Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/234

 'The very perfect idea,' he says, 'of making a levy upon consumptions, is to rate every particular necessary just when it is ripe for consumption: that is to say not to rate corn until it be bread; nor wool until it be cloth, or rather until it be a very garment; so as the value of wool, clothing and tayloring, even to the thread and needles, might be comprehended; but this being perhaps too laborious to be performed, we ought to enumerate a catalogue of commodities both native and artificial, such whereof accompts may most easily be taken, and can bear the office marks either on themselves or what contains them; being withal such as are to be as near consumption as possible; and then we are to compute what further labour or charge is to be bestowed on each of them before consumption, that so an allowance may be given accordingly.'

He proposed to levy an excise on flax in Ireland, on linen goods in England, and on herrings in Scotland: the above articles being all, in his opinion, those in which the home producer had a practical monopoly, and which therefore would bear taxation most easily. He would have allowed these duties under certain circumstances, especially in Ireland, where ready money was not easily to be obtained, to be paid in kind, and he would also have allowed taxes in England to be paid in corn in the years of an abundant harvest, and the corn to be stored in Government granaries, to meet the difficulties which so often arose from the absence of a proper circulating medium, until that difficulty was provided for by the establishment of a bank and the reform of the circulation. The hearth money he thought the best form of 'accumulative excise,' it being easy to tell the number of hearths, 'which remove not as heads or polls do; moreover, 'tis more easy to pay a small tax than to alter or abrogate hearths, even though they are useless or supernumerary; nor is it possible to cover them, because most of the neighbours know them, nor in new buildings will any man who gives forty shillings