other of these is always the loser by a diminished rate of accumulation. If population continues to increase as before, the laborer suffers; if not, cultivation is checked in its advance, and the landlords lose the accession of rent which would have accrued to them. The only countries in which a tax on profits seems likely to be permanently a burden on capitalists exclusively are those in which capital is stationary, because there is no new accumulation. In such countries the tax might not prevent the old capital from being kept up through habit, or from unwillingness to submit to impoverishment, and so the capitalists might continue to bear the whole of the tax.
§ 4. —on Wages.
We now turn to Taxes on Wages. The incidence of these is very different, according as the wages taxed as those of ordinary unskilled labor, or are the remuneration of such skilled or privileged employments, whether manual or intellectual, as are taken out of the sphere of competition by a natural or conferred monopoly.
I have already remarked that, in the present low state of popular education, all the higher grades of mental or educated labor are at a monopoly price, exceeding the wages of common workmen in a degree very far beyond that which is due to the expense, trouble, and loss of time required in qualifying for the employment. Any tax levied on these gains, which still leaves them above (or not below) their just proportion, falls on those who pay it; they have no means of relieving themselves at the expense of any other class. The same thing is true of ordinary wages, in cases like that of the United States, or of a new colony, where, capital increasing as rapidly as population can increase, wages are kept up by the increase of capital, and not by the adherence of the laborers to a fixed standard of comforts. In such a case, some deterioration of their condition,