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LETTERS ON POLITICS1
I
“TAXATION, AND PRINCIPALLY BREAD TAX”
VENICE, March 9th, 1852.
§ 1. THOSE who have neither influence to press nor opportunity to diffuse their opinions, had better in general leave them unexpressed. Neither my circumstances nor my health admit of my entering into public life-and having little sympathy with the present course of English policy, and less power to resist it, I am forced, while my own country is multiplying errors and provoking dangers, to pass my days in deciphering the confessions of one which destroyed itself long ago. But the crisis we have reached in England no longer permits the silence of any one who perceives its peril. By our system of taxation, we have fevered the populace, and palsied the commerce of the country for the last twenty years; by our system of election we have achieved a Parliament which is unoffended at a proposal formally to deny the Christian faith,2 and which can produce from its ranks no one fitter to manage our exchequer than a witty novelist;3 and by our system of education we have made half the youth of our upper
1 [For the circumstances in which these Letters were written, and for others explanatory of them, see above, Introduction, pp. lxxviii.-lxxxv.]
2 [The reference is presumably to the Jewish Disabilities Bill, which passed the House of Commons in 1848, though it was thrown out by the House of Lords.]
3 [Here, again, see the correspondence between Ruskin and his father, above, pp. lxxxiii., lxxxiv.]
XII. 2 P
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
