tax will fall direct on himself_, because he will
be without the means of laying it on the purchaser from him.

Now, the abolition of the Corn Laws has done this. In two years and a
half, the whole grain of Poland and America will be admitted into the
English market at the nominal duty of a shilling a quarter. It will be
impossible for the farmers and landowners after that to keep up the
price of grain of any sort in the British market beyond the prices in
Prussia, and with the addition of 5s. a quarter for the cost of transit,
and perhaps half as much for the profit of the importer. Wheat, beyond
all question, will fall on an average of years to forty shillings a
quarter, barley and oats to twenty. This is just as certain as the
parallel reduction of average prices of wheat from 87s. a quarter to
56s. has been by the money law of 1819. Accordingly, now that the stress
is over, they have no longer an interest to conceal or pervert the
truth; the anti-corn law journals are the first to proclaim this result
_as certain_, and they coolly recommend the English farmers to abandon
altogether the cultivation of wheat, which can no longer be expected to
pay, and to lay out their lands in pasture grass and the producing of
_garden stuffs_. But amidst this general and now admitted decline in the
price of grain, the 46 per cent. of direct burdens on land will continue
unchanged; happy if it does not receive a large augmentation. The effect
of this will be to augment the weight of the burdens to which they are
already subjected on the landholders by at least twenty per cent., and,
in addition, to _throw upon them the whole malt tax_, now amounting to
L4,500,000 a-year. The moment the British farmer is obliged to lower the
price of his barley to the level of the continental nations, where
labour is so much cheaper, and rents comparatively light, the whole malt
tax falls, without deduction or limitation, on British agriculture.

IV. The income tax, though apparently a burden equally affecting all
classes, in reality attaches with much more severity to the landed than
to any other class. There is, indeed, an advantage unduly enjoyed by
capitalists of all sorts, landed or moneyed, in comparison with
annuitants or professional men, which, as will immediately appear,
loudly calls for a remedy. But, as compared with the merchant or moneyed
man, who derives his income from trade or realised capital in a movable
form, the landholder is, in