tues."

"Still hankering after your own exemption," growled Peter.

"Leave me out of account. Take, by preference, yourself. You have
virtues and are proud of them."

Hilda intervened, as I had anticipated. "The pride is admitted," said
she, "but as for the assessment value of the virtues----"

"Never mind that. You are proud of your virtues"--I turned to Peter
again--"yet you are sometimes troubled, like the rest of us, by a fear
that you may not really possess them after all. But the assessment
of your virtues by the Board of Inland Revenue would prove their
existence to yourself and to all the world."

"Except his wife," said Hilda.

"Her evidence would not be accepted. If you had paid taxation for the
possession of a virtue, the receipt would be a guarantee that you did
possess that particular virtue, and it would consequently be a source
of profound moral satisfaction to you. You would pay with pleasure.
Besides, it is a poor kind of virtue that will not abide a test. The
tax would be a test. Suppose that five pounds was levied upon you for
honesty. If you refused to pay how could you ever again claim to
be honest? You would be marked as not valuing your honesty at five
pounds. No, you would pay and pay readily."

My words were addressed to Peter, but Hilda seemed the more
interested. "It sounds well, but how would you raise the money?" she
asked.

"That would depend on the virtue," I replied. "The sobriety tax, for
example, would be levied on anyone who had not for some years been
convicted of drunkenness."

"But how about the virtues that you don't get fined for not
having--truthfulness, unselfishness, kindheartedness and all those?"

"I admit that would be difficult. Can you suggest anything?" I asked
Peter.

"No," he answered. "I'm not encouraging your rotten idea anyhow."

"Could the revenue officials feel people's bumps?" inquired Hilda
reflectively.

"I'm afraid," I said, "people wouldn't stand it. Fancy Peter----"

"I've got it," said Hilda. "The revenue officials would attribute a
virtue to the taxpayer, and if he wanted to escape taxation they would
require him to prove to them that he lacked the virtue in question."

"They would like doing that," muttered Peter.

"You have found the solution," I said to Hilda. "If you impute to a
person a virtue he does not possess he probably denies that he has it,
but he is really flattered and his denial is not sincere. He would be
willing to pay