Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/19

 are not peculiar to the owners of arable land, but fall on the whole immoveable property of the country—that in others, as the land-tax, (which was originally a commutation for feudal suit and service,) a direct fraud has been committed, by which the proceeds of the tax, which ought to be 8,000,000l. annually, are kept down at 2,000,000l.:—while, with all this, the landlord power has secured to itself a number of fiscal exemptions and immunities, great and small. Land devised by will bears no probate duty; land inherited by succession pays no legacy duty. The farmers, too, are protected and exempted at every point, from little fiscal charges, to strengthen them to bear the one great rent charge. The farmer rides an untaxed horse, drives an untaxed gig, looks through untaxed windows, and sleeps under a roof of untaxed tiles, insured from fire by an untaxed policy, and guarded from depredators by an untaxed dog. The fallacy of "peculiar burdens on land," needing to be countervailed by landlord monopoly, has pretty well done its work: we hear less of it as the agitation grows older: occasionally it is paraded for exhibition along with the other bucolic curiosities at agricultural meetings, but it is not often brought out for active field service.

The fallacy of independence of foreigners is going, or gone, the same way. Of the stupendous absurdity of this vaunted independence—the independence of starvation and wretchedness—the independence of voluntary poverty and famine—the independence of a sour and surly barbarism—I do not speak now; I simply advert to it as a fallacy which the progress of events, the bitter, hard experience of the last few years, has so utterly stripped bare, ripped open, and turned inside out, that no human creature can ever be taken in by it again. "Independence of foreigners!" when every child knows that for the raw material of our staple manufactures, for the cordage of our navy, for the commodities of daily use and comfort that give us our revenue—for all that makes us a country—we are dependent on foreign powers already: dependent on jealous and suspicious foreign powers. "Independence of foreigners!" Why, for the last four