INCOME-TAX WORKHOUSES.
We are in for an everlasting Income-Tax. We must lay aside all hope. Foreigners who hate and envy us, and who want to involve us all in their own slavery and misery, will go on maintaining armaments intended for our invasion and subjugation, for ever. We must, therefore, provide national defences, superior to their hostile preparations, and continue eternally increasing them. It will consequently never be possible to obtain relief from the Income-Tax. Moreover, the Income-Tax which we are condemned to suffer will be not only interminable but everlastingly unfair. Its equitable adjustment is as hopeless as its cessation. The House of Commons, which mainly consists of capitalists and landed proprietors, will naturally for ever refuse to tax uncertain earnings at a lower rate than certain rents and dividends. In this denial of justice they will be backed by the labouring masses, who pay no Income-Tax at all. They will also be supported by the reckless trading classes, who will pay any premium for unbounded liberty of speculation; and by grasping and sumptuous persons of the Robson and Redpath school, greedy of other people’s wealth and lavish of their own, who love a financial system which at once encourages avarice to acquire and luxury to consume, urging the former passion to get as much money as possible, and the latter to spend it on a multitude of cheap enjoyments.
Under these circumstances, a certain weak minority will go to the well – to the deuce – to the dogs. These are the moderate steady tradesmen and the professional classes; doctors, lawyers, authors, artists, and all other people who get their living by their own exertion, which are liable at any time to be paralysed, or to fail. Then the most part of them, having none to help them, and having been saved, will of course have to go to the workhouse – the worst of places on this side of the grave.
The above premises having been duly considered by those whom they concern, it will be manifest to such persons that there has arisen a great necessity of petitioning for the establishment of a better sort of workhouse; for the comfortable entertainment of decayed respectable persons, who have for a certain number of years been paying Income-Tax on the profits of trades and professions, on which they were solely dependent for their subsistence.
The ordinary Union Workhouse is a place of punishment for improvidence, in which common people are justly afflicted, insulted, and outraged for having neglected to take sufficient thought for the morrow; and it seems unjust to consign to the same abode of misery whose who would have provided for their sickness, or old age, or loss of employment, if they could, but have been prevented from doing so by the Income-Tax which has confiscated their earnings.
It is possible that the Legislature will listen to the prayer for the institution of Income-Tax Workhouses, because that concession will encourage all provident persons in danger, of destitution to submit to, instead of trying to evade, the exaction of Schedule D.
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