Hard Rain
Some likened tax-and-spend to a refreshing shower of rain, but for William Cobbett the rain wasn’t falling mainly on the plain man.
1816
King George III 1760-1820
Some likened tax-and-spend to a refreshing shower of rain, but for William Cobbett the rain wasn’t falling mainly on the plain man.
1816
King George III 1760-1820
William Cobbett castigated the Government for overtaxing employers, and then congratulating themselves on handing out a little welfare to the underpaid and unemployed while pocketing the difference. Better, Cobbett said, to stop the job-killing taxes, so the working man can have a fair crack at dignified independence.
NO more than a moderate profit can, from the effects of competition, and, indeed, from the very nature of things, remain upon an average to any description of employers in the ordinary callings of life.* All beyond this must, and ever will, be taken away by somebody. If the government, or the church,* or the pauper, does not take it away, the labourer will take it away.
But, if the former take the greater portion, the latter must take the less; and, in whatever degree the demands of the former rise, the portion of the latter must fall; till, at last, he has pared down even beyond what is barely necessary to sustain animal life, and, then, to prevent him from expiring, an addition is made him in the shape of parish relief, which as you well know, is the case in almost every parish in the kingdom.
What, then, becomes, Sir, of Burke’s eulogy on taxes, when he called them “the dews of superfluity, drawn up by the sun of government, to be sent back in showers to fertilise and bless the country”? Much more apt would his figure have been, if he, in drinking the wine bought with his pension, had said: “Come! here go the sweat and blood of the labourer.”*
That is to say, in a free market competition is so fierce that most ordinary employers cannot afford to keep the extra money they get from tax cuts. They have to plough it all back into machinery, expansion and hiring the best workers just to stay in business.
In Cobbett’s day, Church of England parishes collected parish taxes (the ‘poor rate’) which could be used as welfare. The system was absorbed into local council administration in the 1920s.
The income tax rate in 1816 was 2 shillings in the pound, or 10% (with 20s in £1); the net yield stood at £14.7m. See ‘The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century’, by Jeremy Gregory and John Stevenson. Goods and other commodities had been taxed for centuries, but income was taxed for the first time in 1798, the year after Burke died, to fund Britain’s war chest. In 1816, the year that Cobbett wrote this, income tax was abolished, but Robert Peel reintroduced it in 1842, at 7d in the pound, or 3%, on incomes over £150 (about £10,000 today), in the belief that it was necessary to compensate for the fall in tax revenue as the country moved towards free trade and The Repeal of the Corn Laws.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did everyday businesses generally make only a modest profit, in Cobbett’s view?
Because of intense competition in the market.