(Total amount)
22nd 1000 at 19s 0d per pound L950 0s L9630 5s
23rd " 20 0 1000 0 10630 5

At the twenty-third thousand the tax becomes 20s. in the pound, and
consequently every thousand beyond that sum can produce no profit but by
dividing the estate. Yet formidable as this tax appears, it will not, I
believe, produce so much as the commutation tax; should it produce more,
it ought to be lowered to that amount upon estates under two or three
thousand a year.

On small and middling estates it is lighter (as it is intended to be)
than the commutation tax. It is not till after seven or eight thousand
a year that it begins to be heavy. The object is not so much the produce
of the tax as the justice of the measure. The aristocracy has screened
itself too much, and this serves to restore a part of the lost
equilibrium.

As an instance of its screening itself, it is only necessary to look
back to the first establishment of the excise laws, at what is called
the Restoration, or the coming of Charles the Second. The aristocratical
interest then in power, commuted the feudal services itself was under,
by laying a tax on beer brewed for sale; that is, they compounded with
Charles for an exemption from those services for themselves and their
heirs, by a tax to be paid by other people. The aristocracy do not
purchase beer brewed for sale, but brew their own beer free of the duty,
and if any commutation at that time were necessary, it ought to have
been at the expense of those for whom the exemptions from those services
were intended;*[37] instead of which, it was thrown on an entirely
different class of men.

But the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of
rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to
extirpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of
primogeniture, and which is one of the principal sources of corruption
at elections.

It would be attended with no good consequences to enquire how such vast
estates as thirty, forty, or fifty thousand a year could commence, and
that at a time when commerce and manufactures were not in a state to
admit of such acquisitions. Let it be sufficient to remedy the evil by
putting them in a condition of descending again to the community by the
quiet means of apportioning them among all the heirs and heiresses of
those families.