A TA% ON BACHELORS.
ITO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.")
SER,—I cannot see the justice or the common-sense of the Spectator's suggestion to tax people with no children for the benefit of those who have. It would, like all attempts to oppress one section of the community to enrich another, in the end defeat its own object. How long, does the Spectator suppose, would childless people, unless the tax was imma- terial in relation to their means, remain here to be taxed for the benefit of others more fortunate than themselves ? They would simply go abroad, and refuse to submit to an impost so unjust and economically unsound. Take my own case, one of hundreds of thousands probably. The Spectator, like the Socialists, seems to imagine that bachelors, and people who are childless, are fair sport for the Chancellor of the Exchequer; that they necessarily spend all their money on themselves; necessarily are free from all claims upon their purse and self-denial. In my case, I have a mother and sister absolutely dependent upon me to provide them with a home; and having lost ray business and my capital, entirely through the war, I find the greatest difficulty in doing so, and the frightful strain of the Income Tax has forced me to give up many things in order to accomplish this. One of these expe- dients is letting our house furnished and living in rooms. The Spectator calmly says this is the sort of person who should be punished still more! On the contrary, I maintain that it is an abominable miscarriage of justice that I, and hundreds of thousands like myself, do not receive relief in respect to the amount of our incomes on which Income Tax is levied for the sum expended, not on ourselves, but on others, who otherwise would become chargeable to the State. I have no faith what- ever in the Income Tax Commission. Every one knows exactly what will happen. Professor "This" and Lord or Lady " That," who are profoundly ignorant—exeept in theory—of the terrible, ceaseless struggle which goes on day by dab year in and year out, in millions of middle-class house- holds. whose incomes often touch high-water murk at £330, and who have claims on their purses the rest of the world never sees or hears of—these people will decide the fate of those who are, of course, never called to give evidence for themselves. The middle-class man or woman of straitened means is alone competent to give evidence of the conditions under which he or she lives.—I am, Sir, Le.,
LEVER DR IIIDEW.
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