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Til K NATURE AND CAUSES OF

of so much a head upon every negro, are properly taxes uponthe profits of a certain species of stock employed in agricul-ture. As the planters are, the greater part of them, bothfanners and landlords, the final payment of the tax falls uponthem in their quality of landlords without any retribution.

Taxes of so much a head upon the bondmen employed incultivation seem anciently to have been common all over Eu-rope . There subsists at present a tax ef this kind in the empireof Russia. It is probably upon this account that poll-taxesof all kinds have often been represented as badges of slavery.Every tax, however, is to the person who pays it a badge, notof slavery, but of liberty. It denotes that he is subject to go-vernment, indeed, but that, as be has some property, he can-not himself be the property of a master. A poll-tax uponslaves is altogether different from a poll-tax upon free men.The latter is paid by the persons upon whom it is imposed;the former by a ditierent set of persons. The latter is eitheraltogether arbitrary or altogether unequal, and in most casesis both the one and the other; the former, though in some re-spects unequal, different slaves being of different values, is inno respect arbitrary. Every master who knows the numberof his own slaves, knows exactly what he has to pay. Thoseditierent taxes, however, being called by the same name, havebeen considered as of the same nature.

The taxes which in Holland are imposed upon men andmaid servants, are taxes, not upon stock, but upon expense;and so far resemble the taxes upon consumable commodities.The tax of a guinea a head for every man servant, which haslately been imposed in Great Britain, is of the same kind. Itfalls heaviest upon the middling rank. A man of two hun-dred a year may keep a single man servant. A man of tenthousand a year will not keep fifty. It does not affect the poor.

Taxes upon the profits of stock in particular employmentscan never affect the interest of money. Nobody will lend hismoney for less interest to those who exercise the taxed, thanto those who exercise the untaxed employments. Taxes uponthe revenue arising from stock in all employments, where thegovernment attempts to levy them with any degree of exact-ness, will, in many cases, tall upon the interest of money.The Vingtieme, or twentieth penny, in France , is a tax of thesame kind with what is called the land-tax in England, andis assessed, in the same manner, upon the revenue arisingfrom land, houses, and stock. So far as it affects stock it is