DEATH DUTIES FOLLY
SIR,—It is proverbially true that onlookers see most of the game. So far, I have seen very few comments in our own Press on the new and more steeply graded estate duties, but the Irish Independent of April loth says: "It is a curious commentary on the British mentality that, while they have never seriously contemplated a capital levy, they have, in the guise of death duties, operated what is in effect a recurring capital levy, now to amount to a confiscation by the State of as much as 75 per cent. of what a very wealthy man may leave on his death." And we may add that no capital levy normally envisaged would have fallen so heavily and at such frequent intervals upon an estate as this terrible weapon of con- fiscation, arbitrarily and inequitably wielded by the hand of death. Take the case of an estate, say, of two and a half millions, which falls under the highest rate. After the death of its owner it is reduced at one fell swoop to £562,500. When his heir dies the fortune is reduced to £225,000, and at the next change in the line of succession this princely inheritance has sunk to £123,750. This of course means, at the present rates of Income Tax and Super Tax, in the case of one of our historic landed families the abandonment of houses and lands dearly loved and often maintained at great sacrifice, the failure to be able to pay any longer pensions and grants to faithful dependants, and the passing of a great tradition. All this, too, is inflicted at a time of deep personal grief and sorrow.
One of the chief charms of our ancestral country houses has hitherto been that they have been, perhaps for hundreds of years, and still are, homes, not lifeless shells, half barracks and half public institutions, like the grandiose but cold and empty French châteaux on the Loire. None of this, to judge by his sneering broadcast, will trouble Mr. Dalton, but the policy is not even good business. An estate of £2,250,000, if kept in being, would produce at present rates of taxation a permanent revenue to the State of about £55,000 a year, and this is reduced in the instance given above after three deaths to about £2,000 ; nine-tenths of the capital has been realised, and, except for the very small proportion that in peace- time goes automatically to the redemption of the National Debt, has been spent wastefully as income. This presumably is a specimen of that enlightened Government policy which we are so often called upon to admire. I can only say that any ordinary commercial firm which practised this astonishing policy of periodically converting its best investments into wasting assets would really deserve all those strictures which Mr. Dalton and his friends are wont, at present without reason, to pass on private
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