68 THE LAND QUESTION.
during feudal times involved no public debt. Public debt, pauperism, and the grinding poverty of the poorer classes came in as the landholders gradually shook off the obligations on which they had received their land, an operation culminating in the abolition after the Restora- tion of the feudal tenures, for which were substituted indirect taxes that still weigh upon the whole people. To now reverse this process, to abolish the taxes which are borne by labor and capital, and to substitute for them a tax on rent, would be not the adoption of anything new, but a simple going back to the old plan. In England, as in Ireland, the movement would appeal to the popular imagination as a demand for the reassertion of ancient rights.
There are other most important respects in which this measure will commend itself to the English mind. The tax upon land values or rent is in all economic respects the most perfect of taxes. No political economist will deny that it combines the maximum of certainty with the minimum of loss and cost ; that, unlike taxes upon capital or exchange or improvement, it does not check production or enhance prices or fall ultimately upon the consumer. And, in proposing to abolish all other taxes in favor of this theoretically perfect tax, the Land Reformers will have on their side the advantage of ideas already current, while they can bring the argumentum ad hominem to bear on those who might never comprehend an abstract prin- ciple. Englishmen of all classes have happily been edu- cated up to a belief in free trade, though a very large amount of revenue is still collected from customs. Let the Land Reformers take advantage of this by proposing to carry out the doctrine of free trade to its fullest extent. If a revenue tariff is better than a protective tariff, then no tariff at all is better than a revenue tariff. Let them propose to abolish the customs duties entirely, and to
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