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266 £11,420 at the latter period, it was assessed upon only £594 2s. 1d., the official value at the former, thus paying little more than a nineteenth part of what was justly due to the state. Mr. Scott also showed that an estate belonging to the Duke of Richmond, one of the loudest to complain of the exclusive burthens on land, paid only a halfpenny in the pound, or one forty-eighth part of what was due to the national revenue. Mr. Jonathan Duncan, in a lecture in favour of entirely free trade and direct taxation, delivered Ashton-under-Lyne, September 2nd, taking Mr. Scott's estimate of the increase of rents, calculated that if the land tax were levied in the spirit of the constitution, it would produce to the revenue 11,400,000 annually. The League, taking up the subject, published, in 1842, "The Constitutional Right to a Revision of the Land Tax.Being the Argument on a case submitted to Counsel on behalf of the National Anti–Corn–Law League." From that argument the following is an extract:—

"The land was held on certain well-defined conditions, which conditions were, in the strictest sense, the purchase money of that land. That purchase money may be very accurately described to have been made payable as a perpetual annuity to the state, increasing in value as the land increased in value, just as tithe is payable to the parochial clergy, or copyhold profits and other rents to the landholders; with this similarity, as compared with these, that the feudal profits bore a fixed proportion to the annual value at the time the payment became due. But in the year 1660, a body of individuals, who were holders of a considerable portion of the land in question, calling themselves a convention parliament representing the whole nation, voted—at least two more than half of them voted—they should be totally exonerated from the future payment of this perpetual annuity, which was the purchase money of their estates; and that the said annuity or purchase money should, for the future, be paid by other people, who had no share in the land for which they were thus to pay. However, about thirty years after, the parliament laid a tax upon land, which served, when first imposed, as some equivalent for the perpetual and variable annuity, the payment of which had been shifted from the shoulders of the landholders. This tax upon land, which was continued for several successive years, was a tax of four shillings in the pound upon the