ir test of affluent, or at least easy circumstances.
But in the country they are absolutely necessaries. They are
indispensable to business, to health, to mutual communication, to
society, to existence. What similarity is there between the situation of
a merchant with L1000 a-year, living in a comfortable town house, with
an omnibus driving past his door every five minutes, a stand of cabs
within call, and dining three days in the week at a club where he needs
no servants of his own; and a landholder enjoying the same income,
living in a country situation, with no neighbour within five miles, and
having six miles to ride or drive to the nearest town or railway station
where his business is to be transacted, or where a public conveyance can
be reached?

Gardeners, park-keepers, foresters and the like, are generally not
luxuries in the country, they are a necessary part of an establishment
which is to turn the land to a profitable use. You might as well tax
operatives in mills, or miners in collieries, or mechanics in
manufactories, as such servants. Yet they are all swept into the
assessed taxes, upon the rude and unfounded presumption that they are,
equally with a large establishment of men-servants in towns, an
indication of affluent circumstances. The window tax is incomparably,
more oppressive in country houses than in town ones, from their greater
size in general, and being for the most part constructed at a period
when no attention was paid to the number of windows, and they were
generally made very small from being formed before the window tax was
laid on. Taking all these circumstances into view, it is not going too
far to assert, that on equal fortunes the assessed taxes are _twice as
heavy_ in the country as in towns; and that of L3,312,000 which they
produce annually, after deducting the land tax, about L2,500,000, is
paid by _landowners either in town or country_. It is inconceivable--no
one _a priori_ could credit it--how few householders in town, and not
being landowners, pay any assessed taxes at all--or any of such amount
as to be really a burden. The total number of houses charged to the
window tax, in Great Britain, is 447,000, and the duty levied on them
is, L1,613,774, or, at an average, about L3, 10s. a-house, while the
number of inhabited houses was, in 1841, 3,164,000, or above seven times
the number. The total number charged with one man-servant, is only
49,320, and, _persons keeping men-servants