ounds a year paid to
any placeman or pensioner, withdraws from the public the means of
giving active employment to one individual as the head of a family;
thus depriving five persons of the means of sustenance from the fruits
of honest industry and active labour, and rendering them paupers.'
Thus this supporter of Pitt acknowledges the great truth that the
taxes are the cause of a people's poverty and misery and degradation.
We did not stand in need of this acknowledgment; the fact has been
clearly proved before; but it is good for us to see the friends and
admirers of Pitt brought to make this confession.

It has been attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question: 'If
taxes be the cause of the people's misery, how comes it that they were
not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?' Here
is a fallacy which you will be careful to detect. I know that the
taxes have been reduced; that is to say, _nominally_ reduced, but not
so in fact; on the contrary, they have, in reality, been greatly
augmented. This has been done by the sleight-of-hand of paper money.
Suppose, for instance, that four years ago, I had a hundred pounds to
pay in taxes, then a hundred and thirty bushels of wheat would have
paid my share. If I have now seventy-five pounds to pay in taxes, it
will require a hundred and ninety bushels of wheat to pay my share of
taxes. Consequently, though my taxes are nominally reduced, they are,
in reality, greatly augmented. This has been done by the legerdemain
of paper money. In 1812, the pound-note was worth only thirteen
shillings in silver. It is now worth twenty shillings. Therefore, when
we now pay a pound-note to the tax-gatherer, we really pay him twenty
shillings where we before paid him thirteen shillings; and the
Landholders who lent pound-notes worth thirteen shillings each, are
now paid their interest in pounds worth twenty shillings each. And the
thing is come to what Sir Francis Burdett told the Parliament it would
come to. He told them in 1811, that if they ever attempted to pay the
interest of their debt in gold and silver, or in paper money equal in
value to gold and silver, the farmers and tradesmen must be ruined,
and the journeymen and labourers reduced to the last stage of misery.

Thus, then, it is clear that it is the weight of the taxes, under
which you are sinking, which has already pressed so many of you down
into the state of paupers, and which now threatens to depriv