The Sun.
London, England, 1853-06-14 00:00:00

property, because that was sufficiently done on the face of
the bill ; nor need he remind hon. gentlemen opposite that
they and their families were as much interested in this
measure as hon. gentlemen on that side and their families.
(Hear, hear, from the Ministerial benches.) He would
assume that a younger child, having a portion on an estate,
had several years before settled that portion by deeds on
which heavy stamp duties had been paid, the tenant for
life being still alive. Up to this time such a portion
would be free from Aluty ; whereas this ex post facto law
would cast on the party the burden of the succession tax.
(Hear.) The right hon. gentleman the Chancellor of the
Exchequer in introducing this measure estimated the pro-
duce of the tax at about 2,000,000/., stating at the same
time that the burden chargeable on land would be some-
thing like 400,0001. He (Mr.Mullings) estimated the duty
on settled personalty at 1,500,00)1., and the total produce of
the tax at 3,175,000/.; this, it should be remembered, in
addition to the duty of 1,300,030/. now derived from the
income tax. (Hear, hear.) He could imagine no possible
case in which land would pay a lower rate of duty than
personalty. He believed that 21 years, and not 30 years,
as calculated by the right hon. gentleman, was the ordi-
nary duration of life. (Hear, hear.) He had tested the
matter. Having gone through the copyhold descents in
the manors with which he had been concerned, he found
that they did not exceed 20 years. Let them look, again
at the succession in the Royal family from 1649 to 1837,
adding twelve years for the deposition of Charles, and
they got two hundred years. How many sovereigns had
there been during that period ? Ten. And ten times
twenty was two hundred. (Hear.) Let the house con-
sider how it was proposed to get at settled personalty. No
machinely short of that of the Inquisition would accom-
plish the object ; nothing else would prevent families from
handing down property among each other, so as to evade
the succession tax. He believed that in future there would
be no trustees or executors. (Hear, hear, from the Oppo-
sition.) Who would place himself in such a position?
By the 47th clause the commissioners were empowered to
require any accountable party to produce before them or
their officers " all such books and documents in their cus-
tody or control as may be capable of affording any neces-
sary information for that purpose, and they make extracts
therefrom and copies thereof, as they shall think necessary
for the purposes of this act." Talk about the Inquisition
It was nothing to the establishment of a system which
might involve many persons in the loss of their estates.
Nothing could be more unjust than this attempt to stave
off a burden from themselves and cast it on those who
were to succeed them. He believed that the measure
would prove most burdensome ; and that, however popu-
lar it might be at present, ultimately, when its effect be-
came known, the people would say that they had " the
bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill"—(laughter)
—and that before twenty years had elapsed the right hon.
gentleman (Mr. Gladstone) would be considered one of the
most dangerous and mischievous Chancellors of the Ex-
chequer that the country had ever seen. (Laughter.)
Mr. W. WILLIAMS said he should not have troubled
the house had it not been for some misrepresentations of
what he had stated on former occasions by the right hon.
baronet opposite (Sir J. Pakington). On the last occasion
when he introduced the subject of the legacy duty, he
pointed out the great inequality and injustice exhibited in
the levying of the tax on personal property. On that oc-
casion he had referred to a return which demonstrated
that the large properties enjoyed the most extraordinary
exemptions ; and he mainly approved of the measure be-
cause it would, for the future, be an efficient check upon
a faulty system. As regarded the extension to the land,
that was a bagatelle • but it was a great measure so far as
it would compel something like justice in dealing with real
property. The hon. gentleman then proceeded with great
minuteness to comment upon and to dispute the calcula-
tions of the hon. baronet. The hon. baronet talked of
sequestration, and the hon. and learned member for Wey-
mouth talked of considerations of morality, but where was
the morality of a party which had imposed so long such a
tax as the legacy tax, with all its gross inequalities, as it
stood at this moment ? This new tax would., after all, only
be one of 0 per cent, upon the estates of 'the landholders ;
yet now they actually taxed poor widows 12A per cent.
upon the legacies of their husbanks. (Hear, hear.) The
party which maintained the present system was the Pro-
testant party—the church Duty ; and he should like to
know what Christianity there was in supporting the old
and in objecting to the proposed new system ? (Hear, hear.)
Mr. Pitt had said that this was a tax felt least of all taxes,
because the man who paid the money had not himself
earned the money ; and he could not understand upon
what ground the landed interest could pretend there was
an injustice in this partial extension to them of the prin-
ciple of an impost applied for a long time to the rest of the
community. The land had long been spared from taxation.
Out of the gross taxation of the country (75,000,0001.) the
land only paid 17,000,000/.—(oh, oh)—and he would under-
take to prove that at any time. (Hear, hear.) He
appealed to the landlords, therefore, for their own sake, not
to follow the indiscreet lead of the hon. baronet. At any
rate he would venture to tell the right hon. gentleman the
•Chancellor of the Exchequer that in proposing this mea-
sure he had shown more public virtue and public courage
than any statesman of the century. (Hear, hear.)
Sir J. TROLLOPE represented a large mass of small
proprietors, and he regretted that the hon. gentleman who
had just set down had talked of the landed interest entirely
as if it was an interest made up of large properties. He
denied the correctness of the hon. gentleman's calculations
as to what land paid to the gross taxation of the country ;
he believed, on the contrary, that the land paid more than
its share. He took the case of small cypyholders.
Mr. WILLIAMS—They pay the tax now.
Sir J. TROLLOPE—lncrease taxation on them and they
would have no resource but a mortgage, and that in such
properties was ruin. There were numberless such cases
where this tax would result in what he would call confisca-
tion ; and on behalf of that hard-working class he demanded
the sympathies of the house. But ho objected generally to
this bill as unjust in its incidence. It would depend on
the uncertainties of human life ; and, under it, some pro-
perties would pay ten times over what others paid. He
knew of the case of a noble lord in whose family there had
only been one successor since 17511 ; and if that noble lord
lived three years more, there would thus have been only
succession in a century. In another case of a noble family
there had been seven successions in 66 years. This was
therefore a return to the old feudal system, when estates
were held in deputy from the crown. (Hear, hear.) Then
it was the law that a man could not sell an estate wkan
there was this sort of debt due to the crown, until he had
got the quietus from the crown. He did not conapain of
the amount of this proposed taxation ; he come
„mined of
its difficulties and its injustice, and the vicioiridOse of the
principle. He also thought that under t/-_,is bill estates
would come rapidly into the hands of tb ,Court of Chan-
cery, for ho believed men generally
w'-,ttld repudiate guar-
dianship of children and such offices of trust, since, until
they had cleared these estates in .17....u5t of debts to the crown.
they could not deal freely w-ifiii their own estates. (Hear.)
With regard to corporatice:A sole, he did not see why they
should escape. (Hear- Ideas.) No doubt the humbler class
of clergymen induck4 into benefices had great expenses to
meet ; but thou ilere were large as well as small prizes in
the church, ar,izt the result of this proposal of exemption in
this respect was, that the bishops had all, in the course of
a debate In the House of Lords, expressed their delight
with 'the measure. (Hear, hear, and laughter.) This
mra9 simply because the bishops would escape scot free; and
wader the circumstances he thought they had given a very
[indtlicate vote. (Hear, hear, and laughter.) It was well
known • that many of the prelates of the church were
receiving three or four times as much as the ecclesiastical
commission or the legislators) had sanctioned ; and he
wanted to know whether the country, if it did permit the
exemption proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
would approve of the bishops giving a vote on a matter in
which they were so directly concerned. (Hear, hear, and
great laughter.) Certainly for his own part, his confidence
in the correctness of the principle of permitting seats in
the House of Lords to the bishops had been greatly shaken
by what had passed on a recent occasion. In conclusion
the lion. baronet asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer
to look back to the debates of 1796, when, in a great na-
tional emergency, a" tax like this being proposed, it had
been rejected ; and he trusted that the House of Com-
mons would have the wisdom and the justice to reject it
again. (Hear, hear.)
Mr. A. PELLATT was there to express the opinions of
his constituents, and his constituents were decidedly in
favour of this Succession Bill ; and he should accordingly
vote against this amendment. The opinion of his consti-
tuents was strongly in favour of the budget as a whole.
They objected to certain details—as, for instance, to the
plan for licenses ; but believing that the extension of the
legacy duty was a great and just measure, they had
adopted the budget with acclamation. This had been
called the "poor man's budget," and he thought with a
great deal of justice ; and it was because all the benefit to
be conferred on the poor man from exemptions and reduc-
tions would be dependent upon the adoption of the Succes-
sion Bill, that he would vote heartily against the amend-
ment. Objections had been taken on the other side to
taxing capital, but had they not for fifty years taxed capi-
tal, by making personal property liable to the legacy and
stamp duty. The hon. member for Warwickshire said it
was hard that a young man just succeeding to his father's
estate should be called on to pay a heavy tax, when he
might be surrounded with difficulties. But was it not
equally hard on a young man in commercial life who suc-
ceeded to his father's business ? He quite agreed with the
hon. baronet, who spoke last, that a corporation sole should
be exempt. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer had pro-
posed to limit the exemption to clergymen having under
200/. a year, then he should have looked to the income tax,
and other modes of taxation, to institute a fair compari-
' son, but here it was proposed to entirely exonerate the
bench of bishops. Hon. gentlemen on the other side of tho
house had expressed great sympathy with the owners of
small copyholds and freeholds. In London there was a
great number of them, and he mixed with many, but none
of them had ever asked him to bring their case before the
house. If hon. gentlemen opposite would be true to their
sympathies with these people, let them do all in their
power to get rid of the copyhold system. A point of ex-
treme value in this budget was that it increased the area
of taxation in the right direction. A large measure of
retrospective justice was due from the landed to the com-
mercial interest for a half a century's exemption from the
legacy and probate duty, the same kind of exemption
which caused the breaking out of the old French revolu-
tion. The time had arrived when justice and equity was
to be administered equally to the working, the middle, and
the higher classes.
Sir J. WALSH said there had been an union of parties
to throw out Lord Derby's Government, and it appeared to
him the government had brought forward this proposition
in order to secure the support of the democratic party.
He opposed this measure on principle. He considered that
the grounds on which it had been so often urged by the
hon. member for Lambeth were not founded on fact. The

supporters of the measure took personal property On the
one hand and real property on the other, and said the
whole onus was thrown on real property. Ho combated
that position entirely. This measure would not relieve the
owners of personalty, a great many of whom were also the
holders of realty, and they were going to inflict on the
holders of personalty a great wrong, because by deriving a
much larger amount.of taxation from the most objection-
able course, they thereby made it enter more completely
into the system of the taxation of the country, and rendered
it more difficult to repeal it in future. He would not enter
into the question so ably treated by the right hon. member
(Sir J. Pakington) regarding the burdens on land, but ho
considered that no substantial injustice had been done to
the owners of personal property, considering the burdens
on real property. He thought property had been hardly
dealt with in adjusting taxation, and that the whole
tendency of legislation of late years had been to
.11xation on the property of the country, and to re-
lieve_t,
wisp,
classes, which, to a certain extent, was proper
"ern;
now
,Nvhausttnere was a limit to everything. The great
relieve
reliee ab
u industry, to set commerce free, and
theorive es thin thleir wring classes from taxation—all great
but the business of Gove
to reconcile coning. ; interests and claims. rilliem indt not
consider that the n'circumstances of the country required
them to call on the
„mienthelandownersl to make this great and
cruel sacrifice.
the midstaey oaf" probate duty were
imposed they were in
a great war, but now
they were at peace, the revenue was flourishing, the people
prosperous, and there was no reason why they should call
the ladovuovito wake such a faCIiAQQ, HQ would 94,