Page:Civil and Religious Liberty (Annie Besant).pdf/11

 refuse to pay indirect taxes, however onerous those taxes may be: they must buy the necessary articles of food, whether those articles be taxed or no; a refusal to pay is impracticable, and no combination to abstain from buying is possible, because the things taxed are the necessaries of life. Yet as long as indirect taxation is permitted—and the major part of our annual revenue is drawn from Customs and from Excise—so long must taxation crush the poor, while it falls lightly on the rich.

On this point I direct your attention to the following extract, taken from the Liverpool Financial Reformer, and quoted by Mr. Charles Watts in his "Government and the People":—

The whole system of laying taxes on the necessaries of life