The Sun.
London, England, 1853-05-09 00:00:00

LEGACY DUTIES.

( From the Times.)
Whenever it has been proposed to lay real estate under
the legacy duties it has been usual to put the previous
question as to the reasonableness of legacy duties at all.
That has been the case for at least all this century. We
have no difficulty in rejoining—First, that legacy duties
are generally reasonable, seeing that if a man is ever in
a position to contribute to the necessities of the State, it
is immediately on the acquisition of property ; and on
no occasion is a man more indebted to a settled and
orderly state of society than when it hands over to him
the accumulations of others, and realises their wishes in
his favour. Secondly—we rejoin that, if duties on lega-
cies are unreasonable, the landed interest, long so power-
ful in the Legislature, ought, ere this, to have relieved
the legatees of personal estate from the grievance. But,
in truth, no one who thinks at all about the matter
seriously wishes to relieve legacies from duty. There is
one obvious reason against such an innovation, and that
is, that the duty is a species of price paid to the State
for the most unlimited liberty of bequest allowed in this
country. In most other countries, we believe we might
say in all, a man can hardly be said to have the right of
making a will, so much is he tied as to the disposition
of his property. In some countries close entails, in
others the contrary extreme of excessive subdivision,
prevent a man from doing what he wills with his own,
which, however, under such circumstances, can hardly
be regarded as his own. Now, in this country a man
may exclude one or all of his children, even his own wife,
from his will. He may put an entire stranger over their
heads. He may leave all his relations in penury, and
devote a princely fortune to some object just not
immoral or ridiculous. He sits down with a blank
sheet before him, and may exercise his ingenuity in
the most symmetrical, the most fantastic, the most
partial, the most careless, the ;Rost benevolent, the
most vindictive distribution of his property. The
only bounds to his caprice are those imposed by the law
of mortmain, the national jealousy of long entails, and
some restriction as to the morality of the bequest. For
this almost boundless license it is reasonable a man
should pay something to the State, and he pays a duty
graduated in proportion to the deviation of his bequest
from the directest natural line of inheritance. There is
only one exception—an important one, and a very
strange one, but still admitted to be only an exception—
that is the bequest of real estate. The exception is all
the stronger, seeing that unquestionably the duty, taking
its rise from feudal times, was at first levied almost en-
tirely on real estate, the feudal superior always stepping
in, and demanding a fine for permitting the descent of
the estate, whether in the line of inheritance or accord.
ing to the disposition of a will.
The special reasons alleged for exempting real estate
are doubtless worth something, or they would not now
present themselves with so long a prescription in their
favour. The principal of those reasons, however, has
now been disposed of on the kindred question of the corn
laws. It is alleged that real estate is charged with
many local rates, and, what is more, with some taxes,
from which personal property is exempt. The funds pay
neither rates nor inhabited house-duty. To this there
is an obvious and familiar reply, but not the less a true
one. Rates are simply payments either for value re-
ceived, as in the case of paving and lighting, or for duties
localised by the custom of this country, and, indeed, by
the nature of things, as in the case of poor rates. The
inhabited house-duty, as the name implies, is a tax on
expenditure, on enjoyment and appearance, and, so far,
comes under the same category as a tax on horses, on tea,
or on tobacco. One man likes a fine house, another a good
horse, another a cigar ; the State taxes all, the first much
more lightly that the last, though a fine house, in very
many cases, is an improper extravagance. By far the
greater part of our taxation falls on expenditure, that
is, on people the moment they begin to spend, and as
fast as they spend. Thus it may be shown to fall chiefly
upon money ; for what is expenditure but the use of
money ? Virtually, there is no part of a man's property
so taxed as the contents of his purse in his pocket, for
the moment he pulls it out and counts out the coin, whe-
ther in coppers or in gold, he is contributing largely to
the exchequer—much more largely when it is the baser
metal of the two. Seeing, then, that all expenditure is
taxed, and the lighter every-day expenditure much more
than the bulky annual and quarterly items, we may dis-
miss the inhabited house-duty and the other assessed
taxes, as belonging to a province of their own, a pro-
vince in which houses are very lightly taxed. For this
purpose we have the admission of the late Chancellor of
the Exchequer, who thought houses so lightly taxed that
he proposed to increase and extend the duty. The rates
and taxes on real estate being thus disposed of, we find
ourselves at liberty to deal with real estate as with per-
sonal estate, and to subject both alike to a uniform duty
on succession by death.
But there is another special objection which has been
urged with great force, and which we believe to be wor-
thy of some consideration, though we feel there is no
alternative but to overrule it. Almost all real estate is
under encumbrances, and is of such a nature that en-
cumbrances fast accumulate upon it, especially on a
change of possession. The new possessor has often to pur-
chase a great deal of personalty in order to give him
the actual enjoyment of his house and land. He natu-
rally commences alterations, required, perhaps, to
adapt the property to his peculiar wants, besides those
improvements that invariably suggest themselves
on the application of a new taste and a new judgment
to existing arrangements. A man can hardly succeed to
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