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 reducing the Land Tax to is. The gentlemen were relieved at the expense of British manufactures and fisheries, and of the poor; and in a few years a senseless commercial war sent up the Land Tax again to 4s., and there was no more talk about the revenue being able to dispense with the Salt Tax.

The seventeenth century saw two other famous Acts, both connected with landholding, both made in the interest of the landholder and at the expense of the interests of the people. One was the Corn Bill of 1670, which for the first time put a duty on imported corn; the other was the Corn Bill of 1688, for which the Land Tax was the price paid. It gave a bounty on the export of corn. Both were intended as remedies against a low price of the chief necessary of life.  

OR a generation or two now, enclosure had been carried on, as it were, on sufferance—the rich were enclosing, the poor were entering feeble protests, but it was the people who had to show that an enclosure was illegal, not the landlord who had to prove it was legal. And now came another stage. While philanthropists, moralists, and economists were asking why there was so much poverty, and how it could be removed, and were