We see thus that in the case of the land tax, as we saw above of the tithe, and as is also the case in any tax permanently on, a disturbance of the existing taxation is inequitable. This point is so much misunderstood that I will give one more illustration. I am purchasing an estate, intending to farm it myself. There are 400 acres of land, and I reckon the land worth 30s. an acre. I am willing to give twenty-five years' purchase. I find the tithe is £100 a year. I therefore propose to give twenty-five times £500 = £12,500 for the land. But before the bargain is completed I find that the tithe is £150 a year. I at once sink my bid to twenty-five times £450 = £11,250, and buy the estate at that price. The next year some financier "equalises" the tithe, and my tithe is reduced to £100. Is it not clear that, by the equalisation, I pocket £1250, and somebody else loses it? New taxes when imposed should be "equal," as far as can be arranged. When a legacy duty was imposed, it would have been just to impose a succession duty also. But, after the legacy duty had been imposed twenty years with no succession duty, it was similarly inequitable to put on a succession duty; for quantities of land had been bought in the interval of twenty years at a slightly higher price than if there had been no legacy duty, because there was no succession duty. The proposal for "equalising" taxes is usually put forward in order to get a somewhat larger gross income from the taxes equalised, or as a political cry. Nothing can be more absurd than the cry that the land is over-burdened in comparison with other property. There is no comparison in the case. Some land being tithe free, some land tax free, some nearly rate free, those persons who do not trouble themselves to master the political economy may yet be satisfied that the "burdens" of the land affect neither the farmer, the labourer, nor the produce of the farm; the burdens fall _wholly_ on the landlord (a farmer with a lease being, as above shown, a part landlord). The efforts of some Conservative orators for the last twenty-five years to prove the contrary are erroneous in the reasoning; or I should say, much of the "reasoning" does not hang together at all. Without formally refuting these efforts, I repeat that they are fully refuted in the result.