Anyway, you may be wondering, what's an English professor doing at a nice conference like this?
Do you know anything about English professors? They're almost all Marxist.
I assure you I'm an exception. I'm one of a handful of free market English professors in the world.
I actually studied with Ludwig von Mises when I was an infant. I was 15 at the time, he was 80.
But I actually considered becoming an economist, obviously I made the wrong choice, but I'm trying to make up for it and I have for the past decade or so been trying to show how English literature can teach us important pro-free market lessons and as I'll try to show this afternoon, it actually can teach us something about taxation and in fact I'm going to discuss mainly this afternoon a very important
is an episode in the history of taxation and of tax revolt, but one which bears very much literary history in the 19th century.
But it is true that if you start looking for it, you find issues of taxation coming up all over literature.
One of my areas is the Renaissance, and there was tax revolt being chronicled even in the Renaissance.
For example, Francis Bacon wrote something called
The History of the Reign of King Henry VII.
And it's the first history I've seen
that systematically deals with the issue
of tax and tax revolt.
One of the things that Bacon keeps showing
in this history is how many problems
Henry VII got into because of taxes.
Just to give you two examples, here's one in the account.
But howsoever the laws made in that parliament did bear good and wholesome fruit,
yet the subsidy granted at the same time bore a fruit that proved harsh and bitter.
Parliament, of course, raising taxes in order to subsidize the king.
For when the commissioners entered into the taxation of the subsidy in Yorkshire and the Pritzker Prick of Durham,
the people upon a sudden grew into great mutiny
and said openly that they had endured of late years a thousand miseries and neither could nor would pay the subsidy.
The local lord, the Earl of Northumberland, goes back to Henry, tells him there's trouble brewing in the province.
The king wrote back peremptorily that he would not have one penny abated of that which had been granted to him by parliament,
both because it might encourage other counties to pay the like release or mitigation
and chiefly because he would never endure that the base multitude should frustrate the authority of the parliament wherein their votes and consents were concluded.
There you see a taxation even with representation is tyranny.
Upon this dispatch from court, the Earl assembled the principal justices and freeholders of the country
and speaking to them in the imperious language wherein the king had written to them did not only irritate the people
but make them conceived by the stoutness and haughtiness of delivery
that himself was the author of that council
whereupon the meaner sword routed together and suddenly assailing the
Earl in his house slew him and diversified his servants.
Now we're not recommending that kind of tax revolt but there it is
all the way back in Francis Bacon's history of Henry VII.
Again just a little later in his reign but it was fatal to the king to fight
Notice, the king is using his wars in a foreign land to justify the increase in tax
Taxation at Home, and said it was for them to pay that had too much and lived idly, but they would eat their bread that they got with the sweat of their brows and no man should take it from them.
I think I just found the source of Thomas di Lorenzo's favorite quote from Thomas Jefferson there.
They hear bakers talking about the people complaining that they would eat their bread that they got with the sweat of their labor and no man should take it from them.
And again, this tax revolt gets out of hand, and there's a mutiny in this region of England.
So, Bacon already is talking about tax revolts, and my favorite author, Shakespeare.
You'll find the same thing there.
He, too, is very aware of how the English kings get into trouble because of overtaxing their subjects.
One example is in his play, Richard II, where Richard himself says,
Again, he's got a foreign war going and he's wondering how he's going to pay for it.
We will ourselves in person to this war and for our coffers with too great a court and liberal largesse are grown somewhat light.
We are forced to farm our royal realm, the revenue whereof shall furnish us for our fares in hand.
If that comes short, our substitutes at home shall have blank charters, where to when they shall know what men are rich,
They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold.
There it is again. Tax them where the money is.
And send them after supplier wants, for we will make for Ireland presently.
And then later in the play, the king's own counselors are telling him his taxes have got out of hands.
The commons have he filled with grievous taxes and quite lost their hearts.
The nobles have he fined for ancient quarrels and quite lost their hearts.
And above all, he hath not money for these Irish wars, his burdensome taxation, not withstanding, but by the robbing of the banished Duke.
And he basically, Shakespeare, traces all of Richard II's problems to spending too much money on his court, and therefore having to raise taxes so much that the people no longer support him and go over to his opponent, Henry Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV.
Now, there are many, many examples of this sort of thing in the history of literature to show you that many of our great authors, including Shakespeare, are aware of the problem of taxation.
But I want to concentrate more specifically on some material from the 19th century, a very important history in the episode of English taxation, but one that's largely forgotten today.
will show us that some of these problems that we think of as unique to the United States
actually are very much widespread and affect other countries as well.
And so what I'm going to be talking about mostly this afternoon,
and I will get around to the death of John Keats, I promise you, here.
I was meant to provide a little comic relief in the midst of this very serious discussion.
and what could be funnier than the death of John Keats.
But I want to talk about something called knowledge taxes in the 19th century.
These were taxes which affected the course of all printed material and chiefly newspapers and books.
And they became quite an issue in the course of the 19th century.
And I bring this up because I also want to show that taxes are more insidious than just something that takes our money away.
Governments often use taxation to carry out their schemes, particularly against the liberties of their people, and this is an excellent example of it.
So I'm going to be talking about three forms of taxes in the 19th century in England.
a tax on paper itself, the stamp tax, which most people don't realize among other things,
required all newspapers to carry one of these government stamps,
and therefore, affected very seriously the price of newspapers.
And finally, and this is what's related to Keats' death, as we'll finally see,
a tax on advertisements, which prevailed for much of the 19th century.
Now, what we're dealing with here is one of the great achievements of free markets and capitalism in the 19th century, namely, the creation of widespread literacy, making books, newspapers, magazines, other forms of print material, available to the population of England on a scale that was unprecedented in England and in the history of humanity.
There's an excellent book on it which I'm largely going to be drawing upon by Richard
Altick called the English Common Reader.
This guy as I'll show is a fairly typical English professor and doesn't know what he's
showing.
Basically the book shows that all the so-called public spirited efforts to create literacy
of various charity groups, various government enterprises, all of them failed and the only
The only thing that delivered the goods, that made it possible for the average Englishman and woman to have access to books, periodicals and so on, was the free market.
Again, he would never admit that that's the story he tells, but it is what he ends up doing here.
Just to give you some statistics, to give you a sense of what the free market in print accomplished in Britain in the 19th century.
If you look at newspaper circulation, at the end of the 18th century, so around 1800,
the London Times had a daily circulation of roughly 4700 to 4800 copies.
That's it.
The London Times, the biggest newspaper, probably in the world at the time, 47 to 4800 copies.
By 1870, its daily circulation had become 50,000 to 60,000 and had already been surpassed
by The Daily News, the English version which had a circulation of 150,000 and by the end of the century in Britain you were getting the first newspapers with a million daily circulation.
Similar figures for novels, so Walter Scott's Waverly is often considered the first best-selling novel in the 19th century and it was a pretty amazing phenomenon in its day, I think 1816 is when it was published.
It sold 1,000 copies in the first five weeks and 6,000 copies in its first six months.
And within a few years, it had sold 11,000 copies here in the second decade of the 19th century.
And that was considered a huge success. That was considered the bestseller of its day.
By 1889, Charles Kingsley's novel, Westward Ho,
Nowhere near as famous as Scott's Waverly today, in an 1889 reprint, sold 500,000 copies.
You know, now we're talking best seller. And again, by the end of the 19th century in England,
there were books selling in the millions of copies. So this makes it real for you what happened in the course of the 19th century.
You went from a position at the beginning of the century where selling thousands of copies of a newspaper
or a book, made you preeminent in the field.
It's only around 1900 that the phenomenon
of million selling comes into being.
And there were lots of reasons for this happening,
all sorts of technological improvements,
the introduction of steam presses for printing,
the development of stereotype printing and so on.
There were all sorts of developments
which the market came up with, which made this possible.
What was standing in its way?
Taxes, the principal drag on the development of the British printing industry and hence
of what we think of as modern mass literacy was in fact the English tax system and that's
why the opponents of these taxes labeled them taxes on knowledge or knowledge taxes.
It was the way they led their campaign against these taxes.
Now, as I said, there were three principal forms of taxes, again, tax on bulk paper, stamp taxes,
you needed stamps on a newspaper and advertisement taxes. I'll discuss those in some detail.
I do want to begin with one subject that Altik brings up that helps kind of set the context
for this crazy tax situation in 19th century Britain. One of the initial drags on literacy
was something called the window tax in England. Windows were taxed in such a
fashion that people didn't have many of them, so they just didn't have enough
light to read at the beginning of the 19th century. As Alton explains, in the
ordinary home, decent lighting was not to be found until late in the 19th century.
In the period 1808 to 1823, the window tax, a relic dating from 1696. Now here's
Here's a little lesson in tax history, how taxes come into being, they're called temporary,
here lasting for over a century, reached its highest level.
Houses with six windows or less were taxed six shillings, six pence to eight shillings
annually.
In a minute I'll try to explain what those figures mean to us in real terms.
Seven window houses a pound, nine window houses, two guineas and so on up.
Even an aperture only a foot square was considered a window.
Although in 1823, the tax was halved, and in 1825, houses with less than eight windows
were exempted, builders still were discouraged from putting any more openings in a house
than were absolutely necessary, with the result that only one-seventh of all of the houses
in Britain fell under the tax.
Not without reason did Dickens remark that the window tax, not abolished until 1851,
There was an even more formidable obstacle to the people's reading than the so-called taxes on knowledge.
The duties on newspapers, advertisement and paper.
Now, this is just a minor episode, but just think about it.
You know, obviously, windows were regarded as a luxury at some point, you know, back in 1696.
And so, go ahead, tax the rich, tax windows.
You know, in the course of free market development, everybody starts to get windows.
are very useful, especially before electric lighting and here's the British government
still taxing windows in the 19th century and of course the market responds, builders build
houses with fewer windows so the taxes will be less and the result is a darkening of all
of England and again someone as serious as Dickens thought that this was a genuine impediment
in the development of reading in England. No light.
The enlightened government stamps out light by taxing windows.
It's almost grotesque when you think about it, but for almost two centuries there was a tax on windows in England.
Now, to get to the main body of this material, let me begin with the infamous Stamp Act.
Now, we think of the Stamp Act as something that only affected Americans.
But in fact, it prevailed in Britain itself and was much resented and had some terrible effects there.
It began in Britain in 1712. It was initially a penny tax.
Any document needed this stamp on it and that included newspapers.
Believe it or not, there were increases in this tax in 1776, 1789, these are all memorable years,
1797, at which point it reached three and a half pennies, a stamp, and was raised again in 1815, right after Waterloo, to four pennies.
Now, it doesn't sound like too much to us, although I mean, I still remember the days of the three cents stamp in the United States,
When you realize how long ago this was, that it was at three pennies, it really was quite a bit.
And the result was the price of the average newspaper in England at the beginning of the 19th century was six cents, six pence.
Now again, because of inflation, we'd be happy to pay six cents for a paper today.
But to put it in some perspective, and Alter's book is good on this, and giving you some other prices in the economy,
a pound of candles, that's 24 candles, cost seven cents.
And a pound of candles was enough to light a house for a week.
So it cost you as much to buy your daily newspaper as it did to buy the candles you needed for a whole week.
Another way of putting this in perspective is the average clerk in an office,
I probably should say Clark, in an office, made one pound a week, six cents is one fortieth of a pound.
So it meant one fortieth of your salary for the week had to go to buy your daily newspaper.
A very rough rule to convert 1800 English pounds into contemporary US dollars is 200 to 1.
That would mean your daily paper cost $5 at this time.
That's very rough, but gives you some sense of what this meant in terms of prices.
So what that meant is basically newspapers were unaffordable to the average person in 1800.
That's why the circulation of the times was under 5,000.
In fact, this was the heyday of coffee houses,
where part of the attraction was they bought newspapers.
And so you came there, drank a cup of coffee and read your newspaper
because it was too expensive to buy yourself.
So this was essentially a forward tax that helped put the average newspaper
out of the reach of the average person in England.
Now obviously the government regarded this as a revenue raising device,
but it also was a way for the government to control opinion in England.
The Crown and the Parliamentary leadership did not like newspapers criticizing them,
so they were very happy to help price newspapers out of the average person's income.
Now, another one of the taxes was a tax on all advertisements and it was a three shillings,
six pence tax on each ad placed in a newspaper.
We'll come back to that to see how it killed Keats.
And then there was the tax on paper, which at the beginning of the 19th century was three
pence per pound.
It was again halved in 1837, there were constant oppositions to these taxes, but you can see
how the cost of a newspaper, and also of books at this time, very strongly reflected this
tax system, and again to give you a concrete example of it, a man named Charles Knight,
who was a pioneer in mass publication in the 19th century, came up with something called
of the Penny Cyclopedia.
It's a marketing scheme that's existed to this day.
He issued an encyclopedia in parts.
It came out monthly and the big selling point
was it cost only a penny per part
and eventually you'd build it up
and you'd have this whole complete encyclopedia
and it was actually very well done.
The information of it was high quality.
He began in 1833.
He ended up losing 30,788 pounds on this project.
Again, that's a huge amount of money.
It's, again, multiplied by 200 to get some sense of where I'll be today.
Of that loss, his paper duty alone on the publication project was 16,500 pounds.
So more than you can say if he hadn't had that to pay that paper duty, his losses would have been cut more than a half and indeed several publications went out of business in the 1830s claiming one of them the quote is we were absolutely choked to death by the paper tax so again this is it sounds small you know three pence
per pound of paper, but you realize how many pounds of papers publishers use, it really was significant.
So the combination of these taxes exerted an enormous drag on the development of everything prized when we talk about print media today.
The dissemination of newspapers, periodicals, publications of novels.
Now, as I said, you would think, well, this was just a revenue raising device, but in fact, it's a perfect example of how governments use taxes to target activities they don't like.
When Mark Thornton mentioned syntax, I said, oh, he's going to talk about grammar.
Another example of how English professors, you know, kind of miss the point of these economic matters.
But in fact, the amazing thing to realize is among the sin taxes at this time were these various taxes on paper and newspapers.
The government and many authoritative people regarded reading as an evil activity.
It's so ironic because now you've got the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts,
of the Arts issuing this dire report on the decline of reading in America and the federal
government complaining people aren't reading enough. Governments in the early 19th century
maintained the principle that reading was bad for the people. It was a waste of their
time, it took them away from important work and above all it encouraged them to think
about what might be wrong with their governments.
And so part of this tax campaign was an active effort
to retard the growth of a mass reading public in England.
So to give some specific examples of this, that ALTIC documents,
In 1819, the British government set up some new rules for taxation, specifically targeted.
This was an act under George III, December 1819. This law defined as a newspaper,
and thus as subject to the tax, which had just been raised to four pence in 1815.
Every periodical containing news or comments on the news that was published oftener than
every 26 days, printed on two sheets or less and priced at less than six pence, exclusive
of the tax.
Now Alta goes on to point out the framing of the act left no doubt as to its purpose.
It was legislation shrewdly designed to wipe out anti-government and anti-religious papers.
It was not a tax upon news alone, as earlier newspaper stamp enactments had been, but upon
views.
And not upon all views, but specifically upon those of radical demagogues.
Now let me say that in 1819, radical demagogues in England were people advocating the free
market.
They were arguing, for example, to return to the gold standard.
They were arguing for relief from taxation.
and they were what we would call free marketeers, above all named William Cobbett.
To avoid implying that all cheap newspapers were dangerous, if that were so pertinently
acquired a Newcastle pamphleteer, how are we to defend our cheap religious track society pamphlets?
The Act went on to exempt from taxation papers containing only matters of devotion, piety or charity.
Now this would be declared unconstitutional in the United States today,
but notice it's amazing, it was written into the act that if your newspaper was religious,
it wasn't taxed, that really left only these anti-government pro-free market papers.
So again, it shows how insidious taxation can be.
Here's a case where the government was using taxation to adversely affect a specific segment of the press and it worked.
Because you notice, if your price was under 6 pence, and therefore available to the masses, you were subject to the tax.
The result was that many of the radical papers went out of business,
whereas others, including the famous Black Dwarf and Cobbett's Political Register, went up to 6 pence, and their circulation fell off.
So it actually had this chilling effect on the anti-government press in England, which was exactly its intention.
Now again, businessmen are resourceful.
William Cobbett, who is one of the heroes of this time, in my view, came up with a great idea.
He changed the name of his newspaper.
He called it Cobbett's Monthly Religious Tracts.
And then he changed his name to Cobbett's Monthly Sermons.
You'd have to read the wonderful series of his tracks that's called Paper Against Gold
where he's invading against the new paper money system in England.
But, you know, it just shows you what a hard time the government has in trying to redefine these things.
And indeed, it's a perfect example of the Hayekian law of unintended consequences.
Again, the target of the legislation was these specific radical newspapers.
But again, in the kind of lobbying that goes on whenever a tax law comes around,
certain segments of the publication industry in England managed to get serial publication
of previously published books exempted from this rule.
So if you published timely editorials on current events, you were subject to the tax.
If you were reprinting old fiction, you were not.
The result was to give an enormous boost to so-called gothic fiction, to sleazy horror novels.
So here's the British government ending up with this tax system discouraging serious political discussion
of current issues in print and encouraging the publication of the cheapest, sleaziest,
gothic horror stories imaginable again how tax policy can distort the world and the other irony
of it is people suddenly start republishing Thomas Paine and the other radicals from the 1790s
because their works had been published in book form and they now couldn't wouldn't be taxed under
to the current law. So, the result was to leave the British government really no better off than it was before, a perfect example of how tax policy can backfire.
In any case, this pretty soon led to a series of tax revolts and excellent examples of the whole phenomenon.
In 1831 began what's known as the War of the Unstamped Press and a number of publishers in London decided they would simply violate the Stamp Act.
It began with a man named Henry Hetherington who published something called The Poor Man's Guardian.
And that again will give you an idea of what this popular press stood for.
Therefore, it presented itself as the guardian of the poor people in England against the
predation of their government, particularly the excessive taxes.
And he produced an unstamped weekly paper.
He just issued his paper without the required government stamp on it.
And this set off quite a tax revolt in the publishing industry.
Over the years, a series of about three or four years, 800 publishers were arrested of
500 were jailed, or fined, or both.
Heather Intimidates himself served three prison terms
in the course of this tax revolt.
Notice how familiar it sounds. And here he's doing this awful thing,
trying to publish a cheap newspaper for people so they can find out
what's going on in the world. For this he goes to jail three times.
It's nice to report that one of the juries in one of his trials acquitted him
In the grand old British tradition of jury nullification, they just didn't like what the government was doing to the press.
So although he was obviously and publicly guilty of this, the jury decided what he was publishing wasn't a newspaper.
And you can see what the Achilles heel of the government was here.
They themselves had given a very odd definition of what constitutes a newspaper, so their opponents could use that against them.
this is an example of a tax revolt that succeeded in 1836 the stamp tax was
reduced again to one penny so that seems very significant comes down now from four
pennies back to what it was in 1712 one penny and it was a sort of a triumph but
Altick again this guy doesn't know how much he's showing this book but he
realizes there was a problem here and it becomes a very interesting lesson in
in how taxes work to the advantage of big business and against small business
and it's why we get the paradox of so many big businessmen actually supporting a tax system.
And here's what Altych says on the subject, again, very perceptive if you only knew what the larger consequences are.
The tax was lowered to a penny a sheet, but generous as the concession appeared on the surface,
The new act was immediately recognized as a fresh obstacle in England's progress towards a cheap newspaper press.
It was so framed, and above all so enforced, that it became primarily a means of preserving the journalistic monopoly of the moneyed publishers.
So far as the small publisher was concerned, the penny duty was as onerous as the four-penny one had been.
That doesn't compute to me economically, but no one's going to accuse this guy of being an economist.
But he does go on to make a valid point.
His expenses in having this paper stamped and the loss he sustained on unsold copies,
whose stamps were not redeemable, virtually equaled the cost of the stamp itself.
In addition, since the news vendor got a 25% discount on the total price of each paper,
the publisher, in effect, had to pay a premium on the penny tax.
Finally, and I think this is the important point,
the increased stringency of the security provisions of the Newspaper Stamp Act,
Act, requiring heavy bonds to be posted against the printing of criminal libel placed in impossible
burden upon the resources of the small publisher.
And there's the lesson to be learned from this episode, that the tax burden system is
disproportionately burdensome on the small businessman.
Big business can handle it, but it really makes it difficult for the small businessman
to operate.
Here's a case where this apparent victory, the reduction of the tax by a significant amount,
it was a quarter of what it was, still didn't have the effect of liberating the free press in England.
So the real tax revolt against these so-called knowledge taxes came around 1850 and it was led by Richard Cobden.
Richard Cobden, the great force behind free trade, my hero among British politicians of the 19th century.
You can have Disraeli, you can have even Gladstone.
Richard Cobden was the greatest political force in England, along with his colleague John Bright.
They were the men who founded the Anti-Corn Law League.
They were the ones who finally in the 1840s managed to get the protectionist tariffs on imported grain,
in England, they really, Cobden and Bright invented single-issue politics, they really did more to create anti-big government forces in politics than anyone in history and having won the great victory against the Corn Laws in England, in favor of free trade, against protectionism, Cobden was certainly
He was searching around for an issue, and he decided these knowledge taxes would be his next goal.
Not as significant an issue as free trade, and frankly he had to turn to it because it seemed to be the only victory he could win.
His opposition to the Crimean War, for example, got him nowhere.
Got him voted out of parliament at one point later in the 1850s.
The way he did, along with his great sidekick, John Bright, they led the fight in parliament against these taxes, they held committee hearings, a lot of our evidence about 19th century reading patterns and the economics of the publishing industry come out of those hearings in parliament.
And Cobden's public statements on it show what the issue was as he saw it.
It really was an issue of getting knowledge out to the people.
He said daily papers in London, which at this point cost five pence.
The price had come down a bit, but still not enough.
And Cobden said, who below the rank of a merchant or wholesale dealer can afford to take in a daily paper at five pence?
clearly is beyond the reach of the mechanic and the shopkeeper.
So the goal here behind this agitation in Parliament was to get these taxes removed
specifically so that the common man and woman in England would have access to newspapers.
The debate in Parliament is very instructive.
Gladstone was at this point Chancellor of the Exchequer,
who's responsible for preparing the British budget and he actually was in
favor of repealing these taxes and through his weight behind it for one
reason or another he then removed his Chancellor of the Exchequer and a
successor, a man named George Cornwall Lewis, made this statement in the course
of the parliamentary debate and I think it's very telling. He said that he had
And we've heard for many quarters that this measure, quote,
will open the floodgates of sedition and blasphemy,
and will inundate the country with licentious and immoral productions,
will undermine the very foundations of society,
and scatter the seeds of revolution broadcast over land.
Newspapers. The people have access to newspapers.
All hell will break loose in the country.
And again, this was basically the ideology
that had supported these taxes up to this point.
Significantly, at this point, the London Times turned against the taxes.
The Times, which in many ways was the benefit of this tax system,
according to that argument, that it was a large operation,
it could handle the tax code, the tax system, whereas upstart newspapers couldn't.
But in a spirit of genuine public spiritedness,
The Times editorial did say about this tax, it's a tax on knowledge, a tax on light, a tax on education, a tax on truth, a tax on public opinion, a tax on good order and good government, a tax on society, a tax on the progress of human affairs and on the working of human institutions.
And so clearly the tide of opinion had turned against these taxes, and I think it's 1855 that the stamp tax on newspaper was removed, the postal stamps still continued, and finally in 1861 the duty on paper was repealed.
And guess what? The results predicted by Cobb and his party turned out to be exactly right.
Very soon after the taxes were dropped, the price of newspapers in London dropped to one penny.
From five pennies to one penny.
It does seem to indicate that a very large proportion of the cost of the paper
was directly attributed to these various taxes on paper and stamp taxes, so on.
and so on. And guess what? Price now at a penny instead of five pennies, their circulation just start to escalate and indeed you start to get papers circulating the hundreds of thousands finally after their price comes down to one penny.
Moreover, it's right at this point, the 1850s, that the first provincial newspapers start up in England.
Up to this point, every newspaper was based in London, because that's the only place where it's economically feasible.
But for example, by 1876 in Manchester, which as some of you may know, was the center of the free trade movement,
There was a total of 125,000 circulation of the papers in the city of Manchester.
Whereas before these taxes were appealed, there were no papers at all in Manchester.
So it's clear that this campaign against the taxes was justified.
And that you can see that the explosion in print publications in England
really is tied directly to this change in tax law that people like Cobden and Bright agitated for.
So again, it's a marvelous lesson in how un-progressive taxation can be.
And here you're at a case where literally the government was targeting the spread of knowledge
as something that should be retarded precisely by the structure of the tax laws.
Now, let me turn to another subject that ALTIC brings up, and that's libraries, and you get to hear an English professor argue against libraries. How often do you get to hear that?
And indeed, it's an important case because, you know, we have been talking about the evils of taxation and our opponents would say, well, what about the benefits of taxation?
I mean you're just talking about as a purely negative thing don't people get
something in return for their tax money. So let me take the episode of public
libraries in 19th century Britain to illustrate this issue and here Altic
shows his true colors and it's really amusing in that sense to see how he
Although he misconstrues his own subject in what he's discovered, here he is, he's got a whole chapter on the development of public libraries as part of his story of the spreading of literacy in 19th century Britain, and you know the issue is whether tax money should be spent to build libraries, and here's how he describes it, he's writing in the 1950s here, what seems to us in the perspective of a century a fairly simple question, shall or shall not government provide
involved people with free reading facilities, involved all sorts of peripheral, if not actually irrelevant considerations.
Now I want you to hear what these peripheral, even irrelevant considerations were.
He says, you know, strange enough people argued against public libraries in the middle of the 19th century.
They denounced it as a frightening new attempt of the state to encroach upon the liberties of the people.
All. Dedicated as they were to the principle of volunteerism, they submitted that the provision
of libraries, like that of education, was totally outside the proper sphere of government.
On less theoretical grounds, they fought the bill because it would add the last straw to
the load of the already groaning taxpayer. There it is. That is what is a peripheral
or even irrelevant subject to an English professor.
That the argument that this might raise people's taxes, that's incomprehensible to him.
How could they have made that argument?
On the other hand, when he's talking about the proponents of the bill, he says, although
they offered no evidence of any popular demand for free libraries, they knew that once libraries
were provided, they would be welcomed.
There it is, I mean, you know, his absolute foregone conclusion, free libraries are the most wonderful thing in the world, anyone who argues against it is crazy, anyone who argues for it, even if they offer no evidence, must be right.
Now, let's look in practice at this situation because it did involve an issue of taxes.
Taxes. What this legislation enabled was this. It was all done on a local basis
that town councils, which then ran municipalities in England, were allowed
to pass a tax rate of one-half penny on the pound in order to erect libraries.
The opponents of the bill, who didn't manage to get defeated, did manage to get
a writer that it required a two-thirds vote of the taxpayers present at the meeting to
authorize the tax. Very interesting. I wish we had more laws like this that people had
to vote and two-thirds of them had to vote to impose the tax on them. And now poor Mr.
Altick writing about this is really surprised. Popular apathy was overwhelming. In town after
town, proposals to adopt the acts were defeated. Not once, but repeatedly and by large margins.
As late as 1896, only 334 districts, many of them small, had leveraged the library rate.
In 1887, only two parishes in all of metropolitan London had tax-supported libraries. And then
he says, even more surprised, you know, we didn't get libraries in England until Andrew
through Carnegie came along and gave the money for them.
And then he adds, a vindication perhaps
of that preference for the voluntary principle.
Again, he just doesn't get a clue.
It just doesn't get through to him
what story he's actually telling here.
But it's actually very interesting to see what happened here
that when people were given the choice
of imposing the tax on themselves,
for this wonderful purpose of erecting free libraries,
they voted overwhelmingly against it throughout England.
Now, what's even more important, though, is to look at what happened in the actual libraries that were built.
Because the argument behind them was based on education.
That is, the notion was, public money should be spent on this because public libraries will contribute to the education of the public.
We need a more educated public, and what could be better for that than libraries?
Well, what ended up in the libraries? Fiction. Best-selling fiction.
Wherever free libraries were open, the volume of patronage bore a direct relationship to the amount of fiction available.
At Sheffield in the period 1856-67, prose fiction accounted for almost half of the combined circulation
by the 1890s, most free libraries reported that between 65% and 90% of the books circulated were classified as fiction.
So there it is, you establish a library supposedly so the populace will have access to the Encyclopedia Britannica
and they're showing up to read the cheapest popular bestsellers that they can, and you know this is true today.
Today. Libraries are held up as this great public institution. Increasingly, the main
thing they lend is videotapes and DVDs. And these libraries that are supposed to be the
great repositories and defenders of books in our world, they're really feeding television
viewing in that effect. Now, I mean, no one likes television more than I do. But the question
is why you should be publicly funding activities that are just private enjoyment.
And indeed, it's fascinating to see that these arguments were weighed way back in Victorian Britain.
There's almost nothing new in the world.
The Prevalent View was summarized in the Publishers Circular in 1877.
This is what they wrote.
Free libraries, which should only be provided for the poor and helpless,
not for those who can help themselves,
should be resorted to for education and instruction, and should begin in elementary works, long
antecedent to works of imaginative fiction.
If the taxpayers are to provide imaginative fiction or the luxuries of the mind for slightly
poorer classes, why should they not also provide free games, free plays, bread and circuses,
free cakes and nuts for the boys?
Which I believe a number of libraries do now.
And another person reported, when he went to libraries in his district,
I have found as a rule every chair occupied, and by whom?
In nine cases out of ten, by loafing office boys, or clerks, who were using their master's
time for devouring all the most trivial literary trash they could find.
Many are the crimes brought about by the disordered imagination of a reader of sensational and
often immoral rubbish.
And another one of the commentators of the Victorian period had the call, the Nuremberg
altic, to call this socialism. These libraries. This is a disciple of Herbert Spencer writing
in a volume edited by Spencer. A scorching attack on the free library as the socialist
Finishing School
Free Library is a perfect godsend to the town loafer
who finds himself housed and abused at the public expense
and may lounge away his time among the intellectual luxuries
which his neighbors are taxed to provide for him.
The truth is that a free library favors one special section of the community,
the book readers, at the expense of all the rest.
If one man may have his hobby paid for by his neighbors, why not all?
This mendacious appeal to the numerical majority to force a demoralizing and pauperizing institution upon the minority is an attempt to revive in municipal legislation a form of coercion we have outgrown in religious matters.
Now, Alty quotes these things as if, you know, these are the craziest opinions in the world, but here it is a really astute analysis of what the real meaning of public libraries is.
It's taxing everybody to pay for the enjoyments of some people and then Aldick himself has to recognize there was something odd about their library, these libraries.
Even though he supports them as a 20th century liberal, he does say from the outset library buildings were the chosen haunts of public building parasites, vagrants taking shelter from rain and cold.
Doesn't this sound familiar? Loafers and Eccentrics. Listen to this now. This is Altych himself speaking.
Because they received the latest papers, libraries were the resort of the unemployed, who flocked to inspect the advertisements of situations vacant,
and, I love this, of racing enthusiasts, who not only made their daily selections from the papers, but conducted financial transactions on the premises.
The Victorian Library's bookie joint!
To frustrate these shabby turfmen, some libraries obliterated the racing news from each paper as it arrived.
And now, going on with the tragedy of the Commons here, and Altych is so surprised by this,
what with the unsavory odor of the ill-ventilated rooms, the presence of dirty, snoring loafers,
and the assembling on the steps of loafers spitting, smoking, and discussing the merits and demerits
of Horses and Language unfit for quotation.
It was no wonder that many women shrank from approaching free libraries,
however eager they were for books.
Most self-respecting libraries had to set aside separate ladies' rooms,
or at least screened off a part of their reading room for the exclusive use of females,
and some installed ladies' entrances.
So there's a perfect example of something that sounds so high-minded, high-sounding,
free libraries for the public would just have to tax a bit to do it again where people were given the choice they refused to do it and even where it was instituted it had very much the different effects than the government intended so you know these benefits you supposedly get from the tax money you send to the government are dubious at best and usually quite contrary to your interests. But who killed John Keats? I can tease you with that all along.
John Keats died of tuberculosis. He died of natural causes.
I can blame a lot of things on the English tax system, and I hope I have here,
but I can't blame them for the death of Keats. Yet, there's some suspicion here.
As some of you may know, the great story about Keats is that he was killed by the bad reviews of his poem Endymion.
They were extremely hostile, they hurt him very much, and the legend spread that this broke his heart.
They didn't know too much about tuberculosis in those days, so the legend spread that Keats had been killed by his bad reviews.
This is expressed, for example, by Lord Byron, his great satirical poem, Don Juan, in the 11th canto, stanza 60.
I'm not the only one to try to get humor out of this awful subject.
John Keese, who was killed off by one critique, just as he really promised something great, if not intelligible, without grief,
contrived to talk about the gods of late, much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate. It is strange.
The mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
There it is, there is, enshrined in Byron's poetry, the idea that Keats was killed by the bad reviews of Endemic.
Just so you understand how bad the reviews were, I do want to read you some excerpts from them to give you a sense of how vicious reviews could be in the 18th century.
This is one from Blackwood's Magazine by John Gibson Lockhart.
is talking about John Keats, you know maybe the greatest poet of the 19th
century and his first major poem in Demian. To witness the disease of any
human understanding, however feeble, is distressing. But the spectacle of an able
mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting.
What's so sorrow is this, that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John
von Keats. This young man appears to have received from nature talents of an excellent, perhaps even of a superior order, talents which devoted to the purposes of any useful profession, must have rendered him a respectable, if not an eminent citizen. His friends, we understand, destined him to the career of medicine, and he was bound to print something years ago to a worthy apothecary in town. But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we have alluded. And then he goes on and talks about how crazy the poem is, and he
A sentence by saying, we venture to make one small prophecy that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50 pounds upon anything he can write.
It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet.
But for heaven's sake, young Keats, be a little more sparing of sufferrifics in your drugs than you have been in your poetry.
I wish more reviewers would be open about this, but this is the opening of the review.
Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticize.
On the present occasion, we should anticipate the author's complaint and honestly confess
that we have not read his work.
I'm glad that John Maynard Keynes had said that about Mises' Theory of Money and Credit and had opened about it.
Not that we have been wanting in our duty, far from it.
Indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be to get through it.
But with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle
beyond the first of the four books of which this poetic romance consists.
We should extremely lament this want of energy or whatever it may be in our parts.
after one consolation, namely that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the
book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we
have not looked into.
It really does not get more vicious than that and I'm sure it would have killed me.
It probably is not really what killed Keats upon his autopsy they found his lungs were
in fact entirely dead.
But if this were true, if the reviews did kill John Keats, then the Inland Revenue Board
in England was responsible.
By the way, notice the great difference between Britain and America.
They have an Inland Revenue Board, we have an Internal Revenue Service.
Notice what that revolution was about.
We did so much so that we wouldn't have an Inland Revenue Board but could rather have
and have an internal revenue service, and it's actually very interesting.
I was thinking of this throughout Tom DeLangelo's talk last night,
that the British tried to introduce an income tax in 1815,
right at the end of the Polionic War, supposedly pay off the debt of the Polionic Wars.
The major objection in Britain that actually defeated the bill was a privacy issue.
Guess what? The British were saying,
well, what's the government going to have to know about us in order to enforce this income tax?
income tax, and in fact, whose business is it of anybody to know what our income is.
So it's very, I mean, how prophetic the English public was at the time, but the Inland Revenue
Board came into existence.
And now to go back quickly to that advertisement tax, I didn't talk much about that, but was
part of this system of knowledge taxes, tax every single advertisement.
As we've been seeing in many cases, people are resilient.
They will get around taxes any way they can, and so when advertisers were being taxed,
the British publishing industry invented the puff piece.
Our whole current system of literary publicity really grows out of this era.
To run an ad for a book, you're going to be taxed for it.
So you can save money by just paying off the reviewer, getting him to write a favorable
Review, which did as good a job and cost less than paying the tax in most cases.
So for a while the English press was churning out an awful lot of positive reviews.
The government got suspicious of this and started to tax positive reviews as advertisements.
It was at that point that the English reviewing press turned vicious.
Now, the English have these vicious impulses all along, but it is interesting that it does seem that the unusually vicious tone of reviewing in the 1820s had something to do with this advertisement tax situation, and so I can't prove it.
But if those reviews are what really killed John Keats, the nastiness of the reviews may be an artifact of the British tax system, in which case it killed John Keats.
I'll stop there.