The Sun.
London, England, 1862-05-13 00:00:00

puts

the "saccharine" part of this FIVE AND TWENTY
MILLIONS bill bears hard on the family expenditure,
she can retrench a little in her dealings 'with the
grocer, without exposing herself to her neighbours,
and so of the rest. The Income-tax almost alone
demands the "pound of flesh," and holds the un-
fortunate clerk or little struggling tradesman mer-
cilessly to "the bond."

The taxation alike of precarious and permanent
incomes, though often ingeniously defended by some
mathematicians, is repudiated by the instincts of
all who have to earn their livelihood by the sweat
of their brow, or of what lies behind their brows. No
subtlety can persuade any man, with an income of
£5OO from professional efforts or trade, that he can
afford £lB 15s. towards PAKINGTON investments
in what turns out to be a useless navy, as well as
the man, whose £5OO a •year is exposed to no casu-
alties from external causes, from his own sickness,
or in- case of his death, to none which interfere
with its retention by his widow and family. There
is also the crying injustice of the difference in the
number of persons the same income•has to support.
The £5OO may have to maintain a bachelor at lodg-
ings, or a family of a dozen, with perhaps aged
parents in addition. It may be, in fact, the income of
such a number of persons that, if fairly apportioned
to each, no tax could be demanded at all. Yet this
unrighteous tax regards not the claims on the in-
come, nor its nature, but simply its amount. The old
income-tax did take notice of the size of the family,
and large families were exempt altogether.
But on the injustice of a tax which the slightest
examination shows to be, though nominally equal,
yet the most unequal of all,we need not enlarge now.
Enough if we have shown it to be so different from
other taxes that it ought never to be confounded
with them. All taxes must have a measure of in-
equality, but inequality is the distinctive character
of the income-tax; an inequality which marks it
out as the tax for cccasions when necessity makes
everything just. Let it, therefore, be kept separate.
Let it bear the mark of a proscribed infliction
awaiting an early extinction. Let us not wish to
inflict a very ungentlemanly revenge on the Lords,
jumble up things which differ, to our own disad-
vantage, The country is becoming alive to the
extravagance of its expenditure, and it must not
hoodwink itself, merely to vex the House of Lords.
If we are compelled to censure the manner in
which the Government has dealt with the income

tax, we may express our pleasure in its giving up
the very objectionable licence for private brewing.
Happily the great brewers themselves did not wish
to retain it. The revenue to be collected from it
was quite insignificant; not a pretext remained'
therefore, for what would certainly have been felt
as a vexatious impost.

There is the very double of "SMELLFUNGITS"
sow in London. It is surely the unpolitest of
visitors from the politest of nations that has come
over to this country at the time of our Great Exhi-
bition in the person of M. ALFRED Ass—pshaw !
how dv you pronounce his name ?—ASSOLANT.
Monsieur is here just now it appears in the charac-
ter of Special Correspondent to the Courrier du
Dimanche. He has evidently,in a manner avowedly,
never before been in this metropolis. The capital
itself is new to him—nay, with the capital, Eng-
land and the English people together. Yet he has
scarcely been a fortnight in London, and behold he
knows all about us! He does so of course by a sort
of divine intuition. He cannot possibly write
from the fullness of his knowledge, of his observa-
tions, of his experiences. He has not had time for
it. His survey has, necessarily, as yet, been purely
superficial. It requires a traveller with the united
courage and reticence of a Doctor CORRIGAN to
write a book about Athens after a stay of exactly
ten days under the shadow of the violet-crowned
Acropolis. But then the pleasant gossiping Irish
physician who has jotted down thus very recently
his notions about the modern aspect of the ancient
capital of Greece, has modestly contented himself
with giving lists of his bills-of-fare, and such like
frivolous memoranda, mingled incongruously in a
sort of literary hotch-potch, or olla podrida, or lob-
scouse, with notes archeological, geographical,
topographical, meteorological, and all sorts of other
" cals" of a sesquipedalian kind. Not thus modest,
however, is M. ASSOLANT.
A fortnight's stay in London enables him to
pronounce his opinions ex cathedra not simply
upon the general effect, or defect, or however
else we may express it, of our public streets and
of our public buildings. With the instinctive pe-
netration of genius he has already fathomed
the depth of our national character. He knows
all about us, we repeat, from beginning to end—so-
cially, politically, religiously, morally—irreligiously
and immorally, we ought rather perhaps to have
said—and all this by a lynx-eyed scrutiny of us
within a period of less than a fortnight. It is won-
derful ! Talk of clairvoyance, of the force of mes- 1

merit influence, of any spirit-rapping medium you
may care to mention—bah! it is nothing to M. Ass
—what a difficulty there is about his name, to be
sure—to M. ASSOLANT ! He, with his magical
linsight, can look England and the English, London
and the Londoners, through and through at a
1 glance. He can bring everything in a twiukling
under the microscopic lens of a judgment most
accurate, searching, and profound—and, what is
more, a judgment, it should be said, altogether
' infallible in its enunciations. Holding, as he does,
a mirror so clear in the sheen of its pellucidity up
before us—we cannot but marvel to see ourselves
reflected in it, alas ! with such frightful exactness !
It is a mercy that these severe reflections of M. As-
SOLANT come to our knowledge in May, and not in
the month supposed by Frenchmen, of M. AssoLANT's
ahcunding in formation to be devoted here in England
to the purposes of Suicide—viz., November. Other-
wise the consequences might have been dreadful,
nay, might have told very alarmingly on our bills of
mortality.
A diametrically opposite surprise to
that given to NARCISSUS—coming abruptly upon
the weak nerves of poor old JOHN BULL, might just
possibly have incited the old gentleman to take an
unpremeditated "header" out of sheer desperation.
That is, we repeat, if he had chanced to catch this
first horrifying glimpse of himself in the stream of
AL ASSOLANT'S lucubrations,not,as good fortune has
it, in the flowery and refreshing month of May, but as
ill luck might have had it, in that grimly, blue-
devil month—as TOM HOOD sings of it—when we
have—

"No flowers, no trees, no fruit, no bees,
No sun, no warmth—Novembert"

Here is something, by the way—just a choice
tid bit, selected from M. ASSOLANT'S correspon-
dence from London in the (ourrier du Dimanche
—a pleasant little summary of our national peeu-
liirities, that will form for JOHN' BULL, good,
honest man,
a Capital theme for quiet and whole-
some meditation.
"The Englishman," says M.
ASSOLANT, with ingenious f:ankness—[he knows
so much about Englishmen, remember!—been
here actually a fortnight I]—gg The Englishman is
brutal, and that is his chief defect. The English
workman is far inferior in appearance—and also
perhaps in heart—to the French workman. Those
one sees in the streets look soured and brutalised
by ceaseless and hopeless misery. In France the
workman is a man who esteems himself, and
feels himself respected. He is poor, but always