ast for five
years in the view of some experts, or it may go on for fifteen in the
view of others, and you may take a mid-point, say ten, and collect your
tax, but, shortly after, this valuation turns out to be badly wrong,
_though all your valuations in the aggregate are correct_. While the
active procedure of collecting the levy is in progress for a number of
years these assessments will simply shout at you for adjustment. There
are other types of difficulty in assessment which involve annual
adjustment, but you will appreciate most the necessity for care in the
collection. Enthusiastic advocates for the levy meet every hard case put
forward where it is difficult to raise money, such as a private
ownership of an indivisible business, by saying: "But that will be made
in instalments, or the man can raise a mortgage." But the extent to
which this is done robs the levy of all the virtues attaching to
outrightness, for each instalment becomes, as the years roll on,
different in its real content upon a shifting price level, and every
payment of interest on the mortgage--to say nothing of the ultimate
repayment of that mortgage--falls to be met as if reckoned upon the
original currency level. Then those classes of wealth which are not
easily realisable without putting down the market price also require
treatment by instalments, and those who wish to put forward a logical
scheme also add a special charge upon salary-earners for some years--a
pseudo-capitalisation of their earning power.

A really fair and practicable levy would certainly be honeycombed with
annual adjustments and payments for some period of years, and one must
consider how far this would invalidate the economic case of the
"outright cut," and make it no better than a high income-tax; indeed far
worse, for the high income-tax does at least follow closely upon the
annual facts as they change, or is not stereotyped by a valuation made
in obsolete conditions. Imagine three shipowners each with vessels
valued at L200,000, and each called upon to pay 20 per cent., or
L40,000. One owning five small ships might have sold one of them, and
thus paid his bill; the second, with one large ship, might have agreed
to pay L8000 annually (plus interest) for five years; while the third
might have mortgaged his vessel for L40,000, having no other capital at
disposal. At to-day's values each might have been worth, say, L50,000,
but for the tax. The first would actually have shi