reducing the Land Tax to is. The gentlemen were relieved at the expense of British manufactures and fisheries, and of the poor; and in a few years a senseless commercial war[1] sent up the Land Tax again to 4s., and there was no more talk about the revenue being able to dispense with the Salt Tax.
The seventeenth century saw two other famous Acts, both connected with landholding, both made in the interest of the landholder and at the expense of the interests of the people. One was the Corn Bill of 1670, which for the first time put a duty on imported corn; the other was the Corn Bill of 1688, for which the Land Tax was the price paid. It gave a bounty on the export of corn. Both were intended as remedies against a low price of the chief necessary of life.
CHAPTER XIX.—ENCLOSURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
"By nineteen Enclosure Acts out of twenty, the poor are injured, in some grossly injured. … The poor in these parishes may say. and with truth, Parliament may he tender of property, all I know is. I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me."—Arthur Young, "Enquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes to the better Support and Maintenance of the Poor."
FOR a generation or two now, enclosure had been carried on, as it were, on sufferance—the rich were enclosing,[2] the poor were entering feeble protests, but it was the people who had to show that an enclosure was illegal, not the landlord who had to prove it was legal. And now came another stage. While philanthropists, moralists, and economists were asking why there was so much poverty, and how it could be removed, and were
- ↑ This was the war of Jenkins' Ear. "It unquestionably arose from the turbulent spirit of the English, who, tired of a long peace, engaged in hostilities with Spain for very frivolous reasons. The trifling sum of one or two hundred thousand pounds was the original subject of contest."—Sinclair, "History of Revenue."
The war cost £31,338,689.
- ↑ "An ancient surveyor" told John Cowper, author of a pamphlet against Enclosure, that in the eighty years before 1732, one-third of all the land of England had been enclosed. In 1714, the population of England and Wales was 5,750,000.
