John Stuart Mill | Autograph working manuscript of a review article on political economy, 1872

John Stuart Mill

Autograph working manuscript of a review article on political economy

headed "L’Avere et l'Imposta. Per Constantino Baer. Roma, Torino, Firenze. 1872", working draft with deletions and revisions, signed at the end, 6 pages, 4to, text on rectos only, light blue paper, final verso with address panel ("John Morley Esq. | Pitfield Down - Puttenham | Guildford | Angleterre"), marked "Manuscrit pour imprimeur" and with 30-centimes pale brown postage stamp (of 1871-1876), [Avignon, 1872], tied at top left corner, creased, slight browning

"...No tax is in itself absolutely just; the justice or injustice of taxes can only be comparative: if just in the conception, they are never completely so in the application: & it is quite possible that nations may some day be obliged to resort to a moderate tax on all property, as the least unjust mode of raising a part of their revenue..." 

AN ARTICLE BY THE AUTHOR OF PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, REVIEWING NEW IDEAS ABOUT TAXATION. Mill outlined Constantino Baer's preferred form of taxation in Avere et l’Imposta (1870) in a letter to Cairnes (9 December 1872): "a tax on land and capital, of a percentage on their pecuniary value, combined with taxes on such modes of expenditure as may be a fair test of a person’s general scale of unproductive expenses." This review begins by celebrating the emergence of political theory in a newly united Italy: "since restored to freedom, active minds in Italy have not only revived the study of scientific economics but have placed themselves at once at the most advanced point which that study has yet reached". Mill then turns to consider the relative fairness of different methods of taxation. He criticises Baer's formulation, arguing that: "a person’s means of paying taxes, or of bearing any other burden of a pecuniary nature, do not consist of his capital and his income, but of his capital or his income. He possesses them both in the sense of legal control, but only one or other of them for the purposes of his own consumption."

This article was published in The Fortnightly Review in March 1873, and subsequently appeared in Mill's Dissertations and Discussions: Volume IV (1875), pp.231-36. The current manuscript was sent to the Fortnightly Review's editor, John Morley, and was the copytext for the printed edition.

AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS BY MILL ARE RARE ON THE MARKET: NO SIMILAR MANUSCRIPT HAS APPEARED AT AUCTION IN MORE THAN TEN YEARS.

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's, London, 19 July 1994, lot 535