DEATH DUTIES AND. AGRICULTURE
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] is suggested in your "News of the Week" that death duties are specially injurious to agriculture. On examination it will be found that they are less injurious to agriculture than to any other industry, and that in fact if properly treated they are not harmful at all, but in many aspects beneficial. In the first place, death duties are a personal tax and the owner of an agricultural estate, if he has no reserves with which to pay these duties, should not mortgage his estate to pay, but should sell enough farms to pay the duties, and leave the rest unmortgaged. If he does this, these farms go to new owners, either occupying or otherwise, often with ample capital to develop and improve, and the result in most cases I have observed is that agriculture is a great gainer by the change.
Without difficulty I could name a multitude of cases within my own observation where the compulsory breaking-up of mortgage-logged estates has been the means of transforming a disgracefully neglected district into well-equipped and developed occupying ownerships. In any case agricultural land pays from 3o to 45 per cent. less in death duties than other property, and the effect and burden of these duties on agriculture is grossly exaggerated. The landlord is seldom an agriculturist at all. He is mostly merely a rent receiver.—
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