ed. "Indirect taxation has nothing whatever to recommend it to
an intelligent people, however advantageous it may be to the
well-to-do. Indirect taxation violates every principle of sound
economy."[465] "Its maintenance is excused on the ground that indirect
taxation is the only means by which the working class can be made to
contribute to the cost of national government at ah. The poorer
working classes should not be taxed by the Government at all."[466]
"Under a just system of taxation all indirect taxation for revenue
purposes would be abolished."[467] "With 43 per cent, of the working
classes living in poverty, with an average wage over the whole working
class not sufficient to provide themselves with the standard of
workhouse comfort, it becomes a crime to tax them for the protection
of their property and the enjoyment of their privileges"[468]--Is it
true that, as Mr. Snowden, M.P., writes, the whole working class of
Great Britain is so badly paid that it cannot provide for itself the
standard of workhouse comfort? How then can he reconcile with that
assertion the following statement which he gives in the same book a
few pages further on: "Experts assign the proportion of the total
annual drink bill of the United Kingdom contributed by the
wage-earning classes at _100,000,000l._ A committee of the British
Association, reporting on the 'appropriation of wages,' in 1882 said
that 75 per cent, of the total consumption of beer and spirits, and 10
per cent. of the wine bill, might be assigned as the shares of the
working class."[469]

As a matter of fact experts estimate that the British working men
spend even more than _100,000,000l._ per year on drink, and that they
spend about _50,000,000l._ on betting. It is really very inartistic
for a professional agitator to tell us that the British workers are
too poor to pay any taxes, that it is a "crime" to tax them at all,
and then to remind us that the same starving ill-used workers can
afford to spend more than the amount of the whole nation's Budget in
drink and betting, that about one-sixth of the workman's wages are
spent at the public-house, that many workmen spend the larger half of
their income in drink, and that the British nation is the most drunken
in the world, although drink is far more expensive in Great Britain
than in any other country.

With part of the money taken by means of extortionate taxation from
the rich, whole sections of the population are to be