itself passively in the earth, which is the
destiny of capital in retirement, it will
struggle forward into active life and open for
itself a fresh career. Land will lose its
préstige as a subject of investment, and will
be restored to the cultivator, who uses it as
his tool, his machinery, his factory establishment
for the production of marketable and
useful articles. But now, as it is, every day
reveals a new vice and a new inequality in
the actual system of multiple taxation; it is
an old state vessel, a worn-out lord mayor's
barge, whose hull leaks from stem to stern,
and which sets the caulkers at defiance. A
tax on capital allows no privilege to idle
capital. By treating it as if it were productive,
it compels it to become so. An incomes
tax restrains like a bit; a capital-tax urge-
like a spur. An income-tax is arbitrary; a.
capital-tax is absolute and positive. Which
of these taxes is the one to be preferred? If
the question were put to that portion of the
community whose only means of existence is
their daily labour or their daily wage, nine-
tenths of them would unhesitatingly answer,
"A capital-tax." A capital-tax is a voluntary
tax.

For what is taxation, and what ought it to
be? A tax is, and ought to be, nothing else
than an assurance paid by all the members of
a society called the Nation, in order to insure
the full enjoyment of their rights, the
effectual protection of their interests, and the
exercise of their faculties. Taxes ought to
be paid like the money which, insures a
vessel against shipwreck, a house against fire,
a field against hail, a herd against epidemic
disease, a widow or an orphan against
indigence—that is, voluntarily. The transformation
of taxes into assurance, or voluntary
taxation, is the idea destined to regenerate
the old world, which now has a bayonet as
the axis on which it turns, with Want and
Luxury for the poles.

At first sight, many people might be
inclined to think that such a thing as a voluntary
tax is an imaginary supposition. But,
instead of that, under the present state of
things, taxes which are compulsory for the
poor, are in a great measure voluntary for the
rich, as the following example will show.
Smite is a blacksmith, earning four shillings
a day; but he is without work for three out
of the twelve months, and so earns only
forty or fifty pounds a-year. To exercise
his craft, he is obliged to expend a considerable
amount of strength, which he must
restore under pain of falling ill. He is
absolutely compelled to eat and drink in proportion
to his expenditure of corporeal force.
Consequently, at the end of the year, when
the revenue has taken eight or nine pounds'
worth of taxes out of his fifty pounds of wage,
he has nothing left, or next to nothing.

Mr. Close is a miser, whose father left
him some four or five hundred a-year, of
which he only spends a pound or two a-week,
in order to buy into the public funds whenever
they are low. In the case, then, of Mr.
Close, taxation is voluntary, while it is
compulsory for Smite, in the same ratio.

The new impost ought to be the assurance
paid by all who possess anything, to insure
themselves against every risk that can
disturb their possession or their enjoyment.
Among the highest of these risks may be
reckoned, amongst continental nations, the
disasters caused by revolutions. But
revolutions will be utterly prevented by the
elevation of government to the rank of a
vast general and mutual Assurance Office.
Did you ever know the persons insured by a
company to annul the statutes which were
their common guarantee? Did you ever
know the fundholders of a state to destroy
the records of the public debt? Did you
ever know a pawnbroker to burn a pledge,
or a lender on mortgage to call for the
cancelling and suppression of mortgages?

Taxes, as they exist, encourage fraud; the
proposed capital tax would suppress fraud. It
places the tax-payer, or the assured party,
urges M. Girardin, in constant equilibrium
between two equal interests; he would be
tempted to estimate his fortune too low, if it
were not also his interest to value it above
the mark. Does the proprietor who insures
i his house against fire, or the shipowner who
insures against the risk of loss at sea,
consider the premiums he pays in the light of a
tax? No; he pays an assurance; and the
benefit he expects to derive from it is the
reason which induces him to take the step.
The peculiarity of a tax is that it is forced from
the payer; the peculiarity of assurance is,
that it is a voluntary payment. The
characteristic of assurance is to be levied on capital
—of taxes, to be levied on income. What
do you do when you insure your mansion,
your furniture, or your yacht? You declare
their value, and you certify its amount by
every means that can give your declaration
the highest degree of exactitude. If you
value them at less than they are worth, you
pay a lower premium; but also, in case of
accident, will you be entitled to a smaller
indemnity. These two composite considerations
act in combination to make you state a
sincere and exact estimate.

An assurance office does not ask what rent
your house brings you in, but what it is
worth; not what your furniture cost to buy,
but what it would fetch if sold; not what
would be the profit from your cargo on its
arrival, but what it was valued at when the
ship left port. Assurance is not fixed according
to income; it is levied according to the
value of an object at the moment when the
assurance is effected. The unity of assurance
is capital. Always and everywhere a
thousand francs are a thousand francs; but
a thousand francs do not produce the same
income everywhere and always. When
taxation is tranformed into assurance, it