The Sun.
London, England, 1859-07-20 00:00:00

intellectual efforts. Paralysis is often and often
thus seriously affecting the private fortunes of less

eminent but possibly not less honourable members of

that same and of other learned professions. Yet

according to the present iniquitous,and most cruel,
and most unjust assessment of the income-tax—the
precarious income of the professional man--an income
thus perpetually jeopardised by the very energy

which creates it—is placed in precisely the same
category with the permanent income derivable from
the funds, or from landed possessions. So forcefully
is the matter put in the few words uttered on
Monday night by the hon. and learned gen-
tleman, the member for Sheffield, that we cannot
possibly do better than repeat those words
precisely as they have been recorded by the
pencil of the reporter. Mr. ROEBUCK said—
He wished to say a few words with a view to
obtain a prospect of some relief for the labouring
classes. He agreed with the right hon. gentleman
the Chancellor of the Exchequer in what he had
said as to the unjust pressure of indirect taxation
on the poor. But the right hon. gentleman said
nothing of the unjust pressure of the income-tax on
persons of small means. It was to the working
classes that he himself belonged as a professional
man, and for them he would speak. He would
take the case of a man who had £l,OOO a-year
from land, and of another who had £l,OOO a-year
from his own professional exertions. He would
suppose the two men to be 40 years of age, and
they were taxed alike. At the age of 42, however,
the professional man was struck with paralysis.
and there was an end of his income. How unjust,
therefore, that they should be taxed equally. He
(Mr. ROEBUCK) said that the professional man was
unjustly taxed. The right hon. gentleman had an
objection to indirect taxation, because it fell heavily
on the poor working man; yet here was a clearly
proved case of injustice to the poor man, whose
income depended on the precarious tenure of his
brains, for whom the right hon. gentleman could
express no sympathy. The reason was, that their
numbers were few, and hence their case commanded
no attention and received no redress ; but he
would tell the right hon. gentleman that so
long as that injustice remained uncorrected,
so long would the class for whom he spoke
continue to look upon the right hon. gentleman
as a coward, who was afraid to do them justice."
Those convincing and unanswerable words speak
fur themselves. They have about them a pathetic
as well as a logical persuasiveness. They ought in
reason and in honesty to be weighed well in the
balance by the House of Commons, when in Com-
mittee upon the Budget. There is surely an oppor-
tunity now before the house for the removal at last
of the harsh and execrable anomal ,—now when the
abhorred income-tax is about to be abruptly more
than doubled by the very man whose ingenuity
but six years back hit won the specious scheme
for its extinction in 1860. Before the tax is thus
raised for the next half-year from sd. to 13d. upon
all incomes above £l5O per annum, and to Bd. upon
all below £lso—it behoves the House of Com-
mons to consider well whether it may not be
yet possible to mitigate in some measure the cruelty,
the harshness, and the absolute injustice of the'prc-
sent rate of assessment—to see whether it may not
be possible at last to draw some rational distinction
between incomes that are notoriously permanent
and incomes that are deplorably precarious. At
any rate, there is a chance before us that the pro-
posed increase itself may be modified in amount to
a maximum of 3d. additional, instead of the mon-
strous aggregate increase to a total of 13d., as
suggested by her Majesty's Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer ! There is the chance before us—we mean
through the very reasonable amendment placed
upon the papers of the House only this afternoon
by the generous forethought of Sir H. WIL-
LOUGHBY.

The chief fault we have to find with Mr. GLAD-
STONE is one of omission. If the house and the
country were unanimous that they would have
ships and seamen, soldiers and ordnance, costing
some five or six and twenty millions—if they praised
Sir JOHN PAKINGTON for all he had done in incur-
ring this charge, and even Sir CHARLES WOOD for
his share in it—then, of course, Mr. GLADSTONE
must screw the money out of somebody or some-
thing. Ready money, he says, he must have, and
to beg he is ashamed ; so he talks about a million
or two as a loan ; the rests he takes out in Income-
tax pure and simple. We say a loan of a million or
two. We have not time to reckon exactly, but there is
the £780,000 of the malt tax, for which he openly
gives 4 per cent., which seems very much like a
forced loan. Then, of the four millions of the In-
come-tax, two millions is to be taken half-a-year
before it is due ; which, again, is a forced loan,
forced, too, on rather harder terms. Altogether,
we have considerably more than two millions fur-
n'shed by us, poor tax-payers, in advance, to our
loan-hating Chancellor of the Exchequer.
But the great omission we adverted to is, that he
says nothing whatever of the principles of future
taxation. Allowing, for argument's sake, that
he made out his case for a kind of
provisional Budget this year, that the
Navy estimates were on a scale which we hope will
not be required in future, and that the financial
year had in great part elapsed, yet he might have
given us a little twilight at least. Sir ROBERT
PEEL, long before he avowed his conversion to free
trade—perhaps, indeed, he had himself then but
just got his feet on the threshold—avowed it as
" the right of every man to buy in the cheapest
market and sell in the dearest." Even the obtuse
representatives of the counties saw the unwelcome
light breaking, while Free traders hailed the first
gray streaks of dawn. Now there was nothing of
this at all in Mr. GLADSTONE'S oration. No one
could from it form a guess which way his mind
was working, though it is impossible to imagine
that a mind of the high order of Mr. GLADSTONE'S
could have spent its whole strength on the de-
tails of a Budget. Did no great principle,
whether one popularly acceptable or not, loom
before him as the polestar of his thoughts on taxa-
tion ? _ _ _

There is one of which he furnished a specimen
to the House, one which both he and his predeces-
sor have adopted—we refer to the equalisation of
taxation. It only came forward as a work which
two or three Chancellors had completed between
them—the equalisation of taxation between the
three parts of the United Kingdom, chiefly in
regard to spirits. What if Mr. GLADSTONE had
announced that he must fully carry out this prin-
ciple That one self-evident resource for 1860-1
lay in the equalisation of the legacy and probate
duties; we may add, in the equalisation of in-
surance duties. In regard, to the latter, a word or
two will make our meaning plain. All combusti-
balte
thepr operty is taxed, because it is combustible,
rate, on the average, of three shillings
per cent. on its supposed value. Such property
taxes itself to about the same amount, to raise a
common fund, by which the loss and ruin that
might fall on individuals by fire is prevented ; to
this voluntary tax, rendered necessary by the
perishable nature of the property the Government,
adds another: :\ ow we never could understand
why.property,j4st because it is liable to the calamity