People often say that a Capital Levy merely imagines everybody dying at the same time. This parallel is wrong in degree when you are considering the ease of paying duty or of changing the market values by a glut of shares, and it is still more wrong when you are thinking of ease of valuation. When a man is dead, he is dead, and in estimating the death duty you have not to bother about how long he is going to live! But every time you value a life interest and take a big slice of it for tax you are probably doing a double injustice. The charge is incorrect for two taxpayers. On a flat rate of tax this difficulty might be made less, but the essence of any effective levy is a progressive scale. Moreover, whether you are right or wrong about Robinson's tax, he has nothing in hand with which to pay it. He has either to raise a mortgage on his expectation (on which he pays _annual_ interest) or pay you by instalments. So far as his burden is concerned, therefore, there is no outright cut. You will be getting an annual figure over nearly the whole class of life interests and reversions. It is difficult to see how one can escape making adjustments year after year for some time in the light of the ascertained facts, until the expiry of, say, nine or ten years has reduced the disparities between the estimated valuations and the facts of life to smaller proportions. Next come those valuations which depend for their accuracy upon being the true mid-point of probabilities. A given mine may last for five years in the view of some experts, or it may go on for fifteen in the view of others, and you may take a mid-point, say ten, and collect your tax, but, shortly after, this valuation turns out to be badly wrong, _though all your valuations in the aggregate are correct_. While the active procedure of collecting the levy is in progress for a number of years these assessments will simply shout at you for adjustment. There are other types of difficulty in assessment which involve annual adjustment, but you will appreciate most the necessity for care in the collection. Enthusiastic advocates for the levy meet every hard case put forward where it is difficult to raise money, such as a private ownership of an indivisible business, by saying: "But that will be made in instalments, or the man can raise a mortgage." But the extent to which this is done robs the levy of all the virtues attaching to outrightness, for each instalment becomes, as the years roll on, different in its real content upon a shifting price level, and every payment of interest on the mortgage--to say nothing of the ultimate repayment of that mortgage--falls to be met as if reckoned upon the original currency level. Then those classes of wealth which are not easily realisable without putting down the market price also require treatment by instalments, and those who wish to put forward a logical scheme also add a special charge upon salary-earners for some years--a