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of a perfectly free trade with all the world, England has adopted a revenue system that most materially diminishes both the amount of trade and its profit. And, instead of a perfectly free internal industry, England has adopted an excise that is as vexatious in its operation as can well be conceived. Both the customs and excise laws, and every other tax on industry, have arisen from the alienation of the soil from the state; and had the soil not been alienated, no tax whatever would have been requisite; and were the soil resumed, (as it undoubtedly ought to be,) every tax of every kind and character, save the common rent of the soil, might at once be abolished, with the whole army of collectors, revenue officers, cruisers, coast guards, excisemen, &c., &c.

3d. Taxation can only be on land or labor. [By land we mean the natural earth, not merely the agricultural soil.] These are the two radical elements that can be subjected to taxation, capital being originally derived from one or the other. Capital is only hoarded labor or hoarded rent; and as all capital must be derived from the one source or the other, all taxation of capital is only taxation of land or of labor. Consequently all taxation of whatever kind is, 1st, taxation of labor, that is, a deduction from the natural remuneration which God intended the laborer to derive from his exertions; or, 2d, taxation of land; that is, the appropriation of the current value of the natural earth to the expenses of the state.

Now, labor is essentially private property, and land is not essentially private property, but on the contrary is the common inheritance of every generation of

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mankind. Where the land is taxed, no man is taxed, nor does the taxation of land interfere in any way whatever with the progress of human industry. On the contrary, the taxation of land, rightly directed, might be made to advance the condition of the country to a high degree of prosperity.

4th. For the expenses of a state there must be a revenue, and this revenue must be derived from the taxation of labor, or from the rent of the lands. There is no other alternative; either the rents of the soil must be devoted to the common expenses of the state, or the labor of individuals must be interfered with; and restrictions, supervisions, prohibitions, &c., must be called into existence, to facilitate the collection of the

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5th. In England, exactly the same injustice was practised with regard to natural property that was practised with regard to natural liberty; and though the laws and customs that took away the natural liberty of the laboring serf have been for the most part abolished, the laws and customs that make the land the exclusive property of the aristocracy remain almost intact, and have yet to undergo their progress of abolition. Let us first look at the circumstances of the case. And here we shall make a few quotations from the impartial Blackstone.*.

* Every Englishman should diligently peruse the first few chapters of the second book of Blackstone's Commentaries, "Of the Rights of Things,” and, in addition to these, an article in the Quarterly Review for July, 1829, on the condition of the English peasantry. From these, and a history of the resumption and subsequent alienation of the church lands, he will gather a tolerable idea of

"The constitution of feuds had its original from the military policy of the northern, or Celtic nations the Goths, the Huns, the Franks, &c. . . . . . It was brought by them from their own countries, and continued in their respective colonies as the most likely means to secure their new acquisitions; and to that end large districts, or parcels of land, were allotted by the conquering general to the superior officers of the army, and by them dealt out again in smaller parcels. or allotments to the inferior officers and most deserv

ing soldiers. These allotments were called feoda, feud, fiefs, or fees; which last appellation, in the northern languages, signifies a conditional stipend or reward. Rewards, or stipends, they evidently were; and the condition annexed to them was, that the possessor should do service faithfully, both at home and in the wars, to him by whom they were given; for which purpose he took the juramentum fidelitatis, or oath of fealty; and in case of the breach of this condition and

the circumstances that have led to the present condition of England. The lands of England have been disposed of according to two laws ---- the law of the strongest and the law of the most cunning ; hence England's pauperism and England's moral degradation. There yet remains another law, and its reduction to practice will, one day or other, regenerate the social condition of the population the law of equity.

The article on the "condition of the English peasantry” is well worthy of republication in a separate form. Its appearance in that periodical prevents all suspicion of its having been written for the purpose of exciting discontent; and yet we do not hesitate to affirm, that if once the laboring classes were seriously to take up the questions on which it treats, they would resolve never to rest satisfied till they had abolished the landed aristocracy of England, and emancipated their own labor from the burdens that have been imposed upon them from the allocation of the land to the aristocracy, and of the taxation to the laborers of the country.

oath, by not performing the stipulated service, or by deserting the lord in battle, the lands were again to revert to him who granted them."

This explains the mechanism by which the lands. were allocated; but the right to allocate was the right of the sword, or right of the strongest; and consequently any future person who should prove strong enough to overcome the occupiers, would have exactly the same right to allocate them to other individuals. The whole of the feudal system was based on the right of the strongest; and if the unfortunate Irish were strong enough to reconquer the lands of Ireland, they would have exactly the same right that was reduced to practice by the feudal laws.

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"But this feudal polity, which was thus, by degrees established over all the continent of Europe, seems not to have been received in this part of our island least not universally, and as a part of the national constitution, till the reign of William the Norman.

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From the prodigious slaughter of the English nobility at the battle of Hastings, and the fruitless insurrections of those who survived, such numerous forfeitures had accrued, that he was able to reward his Norman followers with very large and extensive possessions. ... The king held a great council to inquire into the state of the nation; the immediate. consequence of which was the compiling of the great survey called Domesday-book, which was finished in the next year; and in the latter end of that very year, the king was attended by all his nobility at Sarum, where all the principal landholders submitted their lands to the yoke of military tenure, became the king's

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vassals, and did honor and fealty to his person.* This may possibly have been the era of formally introducing the feudal tenures by law; and perhaps the very law thus made at the Council of Sarum is that which is still extant. This new polity, therefore, seems not to have been imposed by the Conqueror, but nationally and freely adopted by the general assembly of the whole realm, in the same manner as other nations of Europe had before adopted it, upon the same principle of self-security. And, in particular, they had the recent example of the French nation before their eyes, which had gradually surrendered up all its allodial or free lands into the king's hands, who restored them to the owners as a beneficium or feud, to be held by them and such of their heirs as they previously nominated to the king; and thus by degrees all the allodial estates in France were converted into feuds, and the freemen became the vassals of the crown. The only difference between this change of tenures in France and that in England was, that the former was effected gradually by the consent of private persons; the latter was done at once all over England by the common consent of the nation. The grand and fundamental maxim of all feudal tenure is this: That all lands were originally granted out by the sovereign, and are therefore holden either mediately or immediately of the

* This, in fact, was the formation of the state of England, after its conquest by the Normans. But it was the construction of the state on false principles. This formation, so far as the landlords were concerned, was legally dissolved in the reign of Charles II., when the lands became the property (in law) of the aristocracy. The state is now beginning to be re-formed on true principles; and it appears probable that its ultimate form will be that of a republic with universal suffrage, with all the lands rented from the state, and consequently without any other taxation of any kind or character whatever

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