in a warehouse, are liable. It varies, therefore, not only from year to year, but from day to day, and even from hour to hour. To ascertain what is the average profit of all the different trades carried on in a great kingdom must be much more difficult: and to judge of what it may have been formerly, or in remote periods of time, must be altogether impossible.'

The doctrine by which eminent economists of our own day affect to determine the incidence of rates assumes much more than the knowledge of which Adam Smith demonstrated the impossibility. It assumes that capitalists not only know the past and present profits of all occupations and investments, but foreknow them at remote periods-to the end of a long buildinglease, for example. Yet it is clearly impossible for persons contemplating the building or buying of new houses to foretell, even for twenty years, the profits that single investment will yield. The movements of business and population, the demand for houses and other buildings, the increase of wealth and money, and the general range of incomes and prices, the supply of new houses on the spot, the means of locomotion bringing other districts within reach, all defy calculation. The underground railway defeated the expectations of many house-owners in London. There are indeed house-agents who will affect to tell you the rate of profit on houses, just as there are actuaries who profess to be able to capitalize and assess to the income tax the profits of every man in every business, though of two men assessed at the same rate, one will be bankrupt within the year, and the other will make money for half a century, and die richer than Mr. Brassey. The truth is that the profits of house property, the rents that can be exacted from occupiers, and the incidence of rates, depend on no such fiction as 'the average rate of profit,' but on the demand for and the supply of houses, and these conditions vary from time to time, and from place to place. The house-builder, having cast in his lot with house. and ground, and covenanted to pay a ground-rent, determined, not by any knowledge of the profits of all occupations, but simply by the local demand for and supply of building-ground, afterwards makes such terms as he can with his tenants. And the constant increase of population, the narrow limits of distance

from their business within which it is convenient to most people to live, and the cost and trouble to existing occupiers of removal, give the owner, in most cases, the stronger position, and enable him to throw any increase in the rates on the occupier. But, on the other hand, if rates were abolished, house-owners in most places might exact some addition to their rent, and to that extent they may be said to pay a part of the present rates in reduced rents; their power of raising the rent on the abolition of rates being limited, not by any 'average rate of profit,' but by the supply and demand for houses, and the encouragement to building which the prospect of higher rents might occasion. No universal or strict rule, therefore, can be laid down on the subject; but generally speaking the occupier is the weaker party, and the chief burden of the rates can be laid upon him.

In the case of occupiers of the working class, the inquiries I have been able to make, lead to the conclusion that, generally speaking, the bulk of the rates falls either directly, or indirectly in rent, upon them; but as rent usually could and would be somewhat raised, were rates to be done away with, a part may be said to fall on the house-owner. It would be unfair, at the same time, to take no account of the fact that on some large estates, owing to the liberality of the landlords, the payment of the rates on the cottages of labourers falls altogether on the former. So differently, indeed, are labourers circumstanced in respect of both house-rents and rates, as well as of wages, in different places, that in one parish I know of, belonging to a large proprietor, the labourer pays only £2 12s. for a decent cottage and garden, and nothing for rates; while in neighbouring parishes, in which the rate of wages is the same, he pays £6 for a worse house without garden, and the rates in addition. The estate of the great landlord is, to speak fairly, in most cases, the best estate for the labourer to live on. Where great

landlords and great estates injure the working classes, is as buttresses of a system which keeps land out of the market, obstructs agriculture, manufactures, and trade, and causes the very notion of little farms to appear a chimera to the untravelled Englishman.

The only conclusion we can come to with respect to the

incidence of rates, as between owner and occupier, is that generally the working man, as occupier of a house in country or town, pays (sometimes to a man as poor as himself), all the rent that can be screwed out of him. A little more could be screwed out of him were there no rates, and to that extent the rates may be said to fall on the owner, the remainder being borne by the workman. Even where the local authorities exempt the occupier from the payment of rates on the score of poverty, the rent is often raised in proportion. But it must not be forgotten that, whatever may be the incidence of the rates, as between owner and occupier, working men are now, in a considerable number of cases, the owners of the houses they occupy, and bear the whole burden of the rates, even where their houses are mortgaged. In not a few cases, moreover, the owners of the cottages occupied by workmen, are themselves working men; and here, too, whatever the incidence of the rates, as between owner and occupier, working men pay the entire amount. It is estimated that there are 2,000 building societies in England, and although the English building societies do not build, they advance money to working people both to build and to buy houses, and the number of houses consequently owned by men and women of those classes in some places is truly prodigious. We have,' says a witness connected with some of the chief building societies in Birmingham, in evidence before the Friendly and Building Societies' Commission, 13,000 houses in Birmingham belonging to our working men. We have streets more than a mile long, in which absolutely every house belongs to the working classes.' The value of a working man's house, and the amount of the rates on it, are sometimes considerable. To-morrow,' says another witness before the Commission, I have to settle an advance to a workman on the Metropolitan Railway; we are to lend him £360; he has bought a house for £420.' The amount of local taxation on a town

* A useful essay on English Building Societies has been published by Mr. Ernst von Plener (lately First Secretary to the Austrian Embassy in London, now a Member of the Austrian Parliament), the author of a History of English Factory Legislation,' of which an English translation was procured by Mr. Mundella.

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workman's house is, in short, sometimes actually not far below the amount paid by a millionaire, who keeps only an office in town, and lives in a parish where rates are low. But it is not town workmen only who pay rates as owners of houses. The famous Mr. Joseph Arch, for example, has long been a village ratepayer, as owner of a house left to him by his mother.

Two other classes of working people ought not to be left unnoticed, who are neither owners nor occupiers of whole houses, but letters of lodgings and lodgers. The vestry clerk of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, gave the following evidence before the Poor-rates Assessment Committee of 1868, with respect to inhabitants of houses of £10 a year rateable value in that parish :

2,543. Do you know in what way those people are employed who live in those houses?-A great many of them have stalls in the streets, and they go out with hearthstones, and there are a great many birdcatchers and brickmakers.

'2,544. Are there many bricklayers and masons' labourers in your parish? Yes, there are a good many bricklayers, and a good many cabinet-makers.

2,546. Do those people chiefly take in lodgers in their houses? A great many of them take a house-for instance, widows and those sort of people-and let it out to lodgers.'

The vestry clerk of Bethnal Green also gave evidence:

2,707. Are the people who occupy a £10 house, even though they pay a weekly rent, unable to pay their rates?--In many instances they take in lodgers, and with that they are scarcely able to get along.'

It may be assumed, for the reasons given above respecting occupiers, that in such cases the letter of the lodging in the first instance generally pays at least the greater part of the rates in rent, but the question follows,-Is it finally paid by the lodging-letter or by the lodgers? The stoutest advocate of 'the average rate of profit,' as the key to the incidence of taxation, will hardly contend that costermongers, sellers of hearthstones, birdcatchers, bricklayers, and poor widows in Shoreditch are accurately informed respecting the rates of profit to be made in every trade and investment. The case,

indeed, falls within one of the exceptions which Adam Smith emphatically made to the doctrine of a tendency of the gains of different occupations in the same neighbourhood to equalityexceptions which deprive the doctrine of all application to the profits of English trade at the present day. There is no general principle to determine the incidence of rates in the case of the lodgings of poor workpeople. We can only assume that the letters of such lodgings get as much rent as they can, but its payment is precarious, and even if they succeed in shifting both their own rent and the rates on their lodgers, they pay themselves for the exemption in discomfort and injury to health. And whether they or the lodgers are the real ratepayers, the rate falls on a working class. Nor does the incidence of local taxation on the working classes end there. Both as consumers and as producers, they are likewise contributors to local rates levied on shops and other trade premises, and to tolls and dues for roads, bridges, canals, ferries, fairs, markets and harbours. They contribute as consumers, like other classes, when the price of the commodities they use is enhanced by such local taxation. And they pay much more heavily as small producers and dealers, when their business is unremunerative, and they fail to recover their outgoings. It has been demonstrated already that so-called indirect imperial taxes are often crushing direct taxes on poor working men and women with a small stock in trade; and local taxation, too, is sometimes the last straw that breaks the back of the petty trader. It is, therefore, certain that, on the whole, the working classes bear out of their scanty incomes an amount of local taxation in rates which forms a heavy addition to their imperial taxation. What, then, if nearly one-half of the whole amount levied in rates is applied in a manner which makes it, in fact, to a great extent a deduction from wages? What if, in addition, a great part of the remainder of the local revenue is applied to purposes from which the owners of property derive the chief, and in some cases, the whole advantage, as in the case of various permanent local improvements, and other objects of local expenditure which raise the value of land and buildings?

Out of nearly twenty-two millions of local taxation in