The Sun.
London, England, 1853-03-14 00:00:00

PROBATE AND LEGACY DUTIES.

( From the licekly Dispatch.)
The Chancellor of the Exchequer has now an ample
opportunity of developing the resources of his dexterity.
Like the manager in distress, all his company of players
are quarrelling about his part. Parliament assumes the
attitude of a meeting of his political creditors ; and it
must be confessed that he answers their demands with
as much imperturbable lubricity, and fobs them off with
the same successful plausibility, as Charles Mathews in
the play of Speculation. In his main plea for being ex-
cused from assenting to the motions of those amateur
" many friends of the hare," who volunteer budgets for
him, we confess we think there is much force. If we
were in his place, we are not sure that we, ourselves,
should not also object to the anticipation of his financial
statement by partial propositions of taxation, or remis-
sion of imposts relative to single articles, which leave
out of view the whole area of the incidence of revenue
duties. Unless he could succeed in checking this rush
of one-ideaed financiers, it is obvious that, like the man
with two wives' one of whom disliked his white hair
and the other his black, if he gave all the oppor-
tunity of depilatating from our fiscal system whatever
each did not like, he would be left as bald as a coote,
with an exchequer as empty as Sibthorp's head. He has
been whispering soft nothings to Polly Williams and
Lucy Hume,
and now they both fall upon him at once,
and beseech him to marry their " Ways and Means ! "
Unfortunately, he does not appear to be quite so well
read in the art of dealing with such dilemmas as Captain
Macheath—or, perhaps, he is more foolishly confident
in the fertility of his expedients and the power of his
blarney. Re had not the prudence to escape under
cover of the exclamation--

While you both tease me together,
To n
give neither rh s wordrea willreasons
I forsay.
He must needs
objecting, on the
merits, to the propositions of the members of Lambeth
and Montrose ; and reasons are at all times a danger-
ous ware, in which wise men deal but sparingly. We
could have excused his postponement of the discussion
until the day of Pentecost, the Greek Kalends, or the
Budget, whichever should happen last. But when he
so misapprehends the measure of his own capacity to
grapple with the subject as to undertake a pitched bat-
tle on the spot, in defence of the exemption of real pro-
perty from the legacy duty, he compels us also to anti-
cipate the natural period of discussion, and to examine
the grounds of his opposition to the principles of Mr.
Williams's motion. We should be sorry to endorse the
accusation of those who, in ecclesiastical concerns, ac-
cuse Mr. Gladstone of being a Jesuit. His exposure of
the Government of Naples is the best answer to the im-
putation of Puseyite tendencies. But we are not so
satisfied that he escapes the charge of being a sort of
logical smasher in debate--passing bad change with
singular dexterity, indeed, and with unscrupulous steadi-
ness of face, but with a frequency perhaps encouraged
by the absence of detection. It is scarcely possible to
present a proposition of which the proof is plainer or
more potent thian that the probate and legacy duty was
partially imposed by a house of landowners upon per-
sonal property, and that realty was exempted from its
operation by a combination of freeholders against the
rest of the community. Why, Pitt had expressly ex-
extended the tax to land by a distinct bill ; and
territorial legislators of the day passed the net levying
the duty on personalty, and rejected that which extended
it to realty. Lord Lauderdale put it protest on the

-I°ll:*nals of the Peers, calling for a suspension of the
' Personalty Act until the Realty Bill should have become
law, on the very ground of the grossness of the class legis-
lation which adopted the one bill and rejected the other.
The tinnsaction is so barefaced in its one-*idedness, that
Mr. Disraeli, himself the organ of the landed interest,
acknowledged the interested inequality of the impost—
and yet Mr. Gladstone stoutly denies it, and stands up
in justification of the fairness of the exemptions. And
how does he substantiate his justification ? Why, by at-
tempting to show that the imposition of the duty on
personalty is so clumsily devised, that, by means of set-
tlements, trusts, and so forth, a large proportion of
property liable to the tax escapes and evades it ?
Astonished at the hardihood of this act of passing " false
and counterfeit logic resembling, or intended to resemble
the current common sense of the realm," poor Mr. Wil-
liams involuntarily exclaims, " Why that is what I com-
plain of !"—whereupon the imperturbable Mr. Jenkinson
of the Cabinet, who by talking of the " cosmogony of
the world," can pass off "a gross of green spectales ' for
a good dray-horse, coolly rejoins that the evasion of the
tax on personalty by settlement is evidence that the
imposers were not actuated by selfishness, in exempt-
ing their own peculiar description of property
from the operation of the impost ? Nor is
his next proposition, although it be a good Brum-
magem imitation of sense, and sounds vei' like it, at all
first-rate in serving its professed purpose. Indeed, for
a clever man, gifted with that sort of circumspection
which does not venture to aim at clear and undeniable
success and conviction, but simply at that amount of
plausible mystification which will present no salient
points for defeat, we have seldom witnessed a more de-
plorable exhibition of what may not inaptly be termed
casuistic suicide. Mr. Williams's motion simply is, that
real property should be subjected to the same burdens
of !probate and legacy duty as personal estate. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer answers that it ought not ;
and on what ground, think you, gentle reader ? Why,
chiefly on the assertion that—real property is subjected
to the duty ? Annuities, quoth he, charged on land,
the proceeds of land when sold under bequest, em-
bracing nine out of every ten wills, leaving land, pay
legacy duty. Indeed, he had been told by some Mr.
Trevor (one of your " very respectable men" and eminent
practitioners typified in "Bleak House" by Mr. Vholes),
and apparently he believed that 7-16ths of the legacy
duty was paid from property arising out of land. Now
we will not stop to inquiretoo curiously into the honesty of
this representation. It is intended to pass the bad change
upon the House and the public, that the term "arising
out of land" is equivalent to the term "real property,"
whereas it is only true as referring to those leasehold or
other tenures of landed property which Mr. Williams
was careful to separate from the category of realty.
Annuities arising out of land mean, in Mr. Gladstone s
private vocabulary, simply obligations to pay money
annually, secured by the guarantee of realty. Mort-
gages are only acknowledgments of the loan of money,
for the repayment of which land is to stand responsible
in the last resort. The legacy duty on annuities or
mortgages secured on land is not paid by the owner of
the land mortgaged, but by the legatee or the lender of
the money, or the purchaser of the annuity ; and it is
merely juggling with and hocus-pocussing the question,
to class these instances as legacies arising out of land.
It is the earner and producer of the money paid
or lent alone whose commodity is in either case
taxed by the state, not the proprietor of the realty
over which it is secured. But two other answer,

remain to the proposition. Mr. Pressly, a far more
eminent authority on this subject than Mr. Trevor, de-
clares his belief in his evidence before the Lords—that
the whole legacy duty affected by that section of the
proceeds of the revenue does not reach 400,0001. ; and
that it cannot amount to much more is obvious from the
fact that Mr. Gladstone himself does not state the case
higher than to allege that settlements arising out of land
constitute seven-sixteenths of the whole ; and as the en-
tire duty does not exceed 1,300,0001., it is clear that the
Chancellor of the Exchequer's own data do not afford
him more than a return of 600,0001. from this source, a
small proportion of the nearly 6,000,0001. which Mr.
Williams demonstrates can be derived from the extension
of the tax to real property. It is only our respect for
facts, and our desire that Mr. Gladstone's perversion of
them shall not pass current with the country, that has
induced us to notice these inaccuracies ; because really
the case against Mr. Gladstone is much better substan-
tiated by treating his assumptions as true than by
exposing their inaccuracy. His own argument is
the most convincing evidence of the falsehood of his
conclusions, because if, under an Act which exempts
realty from probate duty, seven-sixteenths of
the whole tax is the pi-educe of that which
it was the intention of the legislature to exempt from its
operation, that is the very best reason why the privileged
portion of real property should not escape the exactions
to which the rest is subjected. A Chancellor of Exche-
quer must indeed be hard pressed for the means of
heating off a motion when he can betake himself to the
jejune plea which has formed the pons asinorum of his
predecessors, that realty pays a heavy stamp duty on
its transfer. In that it does no more than personal
property ; and if receipt and bill, personal bond, insu-
rance, stock and share, and other stamps on the transfer
of moveable effects, were reckoned up, it would Noon
appear that, even of that burden, realty pays by no
means in proportion to its share. Nothing also can
be more puerile than the attempt to plead the burden of
local taxation upon real property as a set-off against its
exemption from imperial exactions. When Mr. Glad-
stone asserts that "of local taxation personal property
knows nothing," we confess our amazement at its hardi-
hood. Is it the proprietor of freehold land or houses that
pays the poor rate? No—that heaviest of all local imposts
is levied exclusively upon the tenant or occupier, who
pays a heavy rent to the owner of the land, heavy
tithe to the parson, heavy highway, police, sewage, light-
ing rates, to the local authorities, and a heavy rate for
the relief of the poor—dues levied entirely from the
person, and not at all from the property. Indeed, the
only connexion which property has- with the tax is
simply this—that the amount an occupier pays to his
landlord is made the measure of what can be squeezed
out of him for the maintenance of the parochial paupers.
Nothing could well exceed the boldness of the official

peroration. Only conceive the hardihood and powers of
face which could sustain even a Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer in the attempt to plead for land exemption from
legacy duty, on the ground of the injustice with which
it is treated under the property and income-tax. It is
the most literal fact in the prose of fiscal exaction, that,
under that latter impost, a thousand pounds in money is
taxed as much as a thousand a-year in land—and Mr.
Gladstone urges that circumstance as a good reason for
exempting land from probate duty altogether. We have
thought it best to commence the examination of this
subject by clearing this official rubbish out of the way.
We shall take a future early opportunity to afford the
public the full benefit of the admirable speech and the
valuable facts contributed by Mr. Williams to the solu-
tion of this infinitely important question.