of his produce, it is still less likely
to enable him to pay more rent to the landlord.
The public, the farmer, the landlord,
all suffer more or less by this degraded cultivation.
That the personal taille tends, in many
different ways, to discourage cultivation, and
consequently to dry up the principal source
of the wealth of every great country, I have
already had occasion to observe in the third
book of this Inquiry.
What are called poll-taxes in the southern
provinces of North America, and the West
India islands, annual taxes of so much a-head
upon every negro, are properly taxes upon the
profits of a certain species of stock employed
in agriculture. As the planters, are the greater
part of them, both farmers and landlords,
the final payment of the tax falls upon them
in their quality of landlords, without any retribution.
Taxes of so much a head upon the bondmen
employed in cultivation, seem anciently
to have been common all over Europe. There
subsists at present a tax of this kind in the
empire of Russia. It is probably upon this
account that poll-taxes of all kinds have often
been represented as badges of slavery. Every
tax, however, is to the person who pays it, a
badge, not of slavery, but of liberty. It denotes
that he is subject to government, indeed;
but that, as he has some property, he cannot
himself be the property of a master. A poll-tax
upon slaves is altogether different from a
poll-tax upon freemen. The latter is paid
by the persons upon whom it is imposed;
the former, by a different set of persons.
The latter is either altogether arbitrary, or
altogether unequal, and, in most cases, is
both the one and the other; the former,
though in some respects unequal, different
slaves being of different values, is in no respect
arbitrary. Every master, who knows
the number of his own slaves, knows exactly
what he has to pay. Those different taxes,
however, being called by the same name, have
been considered as of the same nature.
The taxes which in Holland are imposed
upon men and maid servants, are taxes, not
upon stock, but upon expense; and so far
resemble the taxes upon consumable commodities.
The tax of a guinea a-head for
every man-servant, which has lately been imposed
in Great Britain, is of the same kind.
It falls heaviest upon the middling rank. A
man of two hundred a-year may keep a single
man-servant. A man of ten thousand a-year
will not keep fifty. It does not affect
the poor.
Taxes upon the profits of stock, in particular
employments, can never affect the interest
of money. Nobody will lend his money for
less interest to those who exercise the taxed,
than to those who exercise the untaxed employments.
Taxes upon the revenue arising
from stock in all employments, where the
government attempts to levy them with any
degree of exactness, will, in many cases, fall
upon the interest of money. The vingtieme,
or twentieth penny, in France, is a tax of the
same kind with what is called the land tax in
England, and is assessed, in the same manner,
upon the revenue arising upon land,
houses, and stock. So far as it affects stock,
it is assessed, though not with great rigour,
yet with much more exactness than that part
of the land tax in England which is imposed
upon the same fund. It, in many cases, falls
altogether upon the interest of money. Money
is frequently sunk in France, upon what
are called contracts for the constitution of a
rent; that is, perpetual annuities, redeemable
at any time by the debtor, upon payment of
the sum originally advanced, but of which
this redemption is not exigible by the creditor
except in particular cases. The vingtieme
seems not to have raised the rate of
those annuities, though it is exactly levied
upon them all.
APPENDIX TO ARTICLES I. AND II.—Taxes
upon the Capital Value of Lands, Houses,
and Stock.
While property remains in the possession
of the same person, whatever permanent taxes
may have been imposed upon it, they have
never been intended to diminish or take away
any part of its capital value, but only some
part of the revenue arising from it. But
when property changes hands, when it is
transmitted either from the dead to the living,
or from the living to the living, such taxes
have frequently been imposed upon it as necessarily
take away some part of its capital
value.
The transference of all sorts of property
from the dead to the living, and that of immoveable
property of land and houses from
the living to the living, are transactions which
are in their nature either public and notorious,
or such as cannot be long concealed.
Such transactions, therefore, may be taxed
directly. The transference of stock or moveable
property, from the living to the living,
by the lending of money, is frequently a
secret transaction, and may always be made
so. It cannot easily, therefore, be taxed directly.
It has been taxed indirectly in two
different ways; first, by requiring that the
deed, containing the obligation to repay,
should be written upon paper or parchment
which had paid a certain stamp duty, otherwise
not to be valid; secondly, by requiring,
under the like penalty of invalidity, that it
should be recorded either in a public or secret
register, and by imposing certain duties
upon such registration. Stamp duties, and
duties of registration, have frequently been
imposed likewise upon the deeds transferring