purses of Englishmen what was spent upon the war; and he is to put into the purses of Dutchmen what was got by the war.'"[1]
I am not writing about William the Third, but it was necessary to introduce him here to show how easily the land had been obtained which some of our noble landlords let on such terms as those ninety-nine years' building leases, so craftily devised to suck the blood of the unhappy man who is so ill-advised as to build a substantial house under such leases. Among the other debts we owe to "Old Glorious" is this, that his Dutch advisers designed that the method of raising money by a pound rate—the subsidy of earlier days or the Land Tax Act of 4 William and Mary, c. 1, the principle of which was strictly observed in the five succeeding years—should not prove effectual in order to reduce us to the necessity of taxing consumption, and thereby, because taxes on consumption must always be heavy upon trade, prevent our being such formidable rivals to the Dutch.[2]
- ↑ Macaulay's History of England, iv., pp. 323, 324, 327.
- ↑ See Cunningham's History of Taxes, p. 186, 3rd edition. London, 1778.
