assessed
taxes. This would reach all classes alike in town and country: for
whatever may be said as to doing without an establishment in town, no
one can do even there without a house. And the rich misers who live in a
poor lodging and spend nothing, would be effectually reached in the
heavy property tax, on their funds, wherever invested.

VI. To obviate the innumerable frauds daily practised in the concealment
of professional incomes, especially by small traders, a power should be
given to the Commissioners in all cases where they were dissatisfied
with the return of professional income, to assess the party for income
_at five times the value at which his house is rated_. On this principle
if a lawyer or physician lives in a house rated at L100 a-year, he would
pay on L500 a-year as income: if he occupied one rated at L2000, he
would be taxed on L10,000. If the tax on realised property was 5 per
cent. which it will soon be, that would just subject the professional
one to two and a half. Perhaps it would be better to adopt some such
general principle for all cases of professional income, and avoid the
_requiring returns at all_.

In some cases the above plan might be adopted as a substitute for the
income tax, or rather as a mode of levying it on _professional_ persons.
Those whose income is derived from land, the funds, or other realised
property, would be entitled to exemption or deduction, upon production
of the proper evidence that they were rated for the property tax at the
higher rate.

VII. _Ireland_ should pay the income and all direct taxes, at least on
land, bonds, and other _realised property_, as well as the assessed and
other direct taxes, just as Great Britain. Nothing can be advanced,
founded either in reason or justice, in favour of the further
continuance of their present most invidious and unjust exemption.

We have thus laid before our readers a just and reasonable system of
direct taxation, from which the landed interest, now so unjustly
oppressed, would derive great relief, simply by doing equal justice to
them and the other classes in the state. The amount of injustice which
such a system would remove, may be accurately measured by the amount of
resistance which the system we have now advocated would doubtless
experience, just as the injustice of the exemption from direct taxation
enjoyed by the nobles and clergy of old France was measured by the
obstinate resistance they made to an equalisat