value' (an expression hitherto unknown to surveyors) imply a possible fraud as well as several distinct hypotheses. The possible fraud lurks in the words 'by a willing seller.' 'Gross value,' the statute lays down, 'means the amount which the fee simple of the land, if sold at the time' (that is the date to which the valuation relates back, already three years ago) in the open market, by a willing seller, in its then condition' . . . 'might be expected to realise.' No one will ever know the meaning of the words by a willing seller' in this context until they are interpreted by the House of Lords. Some legal authorities think the words mean nothing, except that the property is presumed to be for sale; others hold that they mean a bargain price in a forced sale, as there is nothing said about a 'willing buyer'; while an open market,' especially a hypothetical open market, does not necessarily presuppose one even hypothetical buyer in the field. The latter interpretation is probably the one placed on the words of the sub-section by the framers of the Act, though they will very likely find they have overreached themselves. For the want of clarity of the expression by a willing seller,' as there qualified, means that no confidence can be placed in a single one of the valuations already made, or to be made, under the Act until the words have been authoritatively interpreted in the courts of law.

No doubt the framers of the Act, in their wisdom, thought that, when once it had passed into law, its taxpayer victims would bow to the inevitable, and allow themselves to be fleeced without protest. This is what usually happens when a piece of oppressive legislation is carried into effect. But there are some Acts of Parliament which are too bad, too dishonest, and too insupportable to be borne, and the Finance Act of 1909-10 is one of these. And the framers of the Act counted without the spirit of thousands of individual owners, who, very rightly, intend to take full advantage of any flaw in the Act, in self-defence. If the owners are in any event to be unfairly harried and worried and cheated, why should they deny themselves the pleasure of showing fight? And the fight is going to be very expensive in more senses than one, not only to the unlucky Liberal-Radical party, saddled with all the odium of an exasperating legislative fiasco, but also to any Government which attempts to administer the Act in future.

For this the Radicals may chiefly thank Mr. Lloyd George; but neither their other leaders nor the rank and file of the party have anything to be proud of. They have all touched pitch. Even Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey did not shine in their advocacy of Mr. Lloyd George's land-taxing programme. Their few public utterances showed plainly that they had not taken

the trouble to understand it. A medium, in one of Dickens's novels, being questioned about the peculiar spelling of a word which he gave out as dictated to him by the spirits, plaintively replied: It came to me "B-O-S-H."' Just so; the Lloyd George Land Gospel came to Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey and the Liberal-Radical party, 'B-O-S-H,' and faithfully they repeated it according to the original text.

To return now to the statutory definition of gross value,' whatever that expression really means, at any rate its purely hypothetical nature may be easily laid bare, as well as that of all the other so-called 'values' under the Finance Act. For only in a small minority of cases, where the property actually is a fee simple in possession free from incumbrances and from any burden, charge, or restriction (other than rates and taxes),' will the thing valued be the thing actually possessed by the owner who is to be subjected to taxation! And even then it is not real market value which is arrived at, except by accident.

Take an example: and to clear our minds, let it be a horse instead of a bit of land which is to be valued under the 'People's Budget.' There are few perfect horses in this world, and when an everyday horse is valued, it is not usual to begin by treating the animal as if it were wholly sound and without blemish. Yet that is the way land is valued under the Finance Act!

Imagine a screw hardly able to stand upon three legs, with a spavin, a blind eye, broken knees and wind. By analogy with the Finance Act system (see Section 25) you begin by valuing him as if he were a sound animal possessing all the attributes of a Derby-winner. This is the 'gross value' of the fee simple in possession free from all drawbacks. Then you consider what the animal might be worth if divested of shoes, tail, mane, and anything else it could part with and still live. This is called 'full site value.' Next you put yet another 'value' on the animal, never heard of before the Finance Act. And even this is not genuine market value-nothing so simple as that! Instead of exercising your judgment as to what the animal ought to sell for as he really is, you have to make elaborate deductions from the gross value, for the lameness, for the spavin, the blind eye, the broken knees, and the broken wind, and the result is called 'total value,' the third Lloyd George innovation. It is something in the region of pure hypothesis, and yet is to be the basis. of land taxation.

For to arrive at a fourth Lloyd George invention''Assessable site value '-upon which duties will have to be actually paid, you have to make another set of deductions from 'total value.' First of all, you hark back, and again deduct,

this time from the total value, the same items (shoes, tail, mane, &c.) as you did before to get full site value out of gross value. Secondly, you deduct any part of the total value' of the animal which you can persuade the Commissioners of Inland Revenue to be due to the expense of feeding it and breaking it in, as well as the cost of advertising it, unsuccessfully, for sale. Thirdly, any part of the total value which you may persuade the Commissioners to be due to your having at some time generously lent the horse to a neighbour free of charge. Fourthly, any part of the total value which you can make out to be due to your having bought out someone else's share in the animal, or to the goodwill of your business as a horse-coper; and lastly, any money the Commissioners may consider it would cost you to take off the shoes and dock the mane and tail.

By this time, I think my readers will agree with me that the assessable site value' of the horse, whether Bucephalus or 'Rosinante,' will have about as much relation to his market value at any time of his career as the moon has to green cheese. Yet the valuation of land under the Finance Act is equally ridiculous. The whole process is perfectly incomprehensible. Nevertheless, every little owner of a cottage or a garden-plot is supposed to grasp the meaning of the series of complicated and hypothetical values,' of which he never heard before in his life, and if he does not employ a competent person to look after his interests, he will to a certainty be fleeced bare, and this by a Government Department!

No doubt Mr. Lloyd George and his familiar demons in the thieves' kitchen of the land-taxers had ulterior motives besides that of trying to filch ready money from the pockets of landowners and house-property owners on any half-plausible pretext. And these ulterior motives are now beginning to leak out. The Finance Act is cunningly drafted, and although it was so much cut about in Parliament before passing, it is producing very queer and unexpected results.

It has always been remarked with surprise that although the Act was ostensibly brought in to tax only unearned increment,' yet that expression is nowhere to be found in it.

Over and over again the Chancellor and his party friends. asserted most strenuously in and out of Parliament that increment value duty would only be levied where increment accrued to land from the enterprise of the community or the landowners' neighbours.' The Commissioners of Inland Revenue, however, do not hold themselves in any way bound by this, or any other of the Chancellor's lucubrations and declarations. Why does he not see that they do?

A strange thing happened in the course of the passage of the

Finance Bill through Parliament. After the Bill left the Committee stage, very considerable alterations were proposed on the 19th of October 1909 by Sir W. Robson, then Attorney-General, in the wording of Sections 2 and 14 (now 25), and were carried. 'Gross value' was then put into the Bill for the first time. Sir W. Robson said, 'The changes make no difference whatever. I say they make no change in the burdens on the subject or the deductions.' Mr. Balfour and Mr. Pretyman demurred, but were overruled. And on the 22nd of October Mr. Lloyd George said, There is no difference at all in substance. The same deductions are made and the same processes will be gone through by the valuers in order to ascertain what the taxable subject is.' Mr. Balfour asked, 'Is it merely a question of terminology?' and Mr. Lloyd George replied, Terminology.'

The late Attorney-General and Mr. Lloyd George have surely something to explain away or amend. For upon these very changes in the Bill, which they maintained were not substantial changes, are founded contentions by the Commissioners of Inland Revenue which are absolutely at variance with the solemn assurances given by these two Ministers of the Crown to procure the passing of the Bill.

In January 1911 the Commissioners issued Instructions to Valuers,' founded on a strange interpretation of the Act as passed with the above-mentioned alterations, by which they direct that increment value duty should be claimed, not only where there has been an increase in value of the site, but wherever the property valued, or an interest in it, has actually been sold for more than it is worth at the time.'

That is to say, that for the purpose of raising some revenue, in a manner opposed to the whole ostensible spirit of the Act, the Commissioners, covering themselves under a strangely twisted reading of the Act as eventually passed, are arrogating to themselves a perfectly arbitrary power. They are actually claiming that they know better than local vendors and purchasers what the real value of any property is. And on the strength of this assumption, when they cannot find any excuse for charging increment value duty upon a real increase in the value of the site, they manufacture a fictitious one!

Let us consider a typical example. In the Richmond case,' which lately came before a referee, a little shop property in a small Yorkshire town, purchased many years ago for 500l., for which, on the death of the owner, estate duty was paid upon 5001, was shortly afterwards sold again for 500l. Could any better evidence be produced that the property was worth 500l., and no more or less? Yet on the last occasion of a sale the • The case is well reported in the Land Union Journal of April 1912.

Commissioners produced a valuation' by one of their district valuers, in which the value was put at only 3801. And on the difference between this and the real sale price of 500l. the Commissioners had the audacity to ask for increment value duty amounting to 221., although it was obvious that no profit whatever had been made out of the sale. Not only this, but they claimed that the site value' had increased in a few months by no less than 1201. Everyone knows that site value in sleepy old market towns does not progress by leaps and bounds; in fact, it just as often goes backwards. Yet the claim would have succeeded, as the owners, two ladies, had innocently let the time go by for appealing against the so-called 'valuation,' had not the Land Union, the only militant association of land and house property owners, come to hear of the scandal. The Land Union took up the case in Parliament, shamed the Government into conceding the appeal, and won the case before the official referee. And now the Commissioners are appealing to the High Court ! Does not this offer a nice prospect to small-owners throughout the country whose properties are under-valued in similar fashion? Pay, or go to the High Court!

To let the public hear one single word about a shabby case like this, the Commissioners must be indeed at their wits' end to discover opportunities of claiming duty, by hook or by crook, under false pretence of increment value which does not exist. They actually had to admit in this case, before the referee, that the site had not in fact increased in value at all. What they were claiming duty on, they said, was statutory increment, a different thing indeed from Mr. Lloyd George's strictly unearned increment.' Was even ship-money a more arbitrary tax than this?

There were other grotesque features about the Government evidence before the referee. Their valuer admitted that he had not valued upon local knowledge. What he did was to figure out for himself an average value per square yard of floor-space, derived from sales of shop property in other localities, and then apply it to sleepy Richmond! And but for the Land Union, which employed a stenographer to record the proceedings, the public would never have been allowed to hear of the curious. details of the case at all!

This 'Richmond' case is unhappily by no means an isolated instance of what looks extremely like attempted extortion. The Land Union is helping its members to fight many other test cases. Several have been already won before referees against the Government. Those which get before the High Court, when once decided, will settle the fate of great numbers of the Government valuations, past and future. The Land Union's legal com