The Sun.
London, England, 1852-09-20 00:00:00

LOWDOW,

labour; if another have 5001. a year, accruing to him
from rents of houses ; if a third have a like 5001.
a year, from landed property, surely their cases very
wid-ly differ. The professional inan'b income, which
would stop altogether, or be greatly reduced, from ill
health, competition, or other casualties, is worth a
very small rate of purchase : it is not worth two years'
purchase, under such personal contingencies, but we
shall take it at 1,000/. The property in houses and
other buildings, on leases with various terms to run,
is worth about fifteen years' purchase, or 7,5001.
The landed property, yielding the like income, is
worth thirty years' purchase, or 15,0001. But, under
the present tax, all these are made to pay the same
141. lls. Bd. This is the first point which Mr. Dis-
RAELI will have to adjust. If the actual value of each
income were taken, and subject to the usual rate of
interest, the professional man would pay 2/. 18s. 4d.,
on 100/., interest of 2,0001.: the house-owner,
10/. 18s. 9d. on his 7,500/. ; and the landowner,
211. 17s. 6d. on his 15,0001. Thus the man with
personal and uncertain income would raise 11/. 13s.
4d.; the house-owner would pay 31. 12s. 11d. less
than he does now; and the landed proprietor, with a
fixed and certain income, would very properly be
called upon to pay 71. 53. 10d. more than he pays at
present. By such equalized and adjusted payments
the inequality and unfairness of this tax would be
removed. The richest would proportionably make
the greatest payments, as they ought to do /
In any revision of our system of taxation, the pro-
bate and legacy duties must be equalized, and on the
same principle (of making these duties fall heaviest on
the wealthiest) which we would apply to the income and
property-tax. Nearly twenty years ago the thought-
ful mind of WILLIAM COBBETT applied itself, in and
out of Parliament, to reform the crying evil of this
system. In those days it was considered vastly un-
genteel to challenge the principle of our taxation, and
besides this, COBBETT, who was a giant with his pen
or in the lecture.room, was dwarfed in the Senate.
To spite him, to render his work useless, and to please
Lord ALTHORP (an honest breeder of cattle and
sheep, but very little of a statesman), his motion was
rejected. It was a good motion, for all that, and
would meet with a different reception now. The
probate and legacy duties are very unequal. They
cannot be avoided and must be paid. Most of the
property bequeathed by will is rated to these duties,
and if a man leave no will, the probate duty is made
some fifty per cent. more than if he had. The evil is
that, having been imposed by law-makers who them-
selves are great owners of real property, the duties
are graduated so that real property is excluded from
their operation! So much for class legislation.
Thus, if A possess a landed estate worth 50,000/.,
and B leave behind him 50,000/. in money, and both
leave this real and personal property to C, he will
have to pay neither probate nor legacy duty upon the
real property (the landed estate), but he must pay
7501. probate duty, and 5,0001. legacy duty, on
the personalty (the money), and this indepen-
dent of the proctor's charges and of the court
fees, including those that make up the
14,000/. a year of the Mammoth Pluralist, the Reve-
rend JOHN MOORE, Registrar of the Prerogative
Court of Canterbury—as son of a defunct Arch-
bishop! If C had been a child or other descendant
of B, he should pay 5001. legacy duty ; if he had
been a brother, or brother's descendant, he should
pay 1,5001. legacy duty; if a brother of B's
father
or mother, or the child of such, the legaoy
duty would be 2,500/. ; if a stage further
in the relationship, C should pay 3,0001.
—in each case paying the 7501. as probate
duty, which would be increased to 1,1251. of the
personal property passed without a will. Here, then,
is heavy taxation on the succession to personal pro-
perty, which it may be generally presumed a man's
industry or ability makes, and a total exemption for
real property, which he.inherits, as one of the "fruges
consurnere natl." The heavy taxation falls on the
industrious—the light taxation on the aristocracy and
landed interest. Nay, so far as the personal
estate can be applied to pay debts and
incumbrances on the real, it is not taxed, and
thus a great amount of even the personalty of the
aristocracy and landowners wholly escapes probate
and legacy duty. _ _

Now, the CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER, if he
means to equalize taxation (as he has promised) must
either abolish these duties—which he cannot afford to
do—or subject all property, real as well as personal,
to their payment. If he honestly attempt this—and
he may fail, through the power of class legislation—
he will do more to establish an honourable reputation
than if he had delivered a score of eloquent orations.
NVill his landed•interest colleagues let him attempt
this act of financial justice ?

Judging by the number of cases for trial at the
ate assizes, amounting, with those of concealing
birth, to no less than twenty-six, infanticide must
have increased to an extent unparalleled hitherto in
this country. Though the convictions were com-
paratively few, yet it is painful to feel pretty sure
that this is due, for the most part, either to the
merely legal imperfection of the evidence, or to the
reluctance of juries to be instrumental in the inflic-
tion of capital punishment. The judges who tried
these twenty-six cases, if giving us their own view
of the verdicts of acquittal, would doubtless express
their fears that most of the unhappy mothers had been
guilty of the crime imputed to them. What can be
done in such a state of the question ? It is clear that
a crime of this magnitude cannot be tolerated in a
civilized and Christianized state ; it is clear also
that juries, feeling as most men feel when called upon
to give a verdict involving the life of a fellow-
creature, will lay hold of every flaw and loophole in
evidence as a pretext for acquittal ; and such defects
can generally be readily found by a clever counsel,
interrogating a humane surgeon or other witnesses.
Indeed, it may well be qinstioned by a juryman of
scrupulous conscience whether he ought to convict
with the remotest chance of error, when he thereby
inflicts a punishment precluding the possibility of
rectifying his awful mistake, should he make one. It
is by no means easy to compensate for imprisonment or
banishment, suffered through an erroneous verdict;
but for death, suffered through a juror's error, there
is, of course, no remedy. By no means unfrequently
(considering the agonizing painfulness of the case) it
has been found, but too late, that innocent persons
have died by the bands of the hangman. It scarcely
admits of a doubt that numerous executions of the
guiltless took place when a wilful Sovereign and the
Bank of England were inexorable in hanging for
forgery. Juries cannot, therefore, be expected to
relinquish their strong desire to acquit, if possible, in
capital cases. We have, indeed, heard it remarked
that infanticide, like suicide, is a case almost beyond
the reach of law ; that a mother's love to her off-
spring is so etrong, that nothing but partial insanity
could nerve her arm to destroy it. Tnat a kind of
delirious frenzy, generated by the awful social
punishment inevitable on her fall, and in part to be
endured by her offspring also, if she spare it, renders
her a scarcely accountable agent. We have indeed
east theto ety
extenuate
W
heard this very statement from the lips of a moat in-
telligent surgeon. It is not one, however, on which
penalty. we think a legislator can act, except in the way of
moderating wishing,so monstrous therefore,
a
in the l
e the guilt of
violation of the holiest
murder of the innocent
who had just become suscep-
tible of maternal love and help, by the hands of its own
mother, we may yet venture to ask whether law
ought to inflict the same • punishment as for the
murder of an adult. Much might be said, no doubt,
on the claims of a human being in • its most helple.a
state on the sternest protection of law. Yet the
murdered adult is nearly always murdered under
circumstances in which he is as helpless as an
infant itself. And here, after all (without
offering a word in defence of a most irrational and
wicked practice), is the undeniable difference between
killing in a duel and real murder. But further, the
mother, in murdering her child, has feelings to over-
come which are unknown to the duellist and the mur-
derer. The latter have to surmount' only the or-
dinary aversion of human beings to injure one ano-
ther ; and the most terrible penalty the law can inflict
is unquestionably deserved, to say the least, by the
man who takes from another the one thing which men
value above all else ; for " all that a man hath will he
give for his life ;" and as the penalty is deserved, so,
if expedient, it is justifiable to inflict it, as a needful
counterpoise to the promptings of revenge or thirst
for gold. How different with the mother 1 Except in