TAXATION AND REPRESENTATION.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XIX, Issue 20, 10 March 1860, Page 3

TAXATION AND REPRESENTATION.

[From the Times, December B.]

We suppose that there never was a period at which Parliament more fully represented the opinions and feelings of the English people, never a time when the weight of taxation was borne with less difficulty and less repining. The country is prosperous, although it has to raise a revenue of sixty-five millions a year, and the people are contented, although their representation in* Parliament is neither regulated by the principles of arithmetic, nor carried down to the point prescribed by the least democratic theory of the rights of man. The people are more educated than they were, but in proportion as they have been more educated they have become more contented. A persuasion has gradually gained ground that less attention is given to the claims of mere class interests, and more to those of the public. While almost every other Government of Europe is driven to the expedient of conscription in order to fill the ranks of its army, we are content to trust to voluntary enlistment ; and while every other Government would regard the arming of the people as the certain symptom of its approaching downfall, we are satisfied to see every town pouring forth its band of marksmen, forming in the aggregate a number much larger than our standing army, for we rely on their employing the arms which they have assumed for no other purpose than that which the public safety demands. We have in England, so far as we are aware, no large discontented class. The opinion of the people seems to be that, when deductions are made for human infirmity and unavoidable inequality, every one here gets fair play. The rich man in exchange for his heavy contributions to the public burdens acquires absolute liberty to accumulate and enjoy his wealth free from the tyranny of a monarch or the envy of a democracy ; the middle classes feel that, as far as law is concerned, the faivest field is open to their exertion ; and the working classes observe that a Parliament in which they are not represented has been engaged for these last seventeen years in transferring the burden of taxation from the great mass of the / people to the very class to which that Parliament principally belongs. Allowing for the imperfection of all human institutions, we should say that here was a state of things which gave us much more occasion to fear than to hope from any violent change ; and that as our domestic happiness and public prosperity far exceed anything of which history bears any record, we might address ourselves to the changes which we may see fit to make in a spirit of good humour with each other, and { of gratitude to those ancestors who have bequeathed to us a polity so well balanced, and a revenue so large and aud yet so easily collected.

If we would test the merits of our present system of Government, we cannot take a better course than to imagine some of the changes which are suggested for our acceptance actually effected. Let us suppose, then, that after some fearful convulsion, after a contest such as people wage rather than submit to what they believe to be the most outrageous injustice, the whole incidence of our taxation has been entirely changed, that the poor, instead of contributing as now their quota to the revenue in the shape of Excise and Customs, are wholly, or almost wholly, emancipated from any taxation whatever, aud that the taxes formerly raised from these sources are laid on the owners of realized property, such as land, stock, houses, shares, and all moveable property. Let us suppose that almost simultaneously with or before this great financial revolution, perhaps standing to it in the relation of cause to effect, an equally violent political change has taken place, that, instead of being limited to less than a million of the people of these islands, the electoral franchise has been extended to upwards of two millions, so that the new electors are twice as numerous as those who now exercise the franchise. We ask our readers to realize for themselves the probable results of such a state of things. We may, we think, not unreasonably presume that the Government in the case supposed would fall completely into the hands of the new class of electors. We have the example of America to guide us, where power is so completely in the hands of the masses that the rich and educated classes count for nothing with those who reckon up the elements that form public opinion. What arts such a Government would practise we can be at no loss to divine. They will do the will of those who made them and can unmake them, and probably compensate themselves for their compliance with the will of the multitude by those arts of personal corruption to which public men in these timesarehappilystraugers. There will be then, at least, no lack of party bitterness until the complete triumph of the popular element shall have deprived the discontented classes of the will and the power to resist. For economy there will be no motive. The public burdens will be imposed by those who do not pay them, aud with that degree of recklessness which usually characterizes men who are spending other persons' money. The rich will feel themselves oppressed, and view with bitter discontent a state of things in which they are called upon to bear all the burdens that are necessary for the maintenance of the State, together with all that an irresponsible master may exact for his own benefit and the benefit of rapacious and unprincipled leaders. The rich will be like the masters in the building trade, without the possibility of protecting themselves by a combination. The continual revaluing of every species of prof erty, rendered necessary by the constant fluctuations of its value in a commercial country, will be found an intolerable burden, and give an opportunity for exaction which is not likely to be lost. Our laws are now framed in accordance with the principles of political economy ; but will they be likely to rest on that basis long when the legislative power has virtually passed into' the hands of persons who believe that they can raise the price of labour by dimiuishiug its efficiency, and who consider that the shortest road to wealth is the destruction of that capital on which they must rely for subsistence 1 Nor is this all. At present the Government and Legislature of this country are sincerely desirous of peace, because they belong to a class sufficiently educated and intelligent to rise superior to the vulgar prejudices of national

animosity, and because they well know that the first effect of war will be to increase their burdens and to curtail their profits ; but place supreme power in the hands of the masses — always ready to enter upon a war, and concious that it is not they who are to pay for it — and we have lost our best, perhaps our only, security for peace. Such a state of things is not favourable to the pursuits of trade, and is eminently hostile to the accumulation of capital. The rich, or rather the classes possessed of property, will be discontented, because they find themselves the victims of the system. The poor will be discontented because all their power and all their abuse of it, so far from tending to enrich themselves, will infallibly impoverish them by diminishing the fund from which they must look for support. We have no back-woods as an outlet for our turbulent spirits. Our country is thickly peopled, our state of scoiety highly artificial, our neighbours powerful and enterprising, and free at least from the dangers arising from too great a development of the democratic principle. At present the Government of the country is in the hands of those who pay the taxes, so that power and responsibility go together ; in the case supposed, the power will be in the hands of one class, aud the burden of tax-paying will be laid on another, and power and responsibility will be fatally aud finally separated. They who govern will not pay ; they who pay will not be allowed to govern. By what means this change is to be brought about we, for our own part, cannot conceive. Such terms might be dictated by the successful party after a disastrous civil war, but we have not yet arrived at the point at which those in whose bands the Government still is will be disposed to submit to dictation. It seems to be believed that the middle and upper classes are prepared, in the mere wantonness of prosperity, to be themselves the means of their owu degradation and destruction. It seems to be supposed that, on the one hand, they willstrip themselves of the power which they have so long and so worthily used, aud hand it over to classes which as yet have never exercised it, but which have already given us sufficient proof in their own trade organization of the manner in which it is likely to be employed. We cannot help believing that there is some miscalculation in all this, that England has not shaken off the selfish legislation of oue class in order to lie down and be trampled on by the selfish legislation of another, aud that she too well appreciates the good she already possesses to exchange it for such a revenue system and such a political organization as we have described.