Page:Civil and Religious Liberty (Annie Besant).pdf/10

£34,000,000 in eight years, while the people were starving; our princes do not spend so much; they dare not; but that the spirit is the same is clearly seen when a wealthy queen sends to Parliament to dower her sons and her daughters: when the scions of a family so rich as are the Brunswicks, become beggars to the nation, and pensioners on the pockets of the poor. However, courts are expensive things, and if we want them we must be content to pay for them. Now, in France, the nobles, the clergy, the great landed proprietors, paid next to nothing: the heavy burden of taxation fell upon the poor. But the poor had not much money which they could pay out to the State, and it is not easy to empty already empty pockets with any satisfactory results; so, in France, they hit upon the ingenious system called indirect taxation; they imposed taxes upon the necessaries of life; they squeezed money out of the food which the people were obliged to buy. Also, those who imposed the taxes were not those who paid them: they laid on heavy burdens, which they themselves did not touch with one of their fingers. We, in England, also think that it conduces to the cheerful paying of taxes that they should be laid chiefly upon those who have no voice wherewith to complain of their incidence in Parliament. If you want to knock a man down, it is very wise to choose a dumb man, who cannot raise a cry for help. A large portion of the working classes, and all women, have no votes in the election of members of Parliament, and have therefore no voice in the imposition of the taxes which they are, nevertheless, obliged to pay. It is a long time since Pitt told us that "taxation without representation is robbery;" it is a yet longer time since John Hampden taught us how to resist the payment of an unjust tax, and yet we are still such cravens, or else so indifferent, that we pay millions a year in taxation, without determining that we will have a voice in the control of our own income. We are crushed under a heavy and a yearly increasing national expenditure, partly because of our extravagant administration, partly because the burden falls unequally, weighing on the poor more than upon the rich, and wholly because we have not brotherhood enough to combine together, nor manhood enough to say that these things shall not be. Our system of taxation is radically vicious in principle, because it must of necessity fall unequally. Those who impose the burdens know perfectly well that it is impossible for the poor to