It is much better, obviously, to make people pay for their luxuries than for their necessities. It is oppressive to make people pay for their necessities, which even the very poor must have, and it is juster and altogether better to make people pay for things which they need not have. Thus, when the tax was first levied upon tea it was a tax upon a luxury, for only rich people then drank tea. But to-day, when the poorest people must drink it, it is unjust to tax it, for it is a necessity. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to keep to this rule in any modern country, because the amount of taxes required is so large that unless one taxes the necessities one will not get enough money for the requirements of the State: thus tea and sugar, beer and tobacco, all of them _necessities_ of the poorest people, are enormously taxed. Our poor people in England are much more heavily taxed than any people in the world. 4. Taxes should fall proportionately to the wealth of the taxed, that is, the sacrifice should be equally felt by all. This rule is easy enough to keep when taxation is light. For a very slight tax on poor men--who are the vast majority of the State, suffices to bring in the small revenue needed, and a severe tax on rich men is but an addition. But when taxation must be heavy to meet the requirements of the State--say more than a twentieth of poor men’s incomes--then the rule is difficult to keep. For either you get insufficient revenue if you spare the poor, or you must tax the poor on a scale which no increase of the taxation on the rich can really equal. When taxation is too heavy, you must either ruin the rich or crush the poor. And that is why heavy taxation has destroyed so many States. 5. The last rule about taxation is that it should be _certain_; and this means that the State should be certain of getting what it ought to get, and that the people who pay should know what they have to pay and not be left in doubt and anxiety. For instance: the tax on tobacco in this country is a certain tax. It is levied on a comparatively small number of ships’ cargoes which enter the country with tobacco, because we do not grow tobacco in England, and the sum which the importers pay is automatically passed on to the purchasers. The State knows by experience how much tobacco the people will buy in the country in the year, and the people who buy tobacco know what they mean to spend, and can, if they choose, ascertain how much of this goes in taxation. But the same tax on tobacco in France is not a certain tax, because the French grow a lot of their own tobacco--in fact, most of it. The people who grow tobacco naturally try to hide the total amount of their crop from the Government inspectors, and a great number of these inspectors have to be going about the whole time actually counting each leaf on each plant and rummaging in the bins to see that none is gone.