A TAX ON EXPECTATIONS.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sta,—In speaking about the injustice of levying a tax on a non- existent article like unproductive land in America, you "suppose," as a parallel injustice, the case of a young man with expectations being taxed on those expectations. What will just men say, if I state that such an injustice—a tax levied on expectations—does exist in legal form in many of the Cantons of Switzerland, and is actually embodied in a Bill, just passed by the Swiss Parliament, which will make that injustice a general law for the whole of Switzerland ? If the nation accept it, after having refused it twice, every young man who is unable to serve as a soldier, and whose father is possessed of real or personal estate, will have to pay a per-centage on his expectations as a military tax. As if the law of compulsory descent of property was a preventive against squandering or failure ! How strange that the two oldest republics should have fallen into such a fiscal policy !—I am, [The facts are curious and worth recording, but " expecta- tions" in Switzerland and England do not mean the same thing. Here, they are hopes ; there, they are reversions.—En. Spectator.]
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