On Monday Mr. Chaplin, while introducing his Bill for paying
half the rates on agricultural land by means of an Imperial grant-in-aid, gave some very striking quotations from the evidence laid before the Royal Commission to prove that the depression of agriculture was beginning to have a most serious effect on the condition of the labourers. He went on to show how unfairly land is treated in regard to taxation, by quoting from Mr. Pringle's report on Essex the following striking case of two men living side by side in an adjoining parish, each of whom started in life with £20,000. " A invested his capital in funds and other securities, and has now an income of £560 a year ; he lives in a house rated at £40 a year ; his rates, at 2s. 7d. in the pound, come to £4 7s. 10d. B invested his capital in the purchase of a farm for £15,000, and put £5,000 in as tenant's capital, the rateable value of his farm is £516 139., and his rates, at 2s. 7d. in the pound, amount to £66 14s. 8d. a year." Again, there is a striking case referred to in the report of Mr. Jabez Turner on the Frome dis- trict of Somerset :—" A factory, employing two thousand hands, is rated for local purposes at £400. A farm of two hundred acres in the same parish is assessed at £430, and pays more to the local rates than the factory." But the rates are not only unfair in kind because they single out land, but excessive in degree. Mr. Chaplin cited the case of a farm of 265 acres in Essex where the rent was only £15 7s. 2d. and the rates £18.
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