es being
unequal to the increase of expenditure.

It was necessity that suggested a plan, which is the simplest and
easiest of any, so long as it succeeds and is productive. =sic= To
increase the excise and customs by an additional five or ten per cent.
on the articles that were supposed able to bear it. This has been done
again and again with those two branches of revenue, and with the
stamps likewise.

But the necessities of the state still outrun the means, and the assessed
taxes, the worst and most obnoxious of all, were augmented in the
same way; but even those were not productive. The inducement to
privation was too great, and the restraints laid on expenditure,
suggested the adoption of a tax on income; that is, on the means a man
has to pay, which carries in its very name a description of its nature.

We have mentioned the influence that necessity has on industry. One
of the effects of taxes, as well as of rent, is to prolong the operation of
necessity, or to increase it. A man who has neither rent nor taxes to
pay, as is the case in some savage nations, only labours to supply his
wants. Whatever proportion rent and taxes bear to the wants of

---
{91} The land-tax is not precisely the same, but very nearly. It
operates as a tax on the produce of land, that is on commodities for the
use of man, the same as those articles subject to duties of customs or
excise. The landholder just feels as the brewer, distiller, or importer of
foreign goods, he gets the tax reimbursed by the farmer, and the
farmer is reimbursed by the consumer.
-=-

[end of page #107]

a people their industry will be increased in the same proportion, unless
their forces are exceeded, and then the operation is indeed very
different.

It follows, from this, that both rent and taxes, to a certain degree,
increase the wealth of a people, by augmenting their industry. As rent
is not compulsive, it never can in general be carried beyond the point
that augmented industry will bear; but taxes are not either regulated by
the industry of the individual, or of the community; they may
therefore be carried too far, and when they are, the people become
degraded, disheartened, their independent spirit is lost and broken,
and industry, in place of increasing, as it did in the first stages of
taxation, flies away.

The government, in this case, generally becomes more severe, and
certainly more obnoxious. The broken spirit of the people makes
submissi