PROBATE AND LEGACY DUTY.
Low) STANLEY, in his speech this week on the Income-tax, under- took to prove that landed property contributes to the exigencies of the state at least to the same amount as personal property. "When gentlemen opposite talked of the payment of 1,700,0001. Legacy-duty, he would remind them of the 1,680,0001. paid for stamps on transfers and settlements on real property." In addi- tion, Lord STANLEY begged honourable gentlemen to recollect that a large proportion of the Legacy-duty fell on real property, such for instance as leasehold property. It is difficult to imagine a man of Lord STANLEY'S intelligence deceiving himself by such arguments.
A tax paid by all classes upon a transference of property inter
vivo*, can never be a set-off for a tax paid by one class exclusively upon receiving an inheritance. A man may provide for the con- tingent widowhood of his bride, or for the children he expects to
have, by settling money in the Funds upon them ; and the mar- riage-settlements will be liable to the Government-tax as much as
if he had endowed them with acres or annuities payable out of landed property. As to the family-settlements made upon an eldest son's coming of age, that is an aristocratic luxury, and more than half the value of most aristocratic luxuries consists in their being too dear for the vulgar. Instead of allowing ennobled acres to be inherited by a man's family after the same fashion as ple- beian pounds sterling, the aristocracy insist upon having a general law which gives them all to one child ; and then, to gratify their parental affection, they insist upon modifying this general law in every particular case by provisions for the younger children. They
insist upon attaining, by a complicated and expensive process, nearly the same end that other people contrive to get at by making a
will, or in many instances by the still easier method of dying m- testate. The lawyers' fees might be price enough to pay for the gratification of this strange taste, if it affected no persons but themselves : seeing, however, the number of law-pleas to which it gives rise, the stamp-duty imposed upon these deeds of settlement is in reality nothing more than a payment for the additional judicial staff they render necessary. Lord STANLEY might with equal justice have enumerated the stamp-duty on all transfers of real property as a set-off against the Legacy-duty ; but then, he would have exposed himself to the palpable retort of stamps on bills, receipts, &c. Settlements are rarely made more than once in a lifetime ; landed estates are rarely sold more than once in two or three generations ; but money is constantly passing from hand to hand among the mercantile classes by means of bills, and pays a percentage to the state at each transfer.
The Legacy-duty on leasehold property is, if possible, a still more shallow fallacy. The complaint against the Legacy-duty is occasioned by its pressing upon the commercial class to the ex- emption in a great measure of the landed aristocracy. In con- versational language, men are accustomed to complain that real property is allowed to escape untaxed : Lord STANLEY pounces upon the phrase "real property," and, using it in the technical acceptation of lawyers, says here is a kind of real property that is not exempted. The answer to this plea is, that the larger propor- tion of that kind of leasehold property is possessed by the non- landed class. Houses with the ground they are built upon, sub- urban villas with their paddocks and gardens, mills, factories, bleaching-grounds, and such like, will be found to constitute a large item in the total of leasehold property throughout the king- dom. Lord STANLEY'S argument goes only so far as to show that the landed interest do not altogether escape the Legacy-duty, not to disprove the assertion that it is essentially an unfair and partial tax, pressing with undue weight upon the rest of society because it allows the landowners in a great measure to escape. This state of matters is the more objectionable that an equit- ably-adjusted tax upon inheritance is perhaps the most just that can be levied, and the least invidious method of raising a property- tax. Be the feeling right or wrong, all are reluctant to give pub- licity to the amount of their property and liabilities ; but all are accustomed to see inventories taken of what a man dies possessed of. Again, it is difficult in the case of men in business to say at times whether a sum of money is realized property, or a portion only of that floating capital or unformed matter out of which pro- perty grows : but when a man is dead and all his speculations and enterprises are finally closed, it is possible to estimate what he had realized. Under these circumstances, the least invidious method of making a man pay the state for the protection it affords to his property, is to deduct the tax upon handing it over when the suc- cession opens to him. There is less of the sense of hardship in thus paying out of that portion of a man's property which has come to him without toil, than out of that which it has cost him sweat of brow or anxiety of mind to attain. A revenue raised in this manner would be sufficiently steady for the purposes of the state : the returns of the Legacy-duty vary little from year to year. And the main objection to the Legacy-duty is, that it is paid by a poor serving-wench out of the pittance left her as a reward for years of patient and honest drudgery, while the inheritor of thou- sands may escape scot-free. There can be no talk of confiscation in this case. Though a grown man may by stren4th or cunning maintain a precarious hold of what he acquires in any state of society, the peaceable succession of the widow and her infants to the property of the dead can only be guaranteed in a society where the law is omnipotent. The state creates inheritance, and is en- titled to charge for an advantage which can only be enjoyed through its means. It is sordid avarice in the wealthy lawgivers of the land to seek an exemption (even though it were more limited) from so just a tax, while they insist upon exacting it from members of the very poorest classes. Every heir ought to pay something : more remote heirs may fairly enough be taxed at a higher rate, but all ought to pay.
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