Notes

1 Any tax imposed on extensive farms might from its noveltv be regarded as a grievance; but the servants' tax, which is so justly popular, might be applied to the same purpose, if extended to hired servants employed in agriculture, when more than one are kept in the same family, and to rise to still higher rates in proportion to the numbers kept.

The popular voice has demanded a heavy tax on the foreign domestics, that are so frequently to be seen in the families of the rich; but the suggestion ought not to meet with attention. These foreigners are generally employed in frivolous offices in the train of opulence and luxury, and were they proscribed by the imposition of any heavy tax, an equal number of robust Englishmen would be called away from their rustic labours, and other necessary employments, allured by higher wages, to perform more awkwardly the same servile tasks, and to lead the same dissipated lives. The profitable industry of the nation would be diminished in proportion.

2 An absolute monarch might combine together the increase of his revenue and the encouragement of small farms in the same regulation, by imposing a heavy tax on all future increase of rent, excepting in those farms which did not exceed the extent of one plough, and were granted in lease for a term of not less than fifty years. Such an edict must operate beneficially, either by bringing money into the treasury of the State, or by increasing the number of citizens in the most useful class.

3 What is the shortest term of a lease which ought to be given by the landlord or accepted by the cultivator? In Ireland, that may be exactly determined by the statutes to be not less than thirty-one years. For if any great landholder resolves not to give leases of more than twenty-one years, he determines to treat his Protestant tenantry more unkindly, and more unreasonably than the legislature, actuated by the most violent spirit of persecution, thought it proper or decent that the Roman Catholics should be treated.