[28] Lords' Report, 1847, p. 7.

Enough, it is thought, has now been said to prove the extreme inequality
and injustice with which direct public burdens are levied in this
country, and the necessity for a thorough and searching revision of our
system of taxation, in this respect, especially since, from the way in
which the tide sets, it has become so evident that direct will
progressively be more extensively substituted for indirect taxation.
But, in addition to these, there are several other circumstances which
aggravate fourfold the burdens thus exclusively laid on real property.

I. In the first place, the alterations in the monetary system of the
country, by the resumption of cash payments in 1819, followed up in
Scotland and Ireland, as well as England, by the stringent Bankers' Act
of 1844, has added fully forty per cent. to the weight of all taxes and
other burdens, public or private, affecting landed property, because it
has altered, to that extent, the value of money, and diminished the
price of the articles of rural produce from which the laud-holders'
means of paying them are derived. If the prices of wheat and of all
other kinds of agricultural produce, for ten years before 1819, and ten
years before 1845, be compared, it will at once appear that the
difference is even greater than has been here stated.[29] But that
consideration is of vital importance in this question, for if the price
of all kinds of rural produce has declined nearly as nine to six by the
operation of these monetary changes, the weight of debts and taxes, of
course, must have been increased in the same proportion. We are not now
to enter into any argument as to the expedience or necessity of that
great change in our monetary system: we assume it as _a fact_, and refer
to it only as rendering imperative a revision of the direct taxes
bearing so heavily on the great interests whose means of paying them
have been thus so seriously abridged.

[29] Prices of wheat average, per Winchester quarter, in the years
after mentioned, viz.:--

_s._ _d._ _s._ _d._
1809 78 11 1834 46 2
1810 103 3 1835 39 4
1811 92 5 1836 28 6
1812 122 8 1837 56 10
1813 106 6 1838 64 7
1814 72 1 1839 70 8
1815 63 8 1840 66 4
1816 76 2 1841 64 4
1817 94 0 1842 64 6
1818 83 8