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Untitled Article
its machinery , and making it bear on property . We stick to the opinions which Lord Althorp and Mr Poulett Thomson held three years and a half ago . They may be very bad opinions now ; we cannot help that . Unless for this reason , we frankly avow that we should care comparatively little about the taxes in
question . Pernicious and unequal as they are , their greatest mischief consists in their being the key-stone of a bad system . We are far more interested about the repeal of the taxes on knowledge . They block up the mental windows of the people . We think of them as the reviewer thought in October last . We then looked , as he did , to the Whig Ministry for the speedy repeal of 4
that wicked impost . We said with him , that we should look in vain is wholly impossible , when we consider how many of its members have devoted themselves to the diffusion of knowledge . Assuredly they of all men must be the first to desire that it should be taxed no longer than the necessities of the revenue require . Indeed , what Mr . Bentham says of law taxes , applies , since
these have ceased , emphatically to the one in question—What shall be put in its place , supposing the revenue insufficient and a substitute necessary ? Any other' And yet now this journal lauds the removal of the duty on pantiles . It finds all Lord Althorp ^ s reductions ' most judicious / But there is amongst them a diminution of the duty on advertisements . A rare boon , indeed ,
compared with the good which was desired , and believed to be promised . We asked for bread and he gave us a stone . And the cry is still , ' Patience , patience ; patience and confidence ; give them time . ' Have they not had time ? They have found time enough to resist the Ballot , the shortening of Parliaments , and the unshackling of knowledge . Time , now , can little affect the
estimation in which they must be held by the friends of freedom and improvement . They may succumb yet more to Tory peers , or they may resist , and resign ; in neither case can they again be the people ' s leaders . And who will be ? We know not . They will be found , we suppose , when wanted . But they must be men who have distinct principles of political action ; who will not fritter away every measure of reformation to placate the
sworn foes of all reformation ; who will not make a game at seesaw of the conflict between justice and corruption ; and who will confrontwith manliness all that individuals , or orders , can threaten , in their consi stent advocacy of the rights , liberty , and prosperity of the millions . Such men would find it very practicable to govern the country in a very different mode from that adopted by Earl Grey and his colleagues .
Untitled Article
583 On the Defence of the House and Window Tax .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 582, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/70/
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