118 Chapter VI
war with Britain made it urgent to obtain a loan from France. One suspects that “no
taxation without representation” meant no taxation with representation, either;
even Thomas Paine, in 1780, thought the Americans should pay more taxes.
As for the British, they paid, along with the Dutch, the highest taxes in propor-
tion to population of all the peoples of Europe. The high rates signify the greater
wealth of England and Holland; no comparative estimates of the proportion of
public revenues to national income can be formed. The main direct tax in Britain
was the land tax. Like the French vingtième, which it somewhat resembled, it had
originated in the wars between Britain and Louis XIV, and had at first been in-
tended as a tax on all forms of income, but had become a tax on rental from land.
It was reckoned in terms of shillings per pound of income, and was levied at a rate
of two or three shillings in peacetime, or four shillings in time of war. Income from
land was substantially rising in this age of improving landlords, but the strength of
the landed class in Parliament was strong enough to prevent any disclosure of ac-
tual income, so that landed income was assumed to be the same as in 1692. This
arrangement, made soon after the Revolution, marked “the final surrender of the
seventeenth- century attempt at an equitably distributed direct tax.”^10 The attempt
still made in the continental monarchies to bring land valuations up to date, an
attempt which French parlements and other such bodies always resisted, was no
longer made in England. Each shilling of land tax simply meant a flat sum of
about £500,000 for the government. It was estimated in the mid- century that reas-
sessment would have doubled the yield; that a landowner paying a four- shilling
tax, and hence nominally a fifth of his income, actually paid a tenth or a twelfth.
The land tax at the close of the Seven Years’ War produced between a fifth and a
quarter of the government’s revenue. The remainder came from the customs, the
excise, and the stamp tax. The stamp tax was relatively light, producing £281,914 in
1765, or about three per cent of government income. It was readily expansible,
however; by 1790 its yield rose to £1,214,969, or almost eight per cent of govern-
ment income. The trend was toward greater dependence on stamps and indirect
taxes. By 1790 the four- shilling land tax was yielding only an eighth of the public
revenues, though it must be noted that new taxes on windows, servants, and luxu-
ries were aimed mainly at the well- to- do.^11
George Grenville, sponsored by Bute and the King, becoming chief minister in
April 1763, set to work to solve the problems left by the war. He devised a plan for
orderly occupation of the American West, newly conquered from France, and
where Pontiac’s rebellion was at that very moment showing the magnitude of the
Indian problem. That the colonial governments did next to nothing about this In-
dian uprising, which was suppressed by the British army, only emphasized the
10 William Kennedy, English Taxation, 1640–1799 (London, 1913), 46. See also W. R. Ward, The
English Land Tax in the 18th Century (London, 1953), and S. Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes
in England from the Earliest Times (London, 1888), III, 81–86. For the vingtième see the article under
that heading in M. Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France aux 17e et 18e siècles (Paris, 1923),
which condenses Marion’s larger writings on the subject. It is a curious fact that in 1789 the two
vingtièmes produced 11 per cent of French government revenues; the land tax, at four shillings, about
12 per cent of British government revenues.
11 For varying amounts of the stamp tax, excise, etc., from year to year see Pebrer, op. cit., 152.