Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/217



"would have exposed them.; but which, did it yield what it ought, would now cover the whole amount of the Excise, and thereby dispense with it. If the Land Tax now paid its proper quota, it would yield thirteen millions a year instead of little more than one million; and by causing the assessment to be fixed upon the valuation of the land made 150 years since, the public have been defrauded of the difference.'"

Mr. Villiers has, as has been seen in the above extract from his speech, estimated the Land Tax in 1843 at, if it paid its proper quota, thirteen millions a year instead of little more than one million. In the Financial Reform Almanack for 1876, page 39, the Land Tax is described as a tax—it is not a tax at all, but the purchase-money of the land payable in the shape of a perpetual annuity—which at this day (1876) should be producing £30,000,000 a year towards the public revenue, in place of only £1,000,000 a year, as it is now doing. When it is borne in mind that this £30,000,000 a year represents the result of a transaction of such magnitude that it changed, transformed all the land of an extensive country from public land into private land, the magnitude of the perpetual annuity which represents the