Report of the Commission Appointed to Inquire Into the Indian Currency; Commonly Known as the Herschell Report on the Coinage of Silver in India, with the Accompanying Correspondence and Testimony (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 Excerpt: ...by almost every man and a great many of the women and children in the country, and you would have to interfere with the production all over the country. The area under tobacco is now something about 500,000 acres. If you put a 5-rupee tax per acre upon that, it would give you a quarter of a crore of revenue, but it would raise euormously the price of tobacco. But if you wanted to raise a larger sum, for instance, one and a half crores or two crores, from tobacco, you would have to interfere and tax tobacco in manyways, and it would really raise the price three or four times over. Tobacco and sugar are the only two luxuries that the masses of India have at all, but they all of them consume tobacco and sugar. 3239. Do you think a succession tax would be practicable as a mode of increasing the revenue?--1 think it would be practicable, and one advantage is that it would fall on the rich, but it would strike exactly the same class as the income tax now strikes. And there would be this difficulty, that many of those who now pay the income tax are the people who are most hurt by the exchange trouble, and the succession tax would just tax them. 3240. Mr.CuRRiE. And supposing, Sir Charles, that you put on a tax or taxes which would till up the present deficit, which we will assume to be one and a half crores, that would not nil up the deficit if there was a further fall in silver?--If silver went down to 30V/. or below, there would then be a deficit of 10 crores, and thatis the deficit that I thought it was impossible to fill by taxation; I was not speaking of one and a half crores; I think you could fill that. 3241. The view you take is that you could only fill up the deficit with a certain danger of political disaffection?--I do not think there is any danger of p...