In this country, and in most others, there is
probably no labouring family which does not contribute to the indirect
taxes, by the purchase of tea, coffee, sugar, not to mention narcotics
or stimulants. But this mode of defraying a share of the public
expenses is hardly felt: the payer, unless a person of education and
reflection, does not identify his interest with a low scale of
public expenditure as closely as when money for its support is
demanded directly from himself; and even supposing him to do so, he
would doubtless take care that, however lavish an expenditure he
might, by his vote, assist in imposing upon the government, it
should not be defrayed by any additional taxes on the articles which
he himself consumes. It would be better that a direct tax, in the
simple form of a capitation, should be levied on every grown person in
the community; or that every such person should be admitted an elector
on allowing himself to be rated extra ordinem to the assessed taxes;
or that a small annual payment, rising and falling with the gross
expenditure of the country, should be required from every registered
elector; that so everyone might feel that the money which he
assisted in voting was partly his own, and that he was interested in
keeping down its amount.
However this may be, I regard it as required by first principles,
that the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory
disqualification for the franchise.
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