WEBVTT NOTE Taxation and Literary History, or Who Killed John Keats? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Anyway, you may be wondering, what's an English professor doing at a nice conference like this? 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:11.000 Do you know anything about English professors? They're almost all Marxist. 3 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:20.000 I assure you I'm an exception. I'm one of a handful of free market English professors in the world. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.000 I actually studied with Ludwig von Mises when I was an infant. I was 15 at the time, he was 80. 5 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:59.000 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 6 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:08.000 is an episode in the history of taxation and of tax revolt, but one which bears very much literary history in the 19th century. 7 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:16.000 But it is true that if you start looking for it, you find issues of taxation coming up all over literature. 8 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:25.000 One of my areas is the Renaissance, and there was tax revolt being chronicled even in the Renaissance. 9 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:28.880 For example, Francis Bacon wrote something called 10 00:01:28.880 --> 00:01:32.200 The History of the Reign of King Henry VII. 11 00:01:32.200 --> 00:01:34.840 And it's the first history I've seen 12 00:01:34.840 --> 00:01:37.160 that systematically deals with the issue 13 00:01:37.160 --> 00:01:38.720 of tax and tax revolt. 14 00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:40.880 One of the things that Bacon keeps showing 15 00:01:40.880 --> 00:01:43.520 in this history is how many problems 16 00:01:43.520 --> 00:01:47.120 Henry VII got into because of taxes. 17 00:01:48.560 --> 00:01:53.000 Just to give you two examples, here's one in the account. 18 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:58.220 But howsoever the laws made in that parliament did bear good and wholesome fruit, 19 00:01:58.220 --> 00:02:04.720 yet the subsidy granted at the same time bore a fruit that proved harsh and bitter. 20 00:02:04.720 --> 00:02:10.240 Parliament, of course, raising taxes in order to subsidize the king. 21 00:02:10.240 --> 00:02:16.220 For when the commissioners entered into the taxation of the subsidy in Yorkshire and the Pritzker Prick of Durham, 22 00:02:16.220 --> 00:02:20.360 the people upon a sudden grew into great mutiny 23 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:29.200 and said openly that they had endured of late years a thousand miseries and neither could nor would pay the subsidy. 24 00:02:29.200 --> 00:02:34.640 The local lord, the Earl of Northumberland, goes back to Henry, tells him there's trouble brewing in the province. 25 00:02:34.640 --> 00:02:41.440 The king wrote back peremptorily that he would not have one penny abated of that which had been granted to him by parliament, 26 00:02:41.440 --> 00:02:46.760 both because it might encourage other counties to pay the like release or mitigation 27 00:02:46.760 --> 00:02:56.640 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. 28 00:02:56.640 --> 00:03:01.880 There you see a taxation even with representation is tyranny. 29 00:03:01.880 --> 00:03:07.560 Upon this dispatch from court, the Earl assembled the principal justices and freeholders of the country 30 00:03:07.560 --> 00:03:14.480 and speaking to them in the imperious language wherein the king had written to them did not only irritate the people 31 00:03:14.480 --> 00:03:17.920 but make them conceived by the stoutness and haughtiness of delivery 32 00:03:17.920 --> 00:03:21.520 that himself was the author of that council 33 00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:25.440 whereupon the meaner sword routed together and suddenly assailing the 34 00:03:25.440 --> 00:03:30.000 Earl in his house slew him and diversified his servants. 35 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:33.600 Now we're not recommending that kind of tax revolt but there it is 36 00:03:33.600 --> 00:03:37.440 all the way back in Francis Bacon's history of Henry VII. 37 00:03:37.440 --> 00:03:43.200 Again just a little later in his reign but it was fatal to the king to fight 38 00:03:43.200 --> 00:03:50.200 Notice, the king is using his wars in a foreign land to justify the increase in tax 39 00:04:13.200 --> 00:04:26.200 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. 40 00:04:26.200 --> 00:04:32.200 I think I just found the source of Thomas di Lorenzo's favorite quote from Thomas Jefferson there. 41 00:04:32.200 --> 00:04:40.200 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. 42 00:04:40.200 --> 00:04:46.200 And again, this tax revolt gets out of hand, and there's a mutiny in this region of England. 43 00:04:46.200 --> 00:04:52.200 So, Bacon already is talking about tax revolts, and my favorite author, Shakespeare. 44 00:04:52.200 --> 00:04:55.200 You'll find the same thing there. 45 00:04:55.200 --> 00:05:01.200 He, too, is very aware of how the English kings get into trouble because of overtaxing their subjects. 46 00:05:01.200 --> 00:05:08.200 One example is in his play, Richard II, where Richard himself says, 47 00:05:08.200 --> 00:05:13.200 Again, he's got a foreign war going and he's wondering how he's going to pay for it. 48 00:05:13.200 --> 00:05:22.200 We will ourselves in person to this war and for our coffers with too great a court and liberal largesse are grown somewhat light. 49 00:05:22.200 --> 00:05:28.200 We are forced to farm our royal realm, the revenue whereof shall furnish us for our fares in hand. 50 00:05:28.200 --> 00:05:36.200 If that comes short, our substitutes at home shall have blank charters, where to when they shall know what men are rich, 51 00:05:36.200 --> 00:05:40.200 They shall subscribe them for large sums of gold. 52 00:05:40.200 --> 00:05:44.200 There it is again. Tax them where the money is. 53 00:05:44.200 --> 00:05:49.200 And send them after supplier wants, for we will make for Ireland presently. 54 00:05:49.200 --> 00:05:55.200 And then later in the play, the king's own counselors are telling him his taxes have got out of hands. 55 00:05:55.200 --> 00:06:00.200 The commons have he filled with grievous taxes and quite lost their hearts. 56 00:06:00.200 --> 00:06:05.200 The nobles have he fined for ancient quarrels and quite lost their hearts. 57 00:06:05.200 --> 00:06:14.200 And above all, he hath not money for these Irish wars, his burdensome taxation, not withstanding, but by the robbing of the banished Duke. 58 00:06:14.200 --> 00:06:30.200 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. 59 00:06:30.200 --> 00:06:41.200 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. 60 00:06:41.200 --> 00:06:56.200 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. 61 00:06:56.200 --> 00:07:01.200 will show us that some of these problems that we think of as unique to the United States 62 00:07:01.200 --> 00:07:07.200 actually are very much widespread and affect other countries as well. 63 00:07:07.200 --> 00:07:11.200 And so what I'm going to be talking about mostly this afternoon, 64 00:07:11.200 --> 00:07:17.200 and I will get around to the death of John Keats, I promise you, here. 65 00:07:17.200 --> 00:07:22.200 I was meant to provide a little comic relief in the midst of this very serious discussion. 66 00:07:22.200 --> 00:07:25.200 and what could be funnier than the death of John Keats. 67 00:07:25.200 --> 00:07:35.200 But I want to talk about something called knowledge taxes in the 19th century. 68 00:07:35.200 --> 00:07:43.200 These were taxes which affected the course of all printed material and chiefly newspapers and books. 69 00:07:43.200 --> 00:07:47.200 And they became quite an issue in the course of the 19th century. 70 00:07:47.200 --> 00:07:55.500 And I bring this up because I also want to show that taxes are more insidious than just something that takes our money away. 71 00:07:55.500 --> 00:08:06.300 Governments often use taxation to carry out their schemes, particularly against the liberties of their people, and this is an excellent example of it. 72 00:08:06.300 --> 00:08:11.300 So I'm going to be talking about three forms of taxes in the 19th century in England. 73 00:08:11.300 --> 00:08:20.580 a tax on paper itself, the stamp tax, which most people don't realize among other things, 74 00:08:20.580 --> 00:08:24.980 required all newspapers to carry one of these government stamps, 75 00:08:24.980 --> 00:08:28.900 and therefore, affected very seriously the price of newspapers. 76 00:08:28.900 --> 00:08:33.140 And finally, and this is what's related to Keats' death, as we'll finally see, 77 00:08:33.140 --> 00:08:40.500 a tax on advertisements, which prevailed for much of the 19th century. 78 00:08:40.500 --> 00:09:04.500 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. 79 00:09:04.500 --> 00:09:09.980 There's an excellent book on it which I'm largely going to be drawing upon by Richard 80 00:09:09.980 --> 00:09:13.260 Altick called the English Common Reader. 81 00:09:13.260 --> 00:09:17.060 This guy as I'll show is a fairly typical English professor and doesn't know what he's 82 00:09:17.060 --> 00:09:18.300 showing. 83 00:09:18.300 --> 00:09:24.260 Basically the book shows that all the so-called public spirited efforts to create literacy 84 00:09:24.260 --> 00:09:31.140 of various charity groups, various government enterprises, all of them failed and the only 85 00:09:31.140 --> 00:09:41.140 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. 86 00:09:41.140 --> 00:09:47.140 Again, he would never admit that that's the story he tells, but it is what he ends up doing here. 87 00:09:47.140 --> 00:09:56.140 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. 88 00:09:56.140 --> 00:10:02.580 If you look at newspaper circulation, at the end of the 18th century, so around 1800, 89 00:10:02.580 --> 00:10:10.460 the London Times had a daily circulation of roughly 4700 to 4800 copies. 90 00:10:10.460 --> 00:10:11.460 That's it. 91 00:10:11.460 --> 00:10:17.420 The London Times, the biggest newspaper, probably in the world at the time, 47 to 4800 copies. 92 00:10:17.420 --> 00:10:25.100 By 1870, its daily circulation had become 50,000 to 60,000 and had already been surpassed 93 00:10:25.100 --> 00:10:38.540 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. 94 00:10:38.540 --> 00:10:53.980 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. 95 00:10:53.980 --> 00:11:02.260 It sold 1,000 copies in the first five weeks and 6,000 copies in its first six months. 96 00:11:02.260 --> 00:11:09.260 And within a few years, it had sold 11,000 copies here in the second decade of the 19th century. 97 00:11:09.260 --> 00:11:16.580 And that was considered a huge success. That was considered the bestseller of its day. 98 00:11:16.580 --> 00:11:22.860 By 1889, Charles Kingsley's novel, Westward Ho, 99 00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:30.860 Nowhere near as famous as Scott's Waverly today, in an 1889 reprint, sold 500,000 copies. 100 00:11:30.860 --> 00:11:35.860 You know, now we're talking best seller. And again, by the end of the 19th century in England, 101 00:11:35.860 --> 00:11:44.860 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. 102 00:11:44.860 --> 00:11:50.860 You went from a position at the beginning of the century where selling thousands of copies of a newspaper 103 00:11:50.860 --> 00:11:54.600 or a book, made you preeminent in the field. 104 00:11:54.600 --> 00:11:57.720 It's only around 1900 that the phenomenon 105 00:11:57.720 --> 00:12:01.060 of million selling comes into being. 106 00:12:01.060 --> 00:12:03.820 And there were lots of reasons for this happening, 107 00:12:03.820 --> 00:12:06.260 all sorts of technological improvements, 108 00:12:06.260 --> 00:12:09.620 the introduction of steam presses for printing, 109 00:12:09.620 --> 00:12:11.780 the development of stereotype printing and so on. 110 00:12:11.780 --> 00:12:13.580 There were all sorts of developments 111 00:12:13.580 --> 00:12:17.140 which the market came up with, which made this possible. 112 00:12:17.140 --> 00:12:19.260 What was standing in its way? 113 00:12:19.260 --> 00:12:27.420 Taxes, the principal drag on the development of the British printing industry and hence 114 00:12:27.420 --> 00:12:35.060 of what we think of as modern mass literacy was in fact the English tax system and that's 115 00:12:35.060 --> 00:12:43.220 why the opponents of these taxes labeled them taxes on knowledge or knowledge taxes. 116 00:12:43.220 --> 00:12:46.460 It was the way they led their campaign against these taxes. 117 00:12:46.460 --> 00:12:53.180 Now, as I said, there were three principal forms of taxes, again, tax on bulk paper, stamp taxes, 118 00:12:53.180 --> 00:12:59.420 you needed stamps on a newspaper and advertisement taxes. I'll discuss those in some detail. 119 00:12:59.420 --> 00:13:07.260 I do want to begin with one subject that Altik brings up that helps kind of set the context 120 00:13:07.260 --> 00:13:15.260 for this crazy tax situation in 19th century Britain. One of the initial drags on literacy 121 00:13:15.260 --> 00:13:23.740 was something called the window tax in England. Windows were taxed in such a 122 00:13:23.740 --> 00:13:27.060 fashion that people didn't have many of them, so they just didn't have enough 123 00:13:27.060 --> 00:13:30.980 light to read at the beginning of the 19th century. As Alton explains, in the 124 00:13:30.980 --> 00:13:35.780 ordinary home, decent lighting was not to be found until late in the 19th century. 125 00:13:35.780 --> 00:13:44.980 In the period 1808 to 1823, the window tax, a relic dating from 1696. Now here's 126 00:13:44.980 --> 00:13:49.700 Here's a little lesson in tax history, how taxes come into being, they're called temporary, 127 00:13:49.700 --> 00:13:54.700 here lasting for over a century, reached its highest level. 128 00:13:54.700 --> 00:13:59.940 Houses with six windows or less were taxed six shillings, six pence to eight shillings 129 00:13:59.940 --> 00:14:00.940 annually. 130 00:14:00.940 --> 00:14:04.420 In a minute I'll try to explain what those figures mean to us in real terms. 131 00:14:04.420 --> 00:14:09.880 Seven window houses a pound, nine window houses, two guineas and so on up. 132 00:14:09.880 --> 00:14:13.500 Even an aperture only a foot square was considered a window. 133 00:14:13.500 --> 00:14:19.220 Although in 1823, the tax was halved, and in 1825, houses with less than eight windows 134 00:14:19.220 --> 00:14:23.780 were exempted, builders still were discouraged from putting any more openings in a house 135 00:14:23.780 --> 00:14:29.020 than were absolutely necessary, with the result that only one-seventh of all of the houses 136 00:14:29.020 --> 00:14:31.500 in Britain fell under the tax. 137 00:14:31.500 --> 00:14:38.860 Not without reason did Dickens remark that the window tax, not abolished until 1851, 138 00:14:38.860 --> 00:14:44.860 There was an even more formidable obstacle to the people's reading than the so-called taxes on knowledge. 139 00:14:44.860 --> 00:14:47.860 The duties on newspapers, advertisement and paper. 140 00:14:47.860 --> 00:14:50.860 Now, this is just a minor episode, but just think about it. 141 00:14:50.860 --> 00:14:56.860 You know, obviously, windows were regarded as a luxury at some point, you know, back in 1696. 142 00:14:56.860 --> 00:15:00.860 And so, go ahead, tax the rich, tax windows. 143 00:15:00.860 --> 00:15:06.860 You know, in the course of free market development, everybody starts to get windows. 144 00:15:06.860 --> 00:15:11.660 are very useful, especially before electric lighting and here's the British government 145 00:15:11.660 --> 00:15:18.340 still taxing windows in the 19th century and of course the market responds, builders build 146 00:15:18.340 --> 00:15:23.380 houses with fewer windows so the taxes will be less and the result is a darkening of all 147 00:15:23.380 --> 00:15:30.860 of England and again someone as serious as Dickens thought that this was a genuine impediment 148 00:15:30.860 --> 00:15:36.660 in the development of reading in England. No light. 149 00:15:36.660 --> 00:15:40.360 The enlightened government stamps out light by taxing windows. 150 00:15:40.360 --> 00:15:48.860 It's almost grotesque when you think about it, but for almost two centuries there was a tax on windows in England. 151 00:15:48.860 --> 00:15:56.160 Now, to get to the main body of this material, let me begin with the infamous Stamp Act. 152 00:15:56.160 --> 00:16:00.260 Now, we think of the Stamp Act as something that only affected Americans. 153 00:16:00.260 --> 00:16:08.260 But in fact, it prevailed in Britain itself and was much resented and had some terrible effects there. 154 00:16:08.260 --> 00:16:12.560 It began in Britain in 1712. It was initially a penny tax. 155 00:16:12.560 --> 00:16:19.760 Any document needed this stamp on it and that included newspapers. 156 00:16:19.760 --> 00:16:26.760 Believe it or not, there were increases in this tax in 1776, 1789, these are all memorable years, 157 00:16:26.760 --> 00:16:40.360 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. 158 00:16:40.360 --> 00:16:51.960 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, 159 00:16:51.960 --> 00:17:00.460 When you realize how long ago this was, that it was at three pennies, it really was quite a bit. 160 00:17:00.460 --> 00:17:11.460 And the result was the price of the average newspaper in England at the beginning of the 19th century was six cents, six pence. 161 00:17:11.460 --> 00:17:19.960 Now again, because of inflation, we'd be happy to pay six cents for a paper today. 162 00:17:19.960 --> 00:17:29.960 But to put it in some perspective, and Alter's book is good on this, and giving you some other prices in the economy, 163 00:17:29.960 --> 00:17:35.960 a pound of candles, that's 24 candles, cost seven cents. 164 00:17:35.960 --> 00:17:40.060 And a pound of candles was enough to light a house for a week. 165 00:17:40.060 --> 00:17:48.760 So it cost you as much to buy your daily newspaper as it did to buy the candles you needed for a whole week. 166 00:17:48.760 --> 00:17:56.840 Another way of putting this in perspective is the average clerk in an office, 167 00:17:56.840 --> 00:18:06.840 I probably should say Clark, in an office, made one pound a week, six cents is one fortieth of a pound. 168 00:18:06.840 --> 00:18:15.640 So it meant one fortieth of your salary for the week had to go to buy your daily newspaper. 169 00:18:15.640 --> 00:18:25.240 A very rough rule to convert 1800 English pounds into contemporary US dollars is 200 to 1. 170 00:18:25.240 --> 00:18:30.640 That would mean your daily paper cost $5 at this time. 171 00:18:30.640 --> 00:18:35.640 That's very rough, but gives you some sense of what this meant in terms of prices. 172 00:18:35.640 --> 00:18:42.440 So what that meant is basically newspapers were unaffordable to the average person in 1800. 173 00:18:42.440 --> 00:18:46.200 That's why the circulation of the times was under 5,000. 174 00:18:46.200 --> 00:18:50.840 In fact, this was the heyday of coffee houses, 175 00:18:50.840 --> 00:18:53.480 where part of the attraction was they bought newspapers. 176 00:18:53.480 --> 00:18:56.760 And so you came there, drank a cup of coffee and read your newspaper 177 00:18:56.760 --> 00:19:01.560 because it was too expensive to buy yourself. 178 00:19:01.560 --> 00:19:08.120 So this was essentially a forward tax that helped put the average newspaper 179 00:19:08.120 --> 00:19:13.320 out of the reach of the average person in England. 180 00:19:13.320 --> 00:19:17.640 Now obviously the government regarded this as a revenue raising device, 181 00:19:17.640 --> 00:19:23.480 but it also was a way for the government to control opinion in England. 182 00:19:23.480 --> 00:19:30.440 The Crown and the Parliamentary leadership did not like newspapers criticizing them, 183 00:19:30.440 --> 00:19:37.160 so they were very happy to help price newspapers out of the average person's income. 184 00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:44.600 Now, another one of the taxes was a tax on all advertisements and it was a three shillings, 185 00:19:44.600 --> 00:19:49.760 six pence tax on each ad placed in a newspaper. 186 00:19:49.760 --> 00:19:54.000 We'll come back to that to see how it killed Keats. 187 00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:02.120 And then there was the tax on paper, which at the beginning of the 19th century was three 188 00:20:02.120 --> 00:20:05.160 pence per pound. 189 00:20:05.160 --> 00:20:11.880 It was again halved in 1837, there were constant oppositions to these taxes, but you can see 190 00:20:11.880 --> 00:20:19.100 how the cost of a newspaper, and also of books at this time, very strongly reflected this 191 00:20:19.100 --> 00:20:25.700 tax system, and again to give you a concrete example of it, a man named Charles Knight, 192 00:20:25.700 --> 00:20:30.420 who was a pioneer in mass publication in the 19th century, came up with something called 193 00:20:30.420 --> 00:20:32.540 of the Penny Cyclopedia. 194 00:20:32.540 --> 00:20:35.620 It's a marketing scheme that's existed to this day. 195 00:20:35.620 --> 00:20:39.900 He issued an encyclopedia in parts. 196 00:20:39.900 --> 00:20:43.860 It came out monthly and the big selling point 197 00:20:43.860 --> 00:20:45.940 was it cost only a penny per part 198 00:20:45.940 --> 00:20:48.260 and eventually you'd build it up 199 00:20:48.260 --> 00:20:50.620 and you'd have this whole complete encyclopedia 200 00:20:50.620 --> 00:20:52.420 and it was actually very well done. 201 00:20:53.940 --> 00:20:57.460 The information of it was high quality. 202 00:20:57.460 --> 00:20:59.420 He began in 1833. 203 00:20:59.420 --> 00:21:06.220 He ended up losing 30,788 pounds on this project. 204 00:21:06.220 --> 00:21:08.540 Again, that's a huge amount of money. 205 00:21:08.540 --> 00:21:13.900 It's, again, multiplied by 200 to get some sense of where I'll be today. 206 00:21:13.900 --> 00:21:23.500 Of that loss, his paper duty alone on the publication project was 16,500 pounds. 207 00:21:23.500 --> 00:21:53.500 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 208 00:21:53.500 --> 00:22:01.500 per pound of paper, but you realize how many pounds of papers publishers use, it really was significant. 209 00:22:01.500 --> 00:22:15.500 So the combination of these taxes exerted an enormous drag on the development of everything prized when we talk about print media today. 210 00:22:15.500 --> 00:22:20.500 The dissemination of newspapers, periodicals, publications of novels. 211 00:22:20.500 --> 00:22:36.500 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. 212 00:22:36.500 --> 00:22:43.500 When Mark Thornton mentioned syntax, I said, oh, he's going to talk about grammar. 213 00:22:43.500 --> 00:22:48.500 Another example of how English professors, you know, kind of miss the point of these economic matters. 214 00:22:48.500 --> 00:22:58.500 But in fact, the amazing thing to realize is among the sin taxes at this time were these various taxes on paper and newspapers. 215 00:22:58.500 --> 00:23:07.500 The government and many authoritative people regarded reading as an evil activity. 216 00:23:07.500 --> 00:23:13.500 It's so ironic because now you've got the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts, 217 00:23:13.500 --> 00:23:20.900 of the Arts issuing this dire report on the decline of reading in America and the federal 218 00:23:20.900 --> 00:23:25.900 government complaining people aren't reading enough. Governments in the early 19th century 219 00:23:25.900 --> 00:23:30.220 maintained the principle that reading was bad for the people. It was a waste of their 220 00:23:30.220 --> 00:23:38.500 time, it took them away from important work and above all it encouraged them to think 221 00:23:38.500 --> 00:23:41.500 about what might be wrong with their governments. 222 00:23:41.500 --> 00:23:46.660 And so part of this tax campaign was an active effort 223 00:23:46.660 --> 00:23:52.340 to retard the growth of a mass reading public in England. 224 00:23:52.340 --> 00:24:00.860 So to give some specific examples of this, that ALTIC documents, 225 00:24:00.860 --> 00:24:13.660 In 1819, the British government set up some new rules for taxation, specifically targeted. 226 00:24:16.460 --> 00:24:22.300 This was an act under George III, December 1819. This law defined as a newspaper, 227 00:24:23.020 --> 00:24:29.180 and thus as subject to the tax, which had just been raised to four pence in 1815. 228 00:24:29.180 --> 00:24:35.040 Every periodical containing news or comments on the news that was published oftener than 229 00:24:35.040 --> 00:24:41.460 every 26 days, printed on two sheets or less and priced at less than six pence, exclusive 230 00:24:41.460 --> 00:24:43.080 of the tax. 231 00:24:43.080 --> 00:24:48.100 Now Alta goes on to point out the framing of the act left no doubt as to its purpose. 232 00:24:48.100 --> 00:24:54.920 It was legislation shrewdly designed to wipe out anti-government and anti-religious papers. 233 00:24:54.920 --> 00:25:00.000 It was not a tax upon news alone, as earlier newspaper stamp enactments had been, but upon 234 00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:01.680 views. 235 00:25:01.680 --> 00:25:07.600 And not upon all views, but specifically upon those of radical demagogues. 236 00:25:07.600 --> 00:25:13.600 Now let me say that in 1819, radical demagogues in England were people advocating the free 237 00:25:13.600 --> 00:25:14.600 market. 238 00:25:14.600 --> 00:25:18.640 They were arguing, for example, to return to the gold standard. 239 00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:21.520 They were arguing for relief from taxation. 240 00:25:21.520 --> 00:25:25.880 and they were what we would call free marketeers, above all named William Cobbett. 241 00:25:25.880 --> 00:25:32.920 To avoid implying that all cheap newspapers were dangerous, if that were so pertinently 242 00:25:32.920 --> 00:25:39.960 acquired a Newcastle pamphleteer, how are we to defend our cheap religious track society pamphlets? 243 00:25:39.960 --> 00:25:47.840 The Act went on to exempt from taxation papers containing only matters of devotion, piety or charity. 244 00:25:47.840 --> 00:25:51.240 Now this would be declared unconstitutional in the United States today, 245 00:25:51.240 --> 00:25:56.640 but notice it's amazing, it was written into the act that if your newspaper was religious, 246 00:25:56.640 --> 00:26:04.540 it wasn't taxed, that really left only these anti-government pro-free market papers. 247 00:26:04.540 --> 00:26:08.740 So again, it shows how insidious taxation can be. 248 00:26:08.740 --> 00:26:16.540 Here's a case where the government was using taxation to adversely affect a specific segment of the press and it worked. 249 00:26:16.540 --> 00:26:24.420 Because you notice, if your price was under 6 pence, and therefore available to the masses, you were subject to the tax. 250 00:26:24.420 --> 00:26:28.980 The result was that many of the radical papers went out of business, 251 00:26:28.980 --> 00:26:38.580 whereas others, including the famous Black Dwarf and Cobbett's Political Register, went up to 6 pence, and their circulation fell off. 252 00:26:38.580 --> 00:26:44.300 So it actually had this chilling effect on the anti-government press in England, which was exactly its intention. 253 00:26:44.300 --> 00:26:50.020 Now again, businessmen are resourceful. 254 00:26:50.020 --> 00:26:57.740 William Cobbett, who is one of the heroes of this time, in my view, came up with a great idea. 255 00:26:57.740 --> 00:27:02.300 He changed the name of his newspaper. 256 00:27:02.300 --> 00:27:08.260 He called it Cobbett's Monthly Religious Tracts. 257 00:27:08.260 --> 00:27:11.860 And then he changed his name to Cobbett's Monthly Sermons. 258 00:27:11.860 --> 00:27:16.360 You'd have to read the wonderful series of his tracks that's called Paper Against Gold 259 00:27:16.360 --> 00:27:20.060 where he's invading against the new paper money system in England. 260 00:27:20.060 --> 00:27:27.960 But, you know, it just shows you what a hard time the government has in trying to redefine these things. 261 00:27:27.960 --> 00:27:35.260 And indeed, it's a perfect example of the Hayekian law of unintended consequences. 262 00:27:35.260 --> 00:27:43.100 Again, the target of the legislation was these specific radical newspapers. 263 00:27:43.100 --> 00:27:49.020 But again, in the kind of lobbying that goes on whenever a tax law comes around, 264 00:27:49.020 --> 00:27:57.180 certain segments of the publication industry in England managed to get serial publication 265 00:27:57.180 --> 00:28:03.020 of previously published books exempted from this rule. 266 00:28:03.020 --> 00:28:08.020 So if you published timely editorials on current events, you were subject to the tax. 267 00:28:08.020 --> 00:28:10.660 If you were reprinting old fiction, you were not. 268 00:28:10.660 --> 00:28:18.060 The result was to give an enormous boost to so-called gothic fiction, to sleazy horror novels. 269 00:28:18.060 --> 00:28:24.660 So here's the British government ending up with this tax system discouraging serious political discussion 270 00:28:24.660 --> 00:28:30.300 of current issues in print and encouraging the publication of the cheapest, sleaziest, 271 00:28:30.300 --> 00:28:41.340 gothic horror stories imaginable again how tax policy can distort the world and the other irony 272 00:28:41.340 --> 00:28:48.140 of it is people suddenly start republishing Thomas Paine and the other radicals from the 1790s 273 00:28:48.140 --> 00:28:53.500 because their works had been published in book form and they now couldn't wouldn't be taxed under 274 00:28:53.500 --> 00:29:07.500 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. 275 00:29:07.500 --> 00:29:18.500 In any case, this pretty soon led to a series of tax revolts and excellent examples of the whole phenomenon. 276 00:29:18.500 --> 00:29:34.500 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. 277 00:29:34.500 --> 00:29:41.500 It began with a man named Henry Hetherington who published something called The Poor Man's Guardian. 278 00:29:41.500 --> 00:29:45.500 And that again will give you an idea of what this popular press stood for. 279 00:29:45.500 --> 00:29:50.180 Therefore, it presented itself as the guardian of the poor people in England against the 280 00:29:50.180 --> 00:29:55.380 predation of their government, particularly the excessive taxes. 281 00:29:55.380 --> 00:29:58.420 And he produced an unstamped weekly paper. 282 00:29:58.420 --> 00:30:02.780 He just issued his paper without the required government stamp on it. 283 00:30:02.780 --> 00:30:08.220 And this set off quite a tax revolt in the publishing industry. 284 00:30:08.220 --> 00:30:14.940 Over the years, a series of about three or four years, 800 publishers were arrested of 285 00:30:14.940 --> 00:30:18.940 500 were jailed, or fined, or both. 286 00:30:18.940 --> 00:30:22.940 Heather Intimidates himself served three prison terms 287 00:30:22.940 --> 00:30:26.940 in the course of this tax revolt. 288 00:30:26.940 --> 00:30:30.940 Notice how familiar it sounds. And here he's doing this awful thing, 289 00:30:30.940 --> 00:30:34.940 trying to publish a cheap newspaper for people so they can find out 290 00:30:34.940 --> 00:30:38.940 what's going on in the world. For this he goes to jail three times. 291 00:30:38.940 --> 00:30:42.940 It's nice to report that one of the juries in one of his trials acquitted him 292 00:30:42.940 --> 00:30:51.940 In the grand old British tradition of jury nullification, they just didn't like what the government was doing to the press. 293 00:30:51.940 --> 00:30:59.940 So although he was obviously and publicly guilty of this, the jury decided what he was publishing wasn't a newspaper. 294 00:30:59.940 --> 00:31:02.940 And you can see what the Achilles heel of the government was here. 295 00:31:02.940 --> 00:31:11.940 They themselves had given a very odd definition of what constitutes a newspaper, so their opponents could use that against them. 296 00:31:11.940 --> 00:31:21.840 this is an example of a tax revolt that succeeded in 1836 the stamp tax was 297 00:31:21.840 --> 00:31:26.820 reduced again to one penny so that seems very significant comes down now from four 298 00:31:26.820 --> 00:31:32.340 pennies back to what it was in 1712 one penny and it was a sort of a triumph but 299 00:31:32.340 --> 00:31:36.900 Altick again this guy doesn't know how much he's showing this book but he 300 00:31:36.900 --> 00:31:41.860 realizes there was a problem here and it becomes a very interesting lesson in 301 00:31:41.860 --> 00:31:47.660 in how taxes work to the advantage of big business and against small business 302 00:31:47.660 --> 00:31:53.460 and it's why we get the paradox of so many big businessmen actually supporting a tax system. 303 00:31:53.460 --> 00:32:01.260 And here's what Altych says on the subject, again, very perceptive if you only knew what the larger consequences are. 304 00:32:01.260 --> 00:32:06.460 The tax was lowered to a penny a sheet, but generous as the concession appeared on the surface, 305 00:32:06.460 --> 00:32:13.060 The new act was immediately recognized as a fresh obstacle in England's progress towards a cheap newspaper press. 306 00:32:13.060 --> 00:32:23.360 It was so framed, and above all so enforced, that it became primarily a means of preserving the journalistic monopoly of the moneyed publishers. 307 00:32:23.360 --> 00:32:30.460 So far as the small publisher was concerned, the penny duty was as onerous as the four-penny one had been. 308 00:32:30.460 --> 00:32:35.460 That doesn't compute to me economically, but no one's going to accuse this guy of being an economist. 309 00:32:35.460 --> 00:32:37.460 But he does go on to make a valid point. 310 00:32:37.460 --> 00:32:42.460 His expenses in having this paper stamped and the loss he sustained on unsold copies, 311 00:32:42.460 --> 00:32:46.460 whose stamps were not redeemable, virtually equaled the cost of the stamp itself. 312 00:32:46.460 --> 00:32:51.460 In addition, since the news vendor got a 25% discount on the total price of each paper, 313 00:32:51.460 --> 00:32:54.460 the publisher, in effect, had to pay a premium on the penny tax. 314 00:32:54.460 --> 00:32:57.460 Finally, and I think this is the important point, 315 00:32:57.460 --> 00:33:01.460 the increased stringency of the security provisions of the Newspaper Stamp Act, 316 00:33:01.460 --> 00:33:08.180 Act, requiring heavy bonds to be posted against the printing of criminal libel placed in impossible 317 00:33:08.180 --> 00:33:11.260 burden upon the resources of the small publisher. 318 00:33:11.260 --> 00:33:16.940 And there's the lesson to be learned from this episode, that the tax burden system is 319 00:33:16.940 --> 00:33:22.140 disproportionately burdensome on the small businessman. 320 00:33:22.140 --> 00:33:27.900 Big business can handle it, but it really makes it difficult for the small businessman 321 00:33:27.900 --> 00:33:28.900 to operate. 322 00:33:28.900 --> 00:33:35.300 Here's a case where this apparent victory, the reduction of the tax by a significant amount, 323 00:33:35.300 --> 00:33:44.100 it was a quarter of what it was, still didn't have the effect of liberating the free press in England. 324 00:33:44.100 --> 00:33:54.900 So the real tax revolt against these so-called knowledge taxes came around 1850 and it was led by Richard Cobden. 325 00:33:54.900 --> 00:34:03.900 Richard Cobden, the great force behind free trade, my hero among British politicians of the 19th century. 326 00:34:03.900 --> 00:34:07.900 You can have Disraeli, you can have even Gladstone. 327 00:34:07.900 --> 00:34:14.900 Richard Cobden was the greatest political force in England, along with his colleague John Bright. 328 00:34:14.900 --> 00:34:16.900 They were the men who founded the Anti-Corn Law League. 329 00:34:16.900 --> 00:34:23.900 They were the ones who finally in the 1840s managed to get the protectionist tariffs on imported grain, 330 00:34:23.900 --> 00:34:53.900 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 331 00:34:53.900 --> 00:35:01.900 He was searching around for an issue, and he decided these knowledge taxes would be his next goal. 332 00:35:01.900 --> 00:35:09.900 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. 333 00:35:09.900 --> 00:35:14.900 His opposition to the Crimean War, for example, got him nowhere. 334 00:35:14.900 --> 00:35:20.900 Got him voted out of parliament at one point later in the 1850s. 335 00:35:20.900 --> 00:35:43.900 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. 336 00:35:43.900 --> 00:35:51.900 And Cobden's public statements on it show what the issue was as he saw it. 337 00:35:51.900 --> 00:35:55.900 It really was an issue of getting knowledge out to the people. 338 00:35:55.900 --> 00:36:02.900 He said daily papers in London, which at this point cost five pence. 339 00:36:02.900 --> 00:36:04.900 The price had come down a bit, but still not enough. 340 00:36:04.900 --> 00:36:12.900 And Cobden said, who below the rank of a merchant or wholesale dealer can afford to take in a daily paper at five pence? 341 00:36:12.900 --> 00:36:17.300 clearly is beyond the reach of the mechanic and the shopkeeper. 342 00:36:17.300 --> 00:36:23.940 So the goal here behind this agitation in Parliament was to get these taxes removed 343 00:36:23.940 --> 00:36:30.180 specifically so that the common man and woman in England would have access to newspapers. 344 00:36:30.180 --> 00:36:34.340 The debate in Parliament is very instructive. 345 00:36:35.380 --> 00:36:38.900 Gladstone was at this point Chancellor of the Exchequer, 346 00:36:38.900 --> 00:36:45.200 who's responsible for preparing the British budget and he actually was in 347 00:36:45.200 --> 00:36:51.500 favor of repealing these taxes and through his weight behind it for one 348 00:36:51.500 --> 00:36:55.380 reason or another he then removed his Chancellor of the Exchequer and a 349 00:36:55.380 --> 00:37:00.620 successor, a man named George Cornwall Lewis, made this statement in the course 350 00:37:00.620 --> 00:37:06.540 of the parliamentary debate and I think it's very telling. He said that he had 351 00:37:06.540 --> 00:37:10.540 And we've heard for many quarters that this measure, quote, 352 00:37:10.540 --> 00:37:13.540 will open the floodgates of sedition and blasphemy, 353 00:37:13.540 --> 00:37:17.540 and will inundate the country with licentious and immoral productions, 354 00:37:17.540 --> 00:37:20.540 will undermine the very foundations of society, 355 00:37:20.540 --> 00:37:24.540 and scatter the seeds of revolution broadcast over land. 356 00:37:24.540 --> 00:37:28.540 Newspapers. The people have access to newspapers. 357 00:37:28.540 --> 00:37:31.540 All hell will break loose in the country. 358 00:37:31.540 --> 00:37:34.540 And again, this was basically the ideology 359 00:37:34.540 --> 00:37:38.780 that had supported these taxes up to this point. 360 00:37:38.780 --> 00:37:43.660 Significantly, at this point, the London Times turned against the taxes. 361 00:37:43.660 --> 00:37:47.780 The Times, which in many ways was the benefit of this tax system, 362 00:37:47.780 --> 00:37:50.620 according to that argument, that it was a large operation, 363 00:37:50.620 --> 00:37:57.820 it could handle the tax code, the tax system, whereas upstart newspapers couldn't. 364 00:37:57.820 --> 00:38:01.740 But in a spirit of genuine public spiritedness, 365 00:38:01.740 --> 00:38:22.740 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. 366 00:38:22.740 --> 00:38:45.740 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. 367 00:38:45.740 --> 00:38:51.740 And guess what? The results predicted by Cobb and his party turned out to be exactly right. 368 00:38:51.740 --> 00:38:58.740 Very soon after the taxes were dropped, the price of newspapers in London dropped to one penny. 369 00:38:58.740 --> 00:39:01.740 From five pennies to one penny. 370 00:39:01.740 --> 00:39:06.740 It does seem to indicate that a very large proportion of the cost of the paper 371 00:39:06.740 --> 00:39:11.740 was directly attributed to these various taxes on paper and stamp taxes, so on. 372 00:39:11.740 --> 00:39:33.340 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. 373 00:39:33.340 --> 00:39:41.180 Moreover, it's right at this point, the 1850s, that the first provincial newspapers start up in England. 374 00:39:41.180 --> 00:39:49.580 Up to this point, every newspaper was based in London, because that's the only place where it's economically feasible. 375 00:39:49.580 --> 00:39:56.460 But for example, by 1876 in Manchester, which as some of you may know, was the center of the free trade movement, 376 00:39:56.460 --> 00:40:03.960 There was a total of 125,000 circulation of the papers in the city of Manchester. 377 00:40:03.960 --> 00:40:08.660 Whereas before these taxes were appealed, there were no papers at all in Manchester. 378 00:40:08.660 --> 00:40:16.660 So it's clear that this campaign against the taxes was justified. 379 00:40:16.660 --> 00:40:23.660 And that you can see that the explosion in print publications in England 380 00:40:23.660 --> 00:40:32.360 really is tied directly to this change in tax law that people like Cobden and Bright agitated for. 381 00:40:32.360 --> 00:40:37.860 So again, it's a marvelous lesson in how un-progressive taxation can be. 382 00:40:37.860 --> 00:40:43.060 And here you're at a case where literally the government was targeting the spread of knowledge 383 00:40:43.060 --> 00:40:47.960 as something that should be retarded precisely by the structure of the tax laws. 384 00:40:47.960 --> 00:41:02.960 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? 385 00:41:02.960 --> 00:41:13.960 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? 386 00:41:13.960 --> 00:41:18.640 I mean you're just talking about as a purely negative thing don't people get 387 00:41:18.640 --> 00:41:24.480 something in return for their tax money. So let me take the episode of public 388 00:41:24.480 --> 00:41:32.480 libraries in 19th century Britain to illustrate this issue and here Altic 389 00:41:32.480 --> 00:41:39.440 shows his true colors and it's really amusing in that sense to see how he 390 00:41:39.440 --> 00:42:09.440 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 391 00:42:09.440 --> 00:42:16.440 involved people with free reading facilities, involved all sorts of peripheral, if not actually irrelevant considerations. 392 00:42:16.440 --> 00:42:22.440 Now I want you to hear what these peripheral, even irrelevant considerations were. 393 00:42:22.440 --> 00:42:28.440 He says, you know, strange enough people argued against public libraries in the middle of the 19th century. 394 00:42:28.440 --> 00:42:36.440 They denounced it as a frightening new attempt of the state to encroach upon the liberties of the people. 395 00:42:36.440 --> 00:42:43.120 All. Dedicated as they were to the principle of volunteerism, they submitted that the provision 396 00:42:43.120 --> 00:42:49.680 of libraries, like that of education, was totally outside the proper sphere of government. 397 00:42:49.680 --> 00:42:55.240 On less theoretical grounds, they fought the bill because it would add the last straw to 398 00:42:55.240 --> 00:43:01.720 the load of the already groaning taxpayer. There it is. That is what is a peripheral 399 00:43:01.720 --> 00:43:06.520 or even irrelevant subject to an English professor. 400 00:43:06.520 --> 00:43:11.640 That the argument that this might raise people's taxes, that's incomprehensible to him. 401 00:43:11.640 --> 00:43:14.380 How could they have made that argument? 402 00:43:14.380 --> 00:43:19.920 On the other hand, when he's talking about the proponents of the bill, he says, although 403 00:43:19.920 --> 00:43:25.220 they offered no evidence of any popular demand for free libraries, they knew that once libraries 404 00:43:25.220 --> 00:43:27.400 were provided, they would be welcomed. 405 00:43:27.400 --> 00:43:39.400 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. 406 00:43:39.400 --> 00:43:47.400 Now, let's look in practice at this situation because it did involve an issue of taxes. 407 00:43:47.400 --> 00:43:53.400 Taxes. What this legislation enabled was this. It was all done on a local basis 408 00:43:53.400 --> 00:44:00.720 that town councils, which then ran municipalities in England, were allowed 409 00:44:00.720 --> 00:44:10.320 to pass a tax rate of one-half penny on the pound in order to erect libraries. 410 00:44:10.320 --> 00:44:15.240 The opponents of the bill, who didn't manage to get defeated, did manage to get 411 00:44:15.240 --> 00:44:22.380 a writer that it required a two-thirds vote of the taxpayers present at the meeting to 412 00:44:22.380 --> 00:44:28.020 authorize the tax. Very interesting. I wish we had more laws like this that people had 413 00:44:28.020 --> 00:44:35.260 to vote and two-thirds of them had to vote to impose the tax on them. And now poor Mr. 414 00:44:35.260 --> 00:44:42.760 Altick writing about this is really surprised. Popular apathy was overwhelming. In town after 415 00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:50.440 town, proposals to adopt the acts were defeated. Not once, but repeatedly and by large margins. 416 00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:57.520 As late as 1896, only 334 districts, many of them small, had leveraged the library rate. 417 00:44:57.520 --> 00:45:07.960 In 1887, only two parishes in all of metropolitan London had tax-supported libraries. And then 418 00:45:07.960 --> 00:45:12.440 he says, even more surprised, you know, we didn't get libraries in England until Andrew 419 00:45:12.440 --> 00:45:15.200 through Carnegie came along and gave the money for them. 420 00:45:15.200 --> 00:45:17.800 And then he adds, a vindication perhaps 421 00:45:17.800 --> 00:45:20.640 of that preference for the voluntary principle. 422 00:45:20.640 --> 00:45:22.840 Again, he just doesn't get a clue. 423 00:45:22.840 --> 00:45:24.720 It just doesn't get through to him 424 00:45:24.720 --> 00:45:26.640 what story he's actually telling here. 425 00:45:27.480 --> 00:45:31.440 But it's actually very interesting to see what happened here 426 00:45:31.440 --> 00:45:33.320 that when people were given the choice 427 00:45:33.320 --> 00:45:35.040 of imposing the tax on themselves, 428 00:45:35.040 --> 00:45:37.800 for this wonderful purpose of erecting free libraries, 429 00:45:37.800 --> 00:45:41.960 they voted overwhelmingly against it throughout England. 430 00:45:42.440 --> 00:45:51.440 Now, what's even more important, though, is to look at what happened in the actual libraries that were built. 431 00:45:51.440 --> 00:45:58.440 Because the argument behind them was based on education. 432 00:45:58.440 --> 00:46:10.440 That is, the notion was, public money should be spent on this because public libraries will contribute to the education of the public. 433 00:46:10.440 --> 00:46:15.440 We need a more educated public, and what could be better for that than libraries? 434 00:46:15.440 --> 00:46:23.440 Well, what ended up in the libraries? Fiction. Best-selling fiction. 435 00:46:23.440 --> 00:46:31.440 Wherever free libraries were open, the volume of patronage bore a direct relationship to the amount of fiction available. 436 00:46:31.440 --> 00:46:38.440 At Sheffield in the period 1856-67, prose fiction accounted for almost half of the combined circulation 437 00:46:38.440 --> 00:46:50.440 by the 1890s, most free libraries reported that between 65% and 90% of the books circulated were classified as fiction. 438 00:46:50.440 --> 00:46:58.440 So there it is, you establish a library supposedly so the populace will have access to the Encyclopedia Britannica 439 00:46:58.440 --> 00:47:05.440 and they're showing up to read the cheapest popular bestsellers that they can, and you know this is true today. 440 00:47:05.440 --> 00:47:11.920 Today. Libraries are held up as this great public institution. Increasingly, the main 441 00:47:11.920 --> 00:47:17.560 thing they lend is videotapes and DVDs. And these libraries that are supposed to be the 442 00:47:17.560 --> 00:47:22.920 great repositories and defenders of books in our world, they're really feeding television 443 00:47:22.920 --> 00:47:29.320 viewing in that effect. Now, I mean, no one likes television more than I do. But the question 444 00:47:29.320 --> 00:47:36.600 is why you should be publicly funding activities that are just private enjoyment. 445 00:47:36.600 --> 00:47:43.200 And indeed, it's fascinating to see that these arguments were weighed way back in Victorian Britain. 446 00:47:43.200 --> 00:47:45.400 There's almost nothing new in the world. 447 00:47:45.400 --> 00:47:49.920 The Prevalent View was summarized in the Publishers Circular in 1877. 448 00:47:49.920 --> 00:47:51.080 This is what they wrote. 449 00:47:51.080 --> 00:47:55.320 Free libraries, which should only be provided for the poor and helpless, 450 00:47:55.320 --> 00:47:56.800 not for those who can help themselves, 451 00:47:56.800 --> 00:48:01.680 should be resorted to for education and instruction, and should begin in elementary works, long 452 00:48:01.680 --> 00:48:03.940 antecedent to works of imaginative fiction. 453 00:48:03.940 --> 00:48:09.320 If the taxpayers are to provide imaginative fiction or the luxuries of the mind for slightly 454 00:48:09.320 --> 00:48:15.160 poorer classes, why should they not also provide free games, free plays, bread and circuses, 455 00:48:15.160 --> 00:48:17.980 free cakes and nuts for the boys? 456 00:48:17.980 --> 00:48:22.880 Which I believe a number of libraries do now. 457 00:48:22.880 --> 00:48:29.240 And another person reported, when he went to libraries in his district, 458 00:48:29.240 --> 00:48:32.680 I have found as a rule every chair occupied, and by whom? 459 00:48:32.680 --> 00:48:37.560 In nine cases out of ten, by loafing office boys, or clerks, who were using their master's 460 00:48:37.560 --> 00:48:41.840 time for devouring all the most trivial literary trash they could find. 461 00:48:41.840 --> 00:48:46.280 Many are the crimes brought about by the disordered imagination of a reader of sensational and 462 00:48:46.280 --> 00:48:49.640 often immoral rubbish. 463 00:48:49.640 --> 00:48:54.080 And another one of the commentators of the Victorian period had the call, the Nuremberg 464 00:48:54.080 --> 00:49:09.080 altic, to call this socialism. These libraries. This is a disciple of Herbert Spencer writing 465 00:49:09.080 --> 00:49:14.800 in a volume edited by Spencer. A scorching attack on the free library as the socialist 466 00:49:14.800 --> 00:49:17.940 Finishing School 467 00:49:17.940 --> 00:49:21.460 Free Library is a perfect godsend to the town loafer 468 00:49:21.460 --> 00:49:24.300 who finds himself housed and abused at the public expense 469 00:49:24.300 --> 00:49:27.180 and may lounge away his time among the intellectual luxuries 470 00:49:27.180 --> 00:49:29.660 which his neighbors are taxed to provide for him. 471 00:49:29.660 --> 00:49:34.120 The truth is that a free library favors one special section of the community, 472 00:49:34.120 --> 00:49:36.760 the book readers, at the expense of all the rest. 473 00:49:36.760 --> 00:49:41.840 If one man may have his hobby paid for by his neighbors, why not all? 474 00:49:41.840 --> 00:49:56.840 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. 475 00:49:56.840 --> 00:50:07.840 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. 476 00:50:07.840 --> 00:50:20.180 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. 477 00:50:20.180 --> 00:50:33.760 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. 478 00:50:33.760 --> 00:50:39.920 Doesn't this sound familiar? Loafers and Eccentrics. Listen to this now. This is Altych himself speaking. 479 00:50:39.920 --> 00:50:49.000 Because they received the latest papers, libraries were the resort of the unemployed, who flocked to inspect the advertisements of situations vacant, 480 00:50:49.000 --> 00:50:58.920 and, I love this, of racing enthusiasts, who not only made their daily selections from the papers, but conducted financial transactions on the premises. 481 00:50:58.920 --> 00:51:02.120 The Victorian Library's bookie joint! 482 00:51:02.120 --> 00:51:09.520 To frustrate these shabby turfmen, some libraries obliterated the racing news from each paper as it arrived. 483 00:51:09.520 --> 00:51:15.620 And now, going on with the tragedy of the Commons here, and Altych is so surprised by this, 484 00:51:15.620 --> 00:51:22.520 what with the unsavory odor of the ill-ventilated rooms, the presence of dirty, snoring loafers, 485 00:51:22.520 --> 00:51:28.220 and the assembling on the steps of loafers spitting, smoking, and discussing the merits and demerits 486 00:51:28.220 --> 00:51:30.940 of Horses and Language unfit for quotation. 487 00:51:30.940 --> 00:51:35.500 It was no wonder that many women shrank from approaching free libraries, 488 00:51:35.500 --> 00:51:38.580 however eager they were for books. 489 00:51:38.580 --> 00:51:42.820 Most self-respecting libraries had to set aside separate ladies' rooms, 490 00:51:42.820 --> 00:51:46.740 or at least screened off a part of their reading room for the exclusive use of females, 491 00:51:46.740 --> 00:51:50.100 and some installed ladies' entrances. 492 00:51:50.100 --> 00:51:55.740 So there's a perfect example of something that sounds so high-minded, high-sounding, 493 00:51:55.740 --> 00:52:25.740 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. 494 00:52:25.740 --> 00:52:31.740 John Keats died of tuberculosis. He died of natural causes. 495 00:52:31.740 --> 00:52:35.740 I can blame a lot of things on the English tax system, and I hope I have here, 496 00:52:35.740 --> 00:52:41.740 but I can't blame them for the death of Keats. Yet, there's some suspicion here. 497 00:52:41.740 --> 00:52:53.740 As some of you may know, the great story about Keats is that he was killed by the bad reviews of his poem Endymion. 498 00:52:53.740 --> 00:53:02.740 They were extremely hostile, they hurt him very much, and the legend spread that this broke his heart. 499 00:53:02.740 --> 00:53:09.740 They didn't know too much about tuberculosis in those days, so the legend spread that Keats had been killed by his bad reviews. 500 00:53:09.740 --> 00:53:19.740 This is expressed, for example, by Lord Byron, his great satirical poem, Don Juan, in the 11th canto, stanza 60. 501 00:53:19.740 --> 00:53:23.740 I'm not the only one to try to get humor out of this awful subject. 502 00:53:23.740 --> 00:53:31.740 John Keese, who was killed off by one critique, just as he really promised something great, if not intelligible, without grief, 503 00:53:31.740 --> 00:53:36.740 contrived to talk about the gods of late, much as they might have been supposed to speak. 504 00:53:36.740 --> 00:53:41.740 Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate. It is strange. 505 00:53:41.740 --> 00:53:47.740 The mind, that very fiery particle, should let itself be snuffed out by an article. 506 00:53:47.740 --> 00:53:55.740 There it is, there is, enshrined in Byron's poetry, the idea that Keats was killed by the bad reviews of Endemic. 507 00:53:55.740 --> 00:54:06.740 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. 508 00:54:06.740 --> 00:54:10.740 This is one from Blackwood's Magazine by John Gibson Lockhart. 509 00:54:10.740 --> 00:54:16.820 is talking about John Keats, you know maybe the greatest poet of the 19th 510 00:54:16.820 --> 00:54:21.540 century and his first major poem in Demian. To witness the disease of any 511 00:54:21.540 --> 00:54:26.980 human understanding, however feeble, is distressing. But the spectacle of an able 512 00:54:26.980 --> 00:54:31.740 mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. 513 00:54:31.740 --> 00:54:36.500 What's so sorrow is this, that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John 514 00:54:36.500 --> 00:55:06.500 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 515 00:55:06.500 --> 00:55:15.500 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. 516 00:55:15.500 --> 00:55:21.500 It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet. 517 00:55:21.500 --> 00:55:31.500 But for heaven's sake, young Keats, be a little more sparing of sufferrifics in your drugs than you have been in your poetry. 518 00:55:31.500 --> 00:55:47.460 I wish more reviewers would be open about this, but this is the opening of the review. 519 00:55:47.460 --> 00:55:52.660 Reviewers have been sometimes accused of not reading the works which they affected to criticize. 520 00:55:52.660 --> 00:55:57.660 On the present occasion, we should anticipate the author's complaint and honestly confess 521 00:55:57.660 --> 00:56:01.260 that we have not read his work. 522 00:56:01.260 --> 00:56:07.260 I'm glad that John Maynard Keynes had said that about Mises' Theory of Money and Credit and had opened about it. 523 00:56:07.260 --> 00:56:10.260 Not that we have been wanting in our duty, far from it. 524 00:56:10.260 --> 00:56:16.260 Indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be to get through it. 525 00:56:16.260 --> 00:56:22.260 But with the fullest stretch of our perseverance, we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle 526 00:56:22.260 --> 00:56:26.260 beyond the first of the four books of which this poetic romance consists. 527 00:56:26.260 --> 00:56:30.260 We should extremely lament this want of energy or whatever it may be in our parts. 528 00:56:30.260 --> 00:56:34.700 after one consolation, namely that we are no better acquainted with the meaning of the 529 00:56:34.700 --> 00:56:39.660 book through which we have so painfully toiled than we are with that of the three which we 530 00:56:39.660 --> 00:56:42.660 have not looked into. 531 00:56:42.660 --> 00:56:47.780 It really does not get more vicious than that and I'm sure it would have killed me. 532 00:56:47.780 --> 00:56:53.180 It probably is not really what killed Keats upon his autopsy they found his lungs were 533 00:56:53.180 --> 00:56:55.580 in fact entirely dead. 534 00:56:55.580 --> 00:57:05.520 But if this were true, if the reviews did kill John Keats, then the Inland Revenue Board 535 00:57:05.520 --> 00:57:07.620 in England was responsible. 536 00:57:07.620 --> 00:57:12.300 By the way, notice the great difference between Britain and America. 537 00:57:12.300 --> 00:57:17.600 They have an Inland Revenue Board, we have an Internal Revenue Service. 538 00:57:17.600 --> 00:57:20.320 Notice what that revolution was about. 539 00:57:20.320 --> 00:57:24.680 We did so much so that we wouldn't have an Inland Revenue Board but could rather have 540 00:57:24.680 --> 00:57:28.680 and have an internal revenue service, and it's actually very interesting. 541 00:57:28.680 --> 00:57:31.680 I was thinking of this throughout Tom DeLangelo's talk last night, 542 00:57:31.680 --> 00:57:36.680 that the British tried to introduce an income tax in 1815, 543 00:57:36.680 --> 00:57:41.680 right at the end of the Polionic War, supposedly pay off the debt of the Polionic Wars. 544 00:57:41.680 --> 00:57:46.680 The major objection in Britain that actually defeated the bill was a privacy issue. 545 00:57:46.680 --> 00:57:48.680 Guess what? The British were saying, 546 00:57:48.680 --> 00:57:53.680 well, what's the government going to have to know about us in order to enforce this income tax? 547 00:57:53.680 --> 00:57:59.440 income tax, and in fact, whose business is it of anybody to know what our income is. 548 00:57:59.440 --> 00:58:04.680 So it's very, I mean, how prophetic the English public was at the time, but the Inland Revenue 549 00:58:04.680 --> 00:58:07.360 Board came into existence. 550 00:58:07.360 --> 00:58:12.260 And now to go back quickly to that advertisement tax, I didn't talk much about that, but was 551 00:58:12.260 --> 00:58:17.680 part of this system of knowledge taxes, tax every single advertisement. 552 00:58:17.680 --> 00:58:21.840 As we've been seeing in many cases, people are resilient. 553 00:58:21.840 --> 00:58:30.120 They will get around taxes any way they can, and so when advertisers were being taxed, 554 00:58:30.120 --> 00:58:35.400 the British publishing industry invented the puff piece. 555 00:58:35.400 --> 00:58:42.420 Our whole current system of literary publicity really grows out of this era. 556 00:58:42.420 --> 00:58:46.020 To run an ad for a book, you're going to be taxed for it. 557 00:58:46.020 --> 00:58:51.660 So you can save money by just paying off the reviewer, getting him to write a favorable 558 00:58:51.660 --> 00:58:58.500 Review, which did as good a job and cost less than paying the tax in most cases. 559 00:58:58.500 --> 00:59:04.760 So for a while the English press was churning out an awful lot of positive reviews. 560 00:59:04.760 --> 00:59:12.180 The government got suspicious of this and started to tax positive reviews as advertisements. 561 00:59:12.180 --> 00:59:17.260 It was at that point that the English reviewing press turned vicious. 562 00:59:17.260 --> 00:59:35.260 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. 563 00:59:35.260 --> 00:59:48.260 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. 564 00:59:48.260 --> 00:59:50.260 I'll stop there.