Rooting their rejection of the law’s authority in the principle that “government without the consent of the governed is tyranny,” [suffragettes] claimed the right to withhold consent until they received representation in Parliament.
Withholding consent provided an especially compelling argument where women could establish that they fulfilled the responsibilities of citizenship but lacked basic political rights.
Tax resistance formed an important part of suffragettes’ overall strategy to reject the legal obligations of women who lacked representation, drawing upon an older tradition of tax resistance in England for its authority.
WTRL member Mrs. Darent Harrison invoked that history in her assertion of a “sense of intimacy and spiritual kinship which must exist between all who have ever defied the law of the day, in defence of eternal justice, and in obedience to the call of public duty.”
The WSPU decided to resist payment of income taxes in .
The WFL urged “no vote — no tax” .
Drawing once again on historical precedent, the suffragettes argued that in , the king illegally levied taxes, whereas voteless women were illegally taxed by Parliament, an even more serious offense, since it occurred at a time of representative government.
Militants believed that, by refusing to pay taxes without representation, women would force Parliament to grant votes to women.
Tax resistance was frequently presented as part of a larger strategy, as in when Charlotte Despard defined WFL tax resistance as part of a larger general strike of women, which would extend to the refusal to bear children, to manage their homes, or to fulfill any of the citizen duties they currently performed.
Tax resistance proved to be the longest-lived form of militancy, and the most difficult to prosecute.
More than 220 women, mostly middle-class, participated in tax resistance , some continuing to resist through the First World War, despite a general suspension of militancy.
Suffragettes resisted payment of two general categories of tax: the first included property tax, inhabited house duty, and income tax; the second, taxes and licenses on dogs, carriages, motor cars, male servants, armorial bearings, guns, and game.
Contemporaries had several theories regarding tax resistance’s appeal.
Suffragette speaker and sympathizer Laurence Housman cited the clarity of tax resistance’s logic as a primary reason for its popularity.
Suffragettes’ tax resistance also cut across organizational lines.
The formation of the Women’s Tax Resistance League in brought women together from numerous organizations, including not only the WSPU, WFL, and NUWSS but also the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association, Church League for Women’s Suffrage, Free Church League, Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, Actresses’ Franchise League, Artists’ Franchise League, and the Women Writers’ Suffrage League.
. —
At Hammersmith, furniture was sold, the property of Miss Carson.
Open-air meeting. Speakers: Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Merrivale Mayer,
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes.
. —
At Kilburn, a bookcase was sold, the property of Miss Green,
Hon.
Treas.
W.T.R.L.
Procession and open-air meeting. Speakers:
Dr. [Helen] Hanson, Mrs.
[Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr, Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
. —
At Mile End, a gold watch was sold, the property of
Dr. Elizabeth Wilks.
Procession from Aldgate Station to open-air meeting. Speakers: Mrs.
[Charlotte] Despard, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
. —Brighton. Goods belonging to Mrs. Gerlach and Miss [Mary] Hare were
sold. Open-air meeting and public meeting in Lecture Hall at night.
Speakers: Mrs. [Caroline] Louis Fagan, Miss Gertrude Eaton, Miss Hare,
Miss Nina Boyle, and the Rev.
J. Kirtlan.
Bournemouth. — Old silver was sold, the property of Miss Symons.
Open-air meeting. Speakers: Miss Howes, Miss Pridden, Mrs. Kineton
Parkes.
Henley-on-Thames. — A cow was sold, the property of Miss
Lelacheur. Open-air meeting. Speakers: Mr. and Mrs. Cobden Sanderson,
Mrs. Juson Kerr and Mr. Carlin.
. —Putney. The goods of Mrs. and Miss Richards were sold. Protest
meeting. Speakers: Miss Richards, Mrs. Juson Kerr, Miss Phyllis
Ayrtin, Miss Gilliat and Mrs. Cobden Sanderson.
Battersea. — Goods belonging to Mrs. [Helen Alexander] Archdale were
sold. Open-air meeting. Speakers: Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Miss Clemence
Housman, Miss Thomas.
Highbury. — At the sale of a silver salver belonging to
Dr. Winifred Patch, of
Highbury, Steen’s Auction Rooms, Drayton Park, were crowded on
by members of the Women’s Freedom
League, the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and other Suffrage societies. The
auctioneer refused to allow the usual five minutes for explanation before the
sale, but Miss Alison Neilans, of the Women’s Freedom League, was well
supported and cheered when she insisted on making clear the reasons why
Dr. Patch for several years
has refused to pay taxes while deprived of a vote. A procession was then
formed, and marched to Highbury Corner, where a large open-air meeting was
presided over by Mrs. [Marianne] Clarendon Hyde, of the Women’s Freedom
League, and addressed by Mrs. Merrivale Mayer.
Bromley. — Mrs. [Kate] Harvey,
Hon. Head of the
W.F.L.
Press Department, is again resisting payment of taxes, and has, in addition,
barricaded her house at Bromley. She hopes members of the Women’s Freedom
League will support her when the sale takes place, and if any members will
send their names to her, Mrs. Harvey will communicate with them direct as
soon as she knows the date and time of the sale. If possible, full
particulars will be published in next week’s Vote,
and information may be had from Headquarters.
Imprisonment of Miss [Constance E.] Andrews at Ipswich.
Our Hon. District Organizer for East Anglia has been sent to prison for one week in the second division as a consequence of her plucky and conscientious fight against taxation without representation.
Miss Andrews was sentenced a month ago, but was only arrested morning.
Our prisoner will be released on from Ipswich Prison, and every member in the district should be there to welcome her.
A public meeting will be held in the evening, and will be addressed by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard and Miss [Marguerite A.] Sidley.
Sale at Woodbridge.
Our report is taken from The East Anglian Daily Times:—
“Do you want a waggon?” seemed to be a sort of catch phrase at Woodbridge yesterday, and the explanation was a huge farm waggon, to be seen in the centre of Market Hill.
It bore the names of Knight and Lane, of Cowslip Dairy, Witnesham, and stood there a silent witness to the enthusiasm of two ladies, Dr. Elizabeth Knight and Mrs. [Hortense] Lane, in the cause of “Votes for Women.” The preliminary stages, leading to the seizure of the waggon by the police, have previously been related in our columns.
The two ladies named are joint occupiers of a farm, but each separately owns a dog and a governess-car.
The law requires “persons” who own such luxuries shall pay a tax for the privilege, and the ladies say, “No, we are not persons in the eyes of the law when the law says certain persons shall have a Parliamentary vote, and therefore if the State won’t have our vote it shall not have our money.”
There was many a sharp contest of wits over the subject of Women’s Suffrage,
and from these it was quite evident that there was no real hostile feeling
amongst the men present. On the other hand, there were many admissions of
belief in the principle that a woman owning property should have a vote for
a Parliamentary candidate, but there seemed to be a consensus of opinion
against women entering Parliament.
Miss Alison Neilans, the chief star in the local Suffragette firmament on Thursday, stood with her back to one of the waggon wheels and “held her own” with all the half-serious, half-chaffing comment from farmers and merchants’ representatives on the cause of women’s rights.
At length the time for the sale arrived, and the business was very quickly
over. Miss Neilans obtained the auctioneer’s permission to give a
two-minutes’ speech in explanation of the proceedings, and she occupied
59½ seconds. Then Mr. Arnott mounted the waggon for the purpose of selling
it. The bidding started at £3, and mounted quickly to £8, when by slower
degrees it reached £9
10s., at which figure the
waggon was knocked down to Mr. Rush.
Thereafter the Suffragettes again took possession of the waggon, and Miss Neilans led off in a very capable speech dealing with the well-known arguments about representation and taxation going together, in a bright and original manner.
The happy and successful home, she said, was where the man and the woman each took a share in its affairs, and not where one had the upper hand.
She disapproved of the nagging woman as much as of the man who beat his wife.
The politics of the State was the housekeeping of the nation, and women should have their share in the work.
Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett also addressed the meeting.
The waggon was then decorated and driven to Ipswich, where a demonstration had been well advertised for 8 p.m. Miss Andrews took the chair and was well received, but the crowd of rowdy youths had considerably increased their forces before Mrs. Tippett, who was the next speaker, had finished, and when Miss Neilans had been speaking a few minutes, the singing and shouting made it quite impossible for the audience to hear a word.
As, however, the noisy element were quite few in proportion to those genuinely interested and anxious to hear, Miss Neilans turned her back on the rowdies, and for over half an hour held the serious attention of quite a large section of those around, in spite of the din behind.
A collection could not be taken, but many men and women came near and pressed money into the speaker’s hand, and when the meeting ended, it was felt that much sympathy had been gained.
Mrs. Tippett and Miss Andrews gave great help with speaking, and an
excellent sale of The Vote was made, both at
Woodbridge and Ipswitch.
Mrs. Despard, who was in the chair, spoke in cheerful, anticipatory vein of the trend of events.
A sense of hope, a sense of expansion, a sense of exhilaration, she said, was in the air; yet, in spite of our confidence, we must not relax our efforts, for it was sometimes in the last stages of work, just before reforms were accomplished, that obstruction became strongest.
She spoke of the activity of the Women’s Freedom League at the present time in the direction of Tax Resistance.
During the past week she had attended several auction sales of goods of members of the Women’s Freedom League, who were following the example of John Hampden and fighting for a great principle — the right to exercise the duties of citizens and to resist the payment of taxation while their citizenship was unrecognised.
Her own goods were to be sold on the morrow, and she would not allow them to be bought in.
When they had taken everything she possessed they would have to again imprison her; but she ventured to think that before that day arrived the Conciliation Bill would have passed, and women would begin to come into their own.
A scene which was probably never equalled in the whole of its history took place at the Oxenham Auction Rooms, Oxford-street, on .
About a fortnight before the bailiffs had entered Mrs. Despard’s residence in Nine Elms and seized goods which they valued at £15.
Our President, for some years past, as is well known, has refused to pay her income-tax and inhabited house duty on the grounds that taxation and representation should go together; and this is the third time her goods have been seized for distraint.
It was not until the day before — — that Mrs. Despard was informed of the time and place where her furniture was to be sold.
In spite of this short notice — which we learn on good authority to be illegal — a large crowd composed not only of our own members but also of women and men from various Suffrage societies gathered together at the place specified in the notice.
When “Lot 325” was called Mrs. Despard mounted a chair, and said, “I rise to
protest, in the strongest, in the most emphatic way of which I am capable,
against these iniquities, which are perpetually being perpetrated in the name
of the law. I should like to say I have served my country in various
capacities, but I am shut out altogether from citizenship. I think special
obloquy has been put upon me in this matter. It was well known that I should
not run away and that I should not take my goods away, but the authorities
sent a man in possession. He remained in the house — a household of women — at night. I only heard of this
sale, and from a man who knows that of which he is speaking, I know that this
sale is illegal. I now claim the law — the law that is supposed to be for
women as well as men.”
The whole assembly listened in respectful silence to our President’s dignified protest, upon the conclusion of which all Suffragists present, and many other sympathisers left for the Gardenia where a very successful meeting was held.
On , Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes addressed a meeting of the members of the Fleet National Union on the principles of tax resistance, and a ballot was taken in order to instruct delegate how to vote at July Conference.
On , a drawing room meeting was given by Mrs. [Louisa] Jopling Rowe in her large studio, and she herself presided.
Speeches were made by Mrs. [Caroline] Louis Fagan, Mrs. Kineton Parkes and Mr. Laurence Housman, the latter dealing in a most interesting and exhaustive way with the tax resistance movement from an historical point of view.
A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L.
By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.
Mrs. [Edith] How Martyn announced that Mrs. [Emma] Sproson, a member of the National Executive of the Women’s Freedom League, was serving a term of seven days’ imprisonment in the third division for refusing to pay her dog license.
This was the third time Mrs. Sproson had suffered imprisonment in connection with the militant suffrage agitation.
The Women’s Freedom League had taken up tax-resistance as a part of their propaganda three years ago.
Mr. Keir Hardie had stated in the House of Commons that twenty-five million pounds flowed yearly into the coffers of the national exchequer as a result of the indirect taxation of women.
If that money could be withheld, or if all women who were directly taxed would refuse to pay until they were enfranchised, they would not long have to wait for their political emancipation.
The speaker then dealt with the political situation as regards the Women’s Bill.
On , Miss Constance Andrews — our honorary organizer for the East Anglian district — was arrested and taken to Ipswich gaol, there to spend a week because she refused to pay her dog tax.
Here was a chance for the local branch, and they seized it.
I went down on , and we soon got all the preliminary arrangements made for a welcome to Miss Andrews.
The little town has been buzzing with suffragettes and their doings.
Everyone has been talking of Miss Andrews and our preparations to receive her.
Open-air meetings, bill-distributing, the carrying of trimmed posters, pushing the decorated coster’s barrow (covered with The Vote and posters) through the town, — all have served to draw the attention of the townsfolk to the fact that something unusual was astir.
Our two meetings on Cornhill were well attended, and the behaviour of the crowds was remarkably good.
On morning a very large crowd — described in the local press as “an immense gathering” — collected outside the prison to cheer Miss Andrews on her release.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard — “the grand old lady of the Women’s movement,” to quote again from the East Anglian Daily Times — drove up in an open cab, with Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett and Mrs. Bastian.
Shortly after her arrival Miss Andrews was released, a photographer standing on a wall opposite the prison gate being the first to give the news.
The outer gate opened, and as our ex-prisoner came out a lusty chorus of “hurrahs!” showed the sympathy of the crowd.
Mrs. Despard said a few words of welcome, and then we formed up in a little procession behind the Ipswich “Dare to be Free” banner, and walked to our rooms in Arcade-street, the cab with Miss Andrews in Mrs. Tippett’s place bringing up the rear.
The large crowd followed us all the way, and enquiring heads were thrust through open windows all along the route.
On our arrival at the rooms, we found a dainty breakfast set out for us at long tables, placed at right-angles to each other.
Japanese table napkins, floral decorations, placards on the walls, all were in the green, white and gold.
After breakfast Mrs. Hossack, from the chair, paid a warm tribute to Miss Andrew’s work.
Mrs. Despard, in her own inspiring way addressed the gathering after the enthusiastic singing of “For she’s a jolly good fellow,” and Miss Andrews gave us a vivid account of her life in prison.
Among other things, she said there were only four other women besides herself in prison.…
…Altogether we feel that Miss Andrews has done a great service to the local work by her protest and imprisonment, and made possible a splendid week’s work, which we hope will leave a lasting impression.
Tax Resistance protests are multiplying throughout the land, and signs are not wanting that the seedling planted by the Women’s Freedom League is developing into a stalwart tree.
This form of militancy appeals even to constitutionally-minded women; and the ramifications of tax resistance now reach far beyond the parent society and the other militant organisations, necessitating the expenditure of great energy on the part of the officials who work under the banner of John Hampden — the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard is no longer even asked to pay her taxes; the Edinburgh Branch of the W.F.L. is in almost the same happy position; Mrs. [Kate] Harvey has once more heroically barricaded Brackenhill against the King’s officers, and Miss [Mary] Anderson has again raised the flag of revolt in Woldingham.
Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight, with praiseworthy regularity, refuses to pay her dog license and other taxes in respect of a country residence; and these protests never fail to carry to some mind, hitherto heedless, a new sense of the unconstitutional position women are forced to occupy in a country that prides itself on being the home of constitutional Government.
Activities of the Tax Resistance League.
Last week we had five sales in different parts of the country.
On three Tax Resisters at West Drayton and two at Rotherfield, made their protest.
Miss [Kate] Raleigh, Miss Weir, and Miss [Margory?] Lees had a gold watch and jewellery sold on the village green, West Drayton; speakers at the protest meeting were Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, Mrs. Hicks, and Miss Raleigh.
Miss Koll and Miss Hon[n]or Morten, of Rotherfield, had a silver salver and gold ring sold from a wagonette in the village street; speakers at the protest meeting were Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Reginald Pott.
Miss Maud Roll presided.
On Mrs. [Myra Eleanor] Sadd Brown gave an at home at her house when short speeches were made by the Hampstead Tax Resisters who were to have their goods sold on , and by Mrs. [Louisa] Thompson Price, whose case is being further looked into by Somerset House.
There was a very good attendance and many new members were gained for the League.
On , sales took place at Hampstead and at Croydon.
Misses Collier, Mrs. Hartley, Mrs. Hicks, and Dr. Adeline Roberts had their goods sold at the Hampstead Drill Hall and at the protest meeting the speakers were Miss Hicks and Mrs. [Margarete Wynne] Nevinson.
The goods of Miss [Dorinda] Neligan and Miss James were sold at Messrs. King and Everall’s Auction Rooms, Croydon; the protest meeting was addressed by Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
On the sale took place of a ring, the property of Mrs. [Adeline] Cecil Chapman, President of the New Constitutional Society, and wife of Mr. Cecil Chapman, the well-known magistrate, at Messrs. Roche and Roche’s Auction Rooms, 68A, Battersea-rise.
Mrs. Chapman made an excellent protest in the auction room, and afterwards presided at the protest meeting, when the speakers were Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, and Mrs. Teresa Gough.
Sequel to Hastings Riot.
As a result of the disgraceful scenes at Hastings on , Mrs. Darent Harrison appealed to the magistrate on Tuesday.
A large number of sympathisers were present and Mrs. [Jane?] Strickland, president of the local National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, spoke, and Mrs. Darent Harrison.
The magistrate said the matter was not within his province and the Watch Committee must be referred to.
We hope that the result may be adequate police protection when the resisters hold the postponed protest meeting.
We learn from Miss Mary Anderson that her house has been “entered” by the authorities, and that some of her goods, among them a copy of the famous picture, “Hope,” by G.F. Watts, have been seized to pay the taxes claimed by a Government which denies representation to women.
The sale will take place at Woldingham on , and will be followed by a meeting in the Public Hall.
All friends are cordially invited to be present, especially those living in Croydon, Thornton Heath and South London district.
On Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight was summoned to appear at the Woodbridge Police-court for non-payment of her dog-tax.
As it was not convenient for her to attend, Miss [Constance] Andrews went in her place again to protest against taxation without representation.
She was supported by Miss Bobby and Miss Pratt.
The Woodbridge Police-court compares very favourably with the London ones, and patience is not lacking in the way it was at Marlborough-street.
When our case came on Miss Andrews asked to be allowed to make a statement; this was refused, but she made it all the same, and it took the form of a Suffrage tax-resistance speech.
In reply to a question why Dr. Knight did not appear, it was pointed out she had professional duties to attend to, and they might take the form of certifying a man to be insane thereby depriving him of his vote, while she herself was not counted capable of exercising one.
After some consultation a fine of 30s. and 14s. cost was levied; failing this, distraint and in default 7 days’ imprisonment.
Whereupon the Suffragists made a further protest in court, and then held a meeting outside.
Miss Andrews addressed an orderly crowd for forty minutes, one man who tried to create a disturbance being promptly ejected.
The next act of this annual drama will be the sale of the wagon which has become historic in the history of tax-resistance.
At Balham.
On , Miss Helen Smith’s goods were sold for tax-resistance at Philip’s Auction Rooms, Balham.
Mrs. Tanner spoke on behalf of the Freedom League, of which Miss Smith is a member.
Mrs. [Leonora?]
Tyson took the chair.
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes and Mrs. Teresa Gough also spoke.
The crowd was very large and quite orderly.
The speakers had an excellent hearing.
The resolution of protest was passed with only a few dissentients.
Women’s Tax Resistance League
Our members are still protesting against the sale of their goods to pay King’s taxes.
On , goods belonging to Miss [Ina] Moncrieff were sold at Harding’s Auction Rooms, near Victoria Station.
Miss Hicks and Mrs. Kineton Parkes spoke at the meeting, and a neighbourhood that was once distinctly hostile has become thoroughly sympathetic.
On , Mrs. Portrey’s goods were sold at the Harrow.
A garden-party was given by Mrs. Huntsman, of the Women’s Freedom League, and the procession to the auction-room started from her house, it being a joint demonstration of the Tax Resistance and Freedom Leagues.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes presided, and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard and Mr. Laurence Housman spoke at the open-air meeting to a large crowd, which was gradually won over to sympathy with the arguments of the resisters, and finally passed a resolution approving tax-resistance.
The Branch wishes to express its very hearty thanks to our President and Mr. Laurence Housman for the splendid speeches they made at our garden meeting on .
Six new members were enrolled, and £4 8s. taken in collection.
A large crowd assembled and the meeting was in every way a great success.
After tea a procession was formed up to go to the protest meeting which was to be held after the sale of Mrs. Portrey’s goods for tax-resistance.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes made a splendid protest in the auction-room, and an open-air meeting followed, at which Mrs. Despard, Mrs. Parkes and Mr. Housman all spoke again.
The tax-resistance banners and the W.F.L. pennons marching down in procession created a great effect in Wealdstone.
Scotland — Edinburgh.
Suffrage Shop, 90, Lothian-road.
We have not yet quite arrived at the happy state of “not even being asked to pay our taxes.”
About ten days ago we received once more the Sheriff Officer’s intimation that if the tax be not paid within three days our goods would be seized and sold, and now await developments, as needless to say the tax remains unpaid.…
(from W.F.L. Literature Department, 1s.; post free, 1s. 1d.)
Not long ago, at the final meeting of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, it was decided to present the famous John Hampden Banner (which did such magnificent service at so many women’s protest meetings against the Government’s unconstitutional practice of taxation without representation), to the Women’s Freedom League.
We treasure this standard of former days, and now we are the grateful recipients of an edition of “The Tax Resistance Movement in Great Britain,” written by our old friend, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, with an introduction by another of our friends, Mr. Laurence Housman.
This little book is charmingly produced, and on its outside cover appear a figure of Britannia and the colours of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Every reader of The Vote knows that it was the Women’s Freedom League which first organised tax resistance in as a protest against women’s political disenfranchisement, and all our readers should be in possession of a copy of this book, which gives a history of the movement, tracing it back to , when two sisters, the Misses [Anna Maria & Mary] Priestman, had their dining-room chairs taken to the sale-room, because, being voteless, they objected to taxes being levied upon them.
Dr. Octavia Lewin is mentioned as the first woman to resist the payment of licenses.
It is refreshing to renew our recollections of the tax resistance protests made by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mr. [Mark] Wilks (who was imprisoned in Brixton Gaol for a fortnight), Miss [Clemence] Housman (who was kept in Holloway Prison for a week), Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison, Mrs. [Kate] Harvey (who had a term of imprisonment), Miss [Kate] Raliegh, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson, Dr. [Winifred] Patch, Miss [Bertha] Brewster, Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight (who was also imprisoned), Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, Miss Gertrude Eaton, and a host of others too numerous to mention, and last, but not least, Miss Evelyn Sharp, who, as Mrs. Parkes says, “has the distinction of being the last tax resister to suffer persecution at the hands of unrepresentative government in the women’s long struggle for citizenship.”
The full list of tax-resisters appearing at the end of this pamphlet will be found to be of special interest to all suffragists.
I haven’t yet found a copy of this book on-line or available via interlibrary loan.
I might be able to order photocopies of a microfilm version held by a library in Australia, but I’m too cheap and so I’m holding out for a better option.
Any ideas?
Another source I’ve had trouble tracking down is Laurence Housman’s The Duty of Tax Resistance, which comes from the same campaign.
The Vote printed excerpts from it in their issue:
The Duty of Tax Resistance
By Laurence Housman.
Two years ago Members of Parliament determined to place the payment of themselves in front of the enfranchisement of women; and now women of enfranchised spirit are more determined than ever to place their refusal to pay taxes before Members of Parliament.
To withdraw so moral an object-lesson in the face of so shabby an act of political opportunism would be not merely a sign of weakness, but a dereliction of duty.
Nothing can be worse for the moral well-being of the State than for unjust conditions to secure to themselves an appearance of agreement and submission which are only due to a Government which makes justice its first duty.
It is bad for the State that the Government should be able to collect with ease taxes unconstitutionally levied; it is bad for the men of this country who hold political power, and in whose hands it lies to advance or delay measures of reform, that they should see women yielding an easy consent to taxation so unjustly conditioned.
If women do so, they give a certain colour to the contention that they have not yet reached that stage of political education which made our forefathers resist, even to the point of revolt, any system of taxation which was accompanied by a denial of representation.
It was inflexible determination on this point which secured for the people of this country their constitutional liberties; and in the furtherance of great causes, history has a way of repeating itself.
Our surest stand-by to-day is still that which made the advance of liberty sure in the past.
In this country representative government has superseded all earlier forms of feudal service, or Divine right, or the claim of the few to govern the many; and its great strength lies in the fact that by granting to so large a part of the community a voice in the affairs of government, it secures from people of all sorts and conditions the maximum of consent to the laws and to administration; and, as a consequence, it is enabled to carry on its work of administration in all departments more economically and efficiently than would be possible under a more arbitrary form of Government.
But though it has thus acquired strength, it has, by so basing itself, entirely changed the ground upon which a Government makes its moral claim to obedience.
Representative government is a contract which requires for its fulfilment the grant of representation in return for the right to tax.
No principle for the claim to obedience can be laid down where a Government, claiming to be representative, is denying a persistent and active demand for representation.
People of a certain temperament may regard submission to unjust Government as preferable to revolt, and “peaceful penetration” as the more comfortable policy; but they cannot state it as a principle which will bear examination; they can give it no higher standing than mere opportunism.
It may be said that the general welfare of the State over-rides all private claims. That is true.
But under representative government it is impossible to secure the general welfare or a clean bill of health where, to any large body of the community which asks for it, full citizenship is being denied.
You cannot produce the instinct for self-government among a community and then deny it expression, without causing blood-poisoning to the body politic.
It is against nature for those who are fit for self-government to offer a submission which comes suitably only from the unfit; nor must you expect those who are pressing for freedom to put on the livery of slaves, and accept that ill-fitting and ready-made costume as though it were a thing of their own choice and made to their own order and taste.
Representative Government man, without much hurt to itself, acquiesce in the exclusion from full citizenship of a sleeping, but not of an awakened section of the community.
And if it so acts toward the latter, it is the bounden duty of those who are awake to the State’s interests to prevent an unrepresentative Government from treating them, even for one single day, as though they were asleep.
They must, in some form or another, force the Government to see that by its denial of this fundamental claim to representation its own moral claim to obedience has disappeared.
That is where the great distinction lies between the unenfranchised condition of certain men in the community who have still not got the vote and the disenfranchised position of women.
It is all the vast difference between the conditional and the absolute.
To no man is the vote denied; it is open to him under certain conditions which, with a modicum of industry and sobriety, practically every man in this country can fulfil.
To woman the vote is denied under all conditions whatsoever.
The bar has been raised against her by statute, and by statute and legal decision is still maintained.
There is the woman’s direct and logical answer to those who say that, after all, she is only upon the same footing as the man who, without a vote, has still to pay the tax upon his beer and his tobacco.
The man is always a potential voter; and it is mainly through his own indifference that he does not qualify; but the woman is by definite laws placed outside the Constitution of those three estates of the realm from which the sanction of Government is derived.
If it asks no sanction of her, why should she give it?
From what principle in its Constitution does it deduce this right at once to exclude and to compel?
We see clearly enough that it derives its right of rule over men from the consent they give it as citizens — a consent on which its legislative existence is made to depend.
But just as expressly as the man’s consent is included in our Constitution, the woman’s is excluded.
From that exclusion the State suffers injury every day; and submission to that exclusion perpetuates injury, not to the State alone, but to the minds of the men and of the women who together should form its consenting voice as one whole.
This submission is, therefore, an evil; and we need in every town and village of this country some conspicuous sign that among women submission has ceased.
What more definite, what more logical sign can be given than for unrepresented women to refuse to pay taxes?
If Women Suffragists are fully awake to their responsibilities for the enforcement of right citizenship, they will not hesitate to bring into disrepute an evil and usurping form of Government which does not make the recognition of woman’s claim its first duty.
The Cæsar to whom in this country we owe tribute is representative government.
Unrepresentative government is but a forgery on Cæsar’s name.
For Suffragists to honour such a Government, so lacking to them in moral sanction, is to do dishonour to themselves; and to offer it any appearance of willing service is to do that which in their hearts they know to be false.
From pamphlet published by The Women’s Tax Resistance League.
1d.
The statue of John Hampden, presented to the county of Buckinghamshire by Mr. James Griffiths, of Long Marston, in commemoration of the Coronation, was unveiled at Aylesbury on by Lord Rothschild.
There was a large gathering, representative of Buckinghamshire generally.
After some difficulty the Women’s Tax Resistance League received the assurance that they would be able to pay their last tribute to the great Tax Resister.
At the close of the unveiling ceremony a procession of members of the League crossed the market square to the statue, the crowd readily making way, while police lined the short route.
On behalf of the League, two delegates, Miss Gertrude Eaton and Miss Clemence Housman, laid a beautiful wreath at the foot of the statue.
It was made of white flowers, on which, in black letters, were the words, “From Women Tax Resisters.”
Within the circle of flowers was a ship in full sail with the name of John Hampden in gold letters on the streamers.
The ship was made of brown beech leaves (the beech is the tree most famous in Buckinghamshire) and white flowers.
Emblems were also laid at the base of the statue from the Irishwomen’s Franchise League [this was corrected in a later issue; it was actually from the Irish League for Women’s Suffrage] (a harp in Maréchal Niel roses), the Gymnastic Teachers’ S.S. (blue immortelles and silver leaves), and the London Graduates Union (a laurel wreath).
Among those present were Mrs. [Myra Eleanor] Sadd Brown, Mrs. [Mary] Sergeant Florence, Dr. Kate Haslam, Mrs. [Ethel] Ayres Purdie, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, Miss [Minnie?] Turner, M.A., Miss [Maud?] Roll, Mr. Lee and Mr. Sergeant.
Tax Resistance: The Situation at Bromley.
“My goods are not yet seized for non-payment of taxes. I am still barricaded.
“Outside the gate!
“A most uncomfortable position for the tax collector!
But, while offering sympathy, I feel the experience will be beneficial.
There is nothing so enlightening as a little ‘fellow-feeling.’
Nothing like going ‘there’ to learn the discomforts of being where the woman is, and should be, according to the gospel of the man at Westminster.
Bolts and bars are never pleasant things to deal with — from outside!
They are terribly, cruelly hard to remove when fixed by men driven by fear to protect an unjust wall of separation.
But walls must yield to pressure, and the women gather, intent on ‘breaking down’; content, if need be, to ‘be broken.’
While men, relying on their fastenings, ignore the trembling of foundations, women know the wall is doomed, and when it falls they will flock in to do the bidding of the “Anti” — to scrub and clean, to mind the babies, to stay in the home — the National Home.”
K[ate]. Harvey.
Meetings in the Market-square, Bromley.
Meetings are now being held every evening in the Market-square, Bromley, and are exciting wide interest.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard was the speaker at the first, and told the crowd why Mrs. Harvey was making this emphatic protest against taxation without representation.
Mrs. Despard’s own experiences aroused much interest.
The following evening Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett spoke, and still larger crowds gathered to hear her.
By news of these regular meetings had spread, and the audience was ready to receive the speakers.
The “Antis” are showing themselves — a sure sign of our success — but the chief argument they bring forward, in the form of questions, is that of physical force: because women do not fight they should not vote.
Mrs. Merivale Mayer, the speaker on , was able to show how beneficial the women’s vote had proved in Australia, and told of the surprise of Australian politicians that the Mother Country still refuses to give the women the chance to stand side by side with men in the fight against evil.
The police are exceedingly kind — and evidently interested.
More Tax Resisters.
On , at Redding, goods belonging to Professor Edith Morley were sold.
Speakers: Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Miss Gertrude Eaton.
Also goods belonging to Miss Manuelle, at Harding’s Auction Rooms, Victoria Station, W.
Speakers: Mrs. [Caroline] Louis Fagan, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Dr. [C.V.] Drysdale; and at Working, silver, the property of Mrs. Skipwith, was sold.
Speakers: Mrs. [Barbara] Ayrton Gould, Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
On , at Southend, silver belonging to Mrs. Douglas Hameton and Mrs. [Rosina] Sky was sold.
There was a procession with brass band prior to sale, and also a very successful protest meeting.
Speakers: Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Mr. Warren.
The need for women to be on the watch is strikingly shown in the news of her experiences which has been sent us by Miss Clara Lee, of Thistledown, Letchworth, who points out how she forced an admission of error from the Inland Revenue Authorities.
She writes thus:—
As a tax resister, the following experiences prove the carelessness of Government officials.
Having refused to pay Inhabited House Duty (8s. 9d.) to the local collector, I was reported by him to the surveyor for this district, who sent a demand containing two inaccuracies.
I wrote to point that one ought not to have occurred, seeing that we had had compulsory education since ; the other, he would see did not agree with the original:—
Local Demand.
s.
d.
Schedule A
5
0
House Duty
8
9
Surveyor’s Demand.
£
s.
d.
Schedule A
0
5
0
Schedule B
1
1
5
House Duty
0
8
9
Schedule B, I found, applied to nurseries and market gardens.
So I wrote pointing out that the nearest connection I had to either, was that under the Lloyd George Insurance Act I was classed with agricultural labourers.
To this I received the following letter:—
4, Cardiff-road, Luton, .
Inland Revenue — Surveyor of Taxes.
Madam, — Referring to your letter of , I much regret that £1 1s. 5d. was included upon your demand note in error — the entry relating to the next person upon the collector’s return. — Yours faithfully,
(Signed) G.R. Simpson.
Is this the exactness of the work for which women, as well as men, pay so heavily?
How long would a commercial firm exist, if it allowed such errors?
How long would the public tolerate such mistakes by women workers in our hospitals and elsewhere?
The title of idiot, lunatic and criminal must revert to the people responsible for such a condition of things.
The 8s. 9d. Inhabited House Duty has now been deducted from my claim of return Income-tax; this seems an unusual proceeding.
Some silver belonging to Dr. [Winifred S.] Patch, who is “sold up” every year owing to the fact that she refuses to pay taxes, was auctioned at Hard’s Auction Rooms, Junction Road, Highbury, on .
A protest meeting was held outside, when Mrs. Manson, Miss [Sarah?]
Benett, and Miss Lightman spoke on the injustice of the Government denying women citizen rights while insisting that they shall pay for upkeep of the State.
A tax resistance meeting will be held at 3 o’clock, when Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard will speak.
A protest meeting was held at Highbury Corner on , as a result of the sale of Dr. [Winifred S.] Patch’s goods last week, owing to her refusal to pay taxes.
Miss Guttridge was in the chair, and there was a good attendance.
The speakers were Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard and Mr. Laurence Housman.
Mrs. Despard, in the course of her speech, said that the Woman Suffragists were going to adopt measures of coercion towards the Government.
They were going to “stop the traffic.”
Mr. Laurence Houseman took up the phrase.
He said, “Stop the traffic, and you have found the solution of the situation.
Bad government makes government expensive.”
He spoke of the spirit of liberty which is latent in every human being — the spirit of liberty which is always roused to its fullest force under tyrannical oppression.
That spirit was awake in the women who are fighting for the Franchise to-day.
He thought that most of the men of this country did not realise the spirit of that fight because they had come by their own votes too easily.
They had practically been born to the Vote.
They had come into it too long after their fathers’ fight for it to feel its true basis of liberty.
He remarked that wherever Mrs. Despard went to-day the Government became an object of ridicule.
She ought to be in prison, as she had refused to pay the Imperial taxes, but they were afraid to put her there — (laughter and cheers) — and she would not go to prison because she was more logical than the Government.
If they gave her representation she would agree to taxation — the two must go together.
It was disgraceful in a democratic country that women like Mrs. Despard, who have done noble work for the community in general, should be shut out from the Parliamentary administration of the people’s interests.
The thanks of our League are due to our courageous fellow-member, Miss Mary
Anderson, for the splendid opportunity provided by her for carrying our
gospel into new quarters. The quiet little village of Woldingham, one of the
beauty spots of England, has been thoroughly roused by Miss Anderson’s
spirited protest against the tyranny of taxation without representation; and
a great gathering of its inhabitants attended at the sale of her goods on
.
Our energetic and honoured workers, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Fisher, most ably
seconded Miss Anderson in organising the protest. By the courtesy of Messrs.
Jarrett, the King’s officers, whose consideration and forbearance call for
our kindest appreciation, the sale was to have been held on the village
green, close to Miss Anderson’s residence; but owing to the inclement
weather, the adjacent public hall was “commandeered” for the ceremony. In
spite of an incessant downpour, the hall was packed with an appreciative
audience.
The sale was conducted, laughably enough, under the auspices of the Women’s
Freedom League and the Women’s Tax Resistance League; for, on obtaining
entrance to the hall, Miss Anderson and Mrs. Fisher bedecked it with all the
insignia of suffrage protest. The rostrum was spread with our flag
proclaiming the inauguration of Tax Resistance by the
W.F.L.;
above the auctioneer’s head hung Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard’s embroidered silk
banner, with its challenge “Dare to be Free”; on every side the green, white
and gold of the
W.F.L.
was accompanied by the brown and black of the Women’s Tax Resistance League,
with its cheery “No Vote, no Tax” injunctions and its John Hampden maxims;
while in the front rows, besides Miss Anderson, the heroine of the day, Mrs.
Snow and Mrs. Fisher, were seen the inspiring figures of our President and
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, vice-president of the
W.T.R.L.
Mrs. Huntsman took the chair as soon as the sale was completed and the
necessary sum realised. Mrs. Despard and Mrs. Cobden Sanderson were the
principal speakers, Miss Boyle expressing the acknowledgments of the two
Leagues and of Miss Anderson to the King’s officers for carrying out the
stern duties of their office with so little unpleasantness.
A resolution, proposed from the chair, and carried with only one open
dissentient, was couched in the following terms:— “That this meeting
supports Miss Anderson in her protest against the tyranny of taxation
without representation, and calls upon the Government to include women in the
Franchise Reform Bill.”
At the close of the ceremony the goods, bought in by her friends, were
presented to Miss Anderson, who briefly returned thanks, and expressed her
intention of maintaining that form of protest.
Among those present were Miss F[lorence].A. Underwood, looking very well and
sunburnt after “holiday” with the Scottish campaign; Mr. Snow, to whose
kind support no words will do justice; Mrs. [Kate] Harvey; Mrs. [Emma]
Fox-Bourne and her son and daughter-in-law; Mrs. Lawrence and her little
sons; Miss Charrington; Mrs. Robert Barr and her daughter and son-in-law;
Mr. and Mrs. Galbraith, Colonel and Mrs. Eales, Mrs. O’Sullivan, Mrs. Croad,
Miss Watson, and other well-known residents of the neighbourhood.
The next event of a similar kind to which we may look forward is the breaking
of Mrs. Harvey’s barricade at Bromley. Mrs. Harvey, with the greatest
resolution, has kept the King’s officer at bay for months; and she should be
heartily applauded for flying the flag of resistance, and invading with
suffrage protest and propaganda so notorious a centre of anti-suffrage
activity as Bromley. It is hoped that all good Freedom-Leaguers and all good
Tax Resisters will rally in force to the protest when the final act is being
played.
Undaunted, Mrs. Harvey has gone to Holloway.
The Bromley police authorities, after certain spasmodic efforts to secure payment of the sums claimed from her, have carried the sentence of the court into effect, and, by courteous arrangement, allowed Miss Harvey, Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, and Miss [Mary] Anderson to accompany her to the gates of Holloway.
A plain clothes officer and a woman warder met them at Bromley Station, and two taxi’s [sic] conveyed them to the prison from Holborn.
A great meeting of protest is to be held against the vindictive sentence on our brave comrade, for which has been fixed.
Trafalgar-square will be the place of meeting, and we hope to have a great rally of the friends of freedom.
Meetings also will be held in Bromley Market-place twice a week — Mondays and Wednesdays — at 7.30 p.m., where we hope members will rally when possible.
We venture to foretell that Mrs. Harvey will come out of prison no less resolute a resister than when she went in, and that she will stand to her principle of resisting Government without consent and taxation without representation no matter what Governments may order or police authorities execute.
We wish to call attention to another prosecution, that of four farmers in Scotland — we have republished several lately, — of men who also resisted the Act and whose servants resisted the Act by joint conspiracy, the latter not being prosecuted at all.
The penalties imposed in none of these cases have been so heavy as those imposed on Mrs. Harvey, whose chief crime is that she acts on principle and not because she desires to evade and obligation.
The Scottish farmers’ case is as follows:—
At Aberdeen on four farmers from the Turriff district pleaded guilty to having failed to pay insurance contributions in respect of farm servants in their employ.
Their agents stated that the farm servants in this district, believing that they were better off under the former conditions, when the employers provided for them during illness, than they would be under the provisions of the Act, refused to bring their cards, and declined to engage unless the master gave an understanding not only that he would not deduct the money from their wages but would not apply for an emergency card.
The Fiscal said that in such cases complaint should have been lodged with the Commissioners, who would have instituted a prosecution against the servants.
A penalty of 15s. for each offence in each case was imposed, and on the application of Mr. Gerrard, who appeared for the Scottish Insurance Commissioners, decree was given for the amount of contributions in arrears.
―Glasgow Herald, .
C. Nina Boyle.
Letter from Mrs. Harvey.
Comrades, — When you read this you will be much in my thoughts, for I shall be in Holloway Gaol.
I will not insult you by asking you to think of me, but when you do, will you remember that if my sentence be the means of bringing home to but one person the kind of justice meted out by vote-protected men to voteless women, the price will be light though the sentence is heavy, very heavy when compared with that passed on men whose only desire is to shirk responsibility when refusing to pay the Insurance Tax, iniquitously heavy when compared with the sentences passed on men who ruin the bodies of our girls, often baby-girls.
Since writing the above I have heard that, quite lately, a man was sentenced to a twenty shillings fine or seven days for criminally assaulting two children, the excuse being that his brain was weak.
The same authorities do not hesitate to label Suffragettes “mad,” but in their case it is only an added excuse for harsh treatment.
Justice!
We have almost forgotten the meaning of the word.
“No taxation without representation.”
Men made that law, men break that law, then punish women for not breaking it also!
Justice! It is conspicuous by its absence!
Another man-made law, “a man must be tried by his peers”; equally so a woman should be tried by her peers!
One thing I ask.
Will you strive by every means in your power to make “Hiawatha” [a dramatic version of Longfellow’s poem that Harvey had put together] a huge success?
It is a sore trouble to leave before arrangements are fully completed; help me by letting my absence rouse you to enthusiastic endeavour for our paper!
Many doubt as to the wisdom of the step I have taken; none can doubt as to the lack of wisdom in a Government that deliberately turns good citizens into outlaws! — Yours, in the Cause that is nearest to our hearts, the Cause of women — and children, they are inseparable,
K. Harvey.
Mrs. Despard’s Letter to Mr. McKenna
Mrs. Despard has sent the following letter to the Home Secretary:—
2, Currie-street, Nine Elms, London, S.W.
.
To the Right Honble. Reginald McKenna, M.P.
Sir,— A few months ago you granted an interview to me and several of my colleagues in the Women’s Freedom League.
I spoke to you then on what I conceive to be the maladministration of justice in this country and the unequal incidence of punishment.
I desire now to bring before you a glaring instance of that of which I complain, hoping that if your attention has not been drawn to it, you will immediately give it your serious consideration.
Thousands of British men and women are refusing to pay the Insurance Tax or to deduct the Tax from the wages of those whom they employ.
Some object to this tax on principle; others desire to shirk responsibility.
Suffragists — and I am amongst their number — are, in many cases resisting this in common with other forms of taxation because their rights of citizenship are not recognised.
There have been sundry prosecutions — mostly of men in business.
I wish to quote three cases to show you the different treatment meted out to men and women in our law courts.
Joseph Lister, of Doncaster, defaulter for thirty-one weeks, was given by Mr. Andrews, the magistrate, a fine of 50s., with payment of costs.
Mr. F. Hamblin (Eastbourne), who had conscientious objections, was summoned on twenty counts.
He was ordered to pay fines, costs and arrears to the amount of £6 14s., 8d..
Mrs. Harvey, of Brackenhill, Bromley, Kent — a Suffragist, the first who has been proceeded against for Insurance Tax resistance — was summoned, on , on ten counts in respect of her gardener.
She was fined £1 on each count, £4 10s. costs, £2 2s. special costs, and ordered to pay the arrears, 5s. 10d.; total, £16 17s. 10d.
I beg you to compare this sentence with the two previous ones.
Mrs. Harvey, deeply conscious of the injustice done to her, has refused to pay the money.
A week later a further fine of £5 was imposed upon her for refusal to pay her gardener’s license.
The alternative was a month’s imprisonment on each summons, and she went to Holloway yesterday.
I cannot believe, sir, that you will permit this injustice to be done.
Let me remind you that the woman who, in a Piccadilly flat, used for vile purposes, was drawing young girls to their ruin, had a similar sentence.
We hear, moreover, on good authority, that she was released after she had served ten days.
Mrs. Harvey is one whose time, service and money are given to the rescue of little destitute children, and to the help of those not so fortunately placed as herself.
While such injustices as these are permitted by the authorities, can you wonder that women are in revolt? ―Yours truly,
C. Despard
Women’s Freedom League Statement.
The following letter has been sent to the Press from Headquarters:—
Sir,— We write to protest against the extraordinary partial administration of justice in this country.
Thousands of persons are resisting the Insurance Act in Great Britain; many cases have been brought before the Courts and nominal fines only have been imposed on the defendants.
When, however, it is a case of a woman, and a Suffragist, resisting this Act, who from the point of view of principle, objects to paying taxes because she is not represented in the counsels of the nation, a heavy penalty is exacted.
Mrs. Harvey, of Bromley, Kent, who refused to pay her Insurance dues in respect of her gardener, William David Asquith, or the license for him, was fined as follows:—
For refusal to pay Insurance dues—
£16
17
10
£1 fine on each count
£10
0
0
Arrears of Insurance amounting to
0
5
10
Court fees
4
10
0
“Special costs” asked for by the Insurance Commissioners
2
2
0
For refusal to pay the license—
£5
14
0
Fine
£5
0
0
Costs
0
14
0
And since she declined to pay these fines Mrs. Harvey has to-day been conveyed to Holloway Gaol for two months’ imprisonment in the second division.
We think these facts speak for themselves.
Mrs. Harvey spends her life in working for the betterment of conditions under which our poorer children live, and has never failed to help those weaker than herself.
She believes that until women have a voice in making the laws, no satisfactory legislation will be carried through for the protection of girls and children.
For this reason she protests against the exclusion of women from full citizenship rights, and the answer of men’s representatives is two months’ imprisonment in the second division.
For keeping a Piccadilly flat for the express purpose of ruining young girls physically, mentally and morally, another woman was also sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, and it is universally believed that she was released at the end of ten days!
―We are, yours faithfully,
Charlotte Despard. Florence A. Underwood.
A “Snowball” Protest.
As evidence of the wide interest which is being aroused, Miss Marie Lawson writes from 5, Westbourne-square, London, W., to inform us that she has started a “Snowball” protest on behalf of Mrs. Harvey — a form of protest which she worked successfully in the case of Mr. Mark Wilkes.
The “Snowball” letter, which she hopes will be copied and widely distributed, is as follows:—
Dear Madam,— Mrs. K. Harvey, of Bromley, Kent, has been committed to prison for two months for non-payment of a Government tax and for non-compliances with the requirements of the National Insurance Act.
Because she refuses to submit to the tyranny of arbitrary taxation and because her conscience will not permit her to comply with conditions which she knows to be wrong and unjust, she has been given this extraordinarily severe sentence.
Passive resistance is a form of protest which has been frequently and successfully used in this country by men.
A good part of our constitutional history may be said to have been written in the terms of tax-resistance, and it is largely by such means that some of our greatest reforms have been won.
In the case of voteless women it is the only form of protest open to them, short of actual violence.
They have to choose between passive resistance and cowardly acquiescence.
Mrs. Harvey has chosen the latter [sic], and as a result now lies in Holloway Prison.
I earnestly request you to assist the agitation for her immediate release in two ways:—
By copying the accompanying form of protest on to two postcards, adding your name and address, and directing one to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, The Treasury, Whitehall, S.W., and the other to the Home Secretary, Home Office, Whitehall, S.W..
By copying this letter and the form of protest in full and forwarding it to at least three friends, inviting them to join in this “snowball” movement.
Relying on your sympathy and cooperation,
Yours sincerely,
No Taxation Without Representation.
Form of Protest
I write with reference to the case of Mrs. K. Harvey, of Bromley, Kent, who has been committed to prison for two months as a result of her refusal to submit to the tyranny of arbitrary taxation.
In seeking to impress upon a Liberal Government the necessity of putting its principles into practice, Mrs. Harvey adopted the time-honoured protest of passive resistance.
That being her only offence, I protest against this vindictive sentence, and urge you to use every effort to secure her immediate release.
We look forward to a strenuous autumn and winter campaign.
We shall begin this in London by holding a demonstration in Trafalgar-square, , to protest against the biased administration of the law and its treatment of women, as instanced in the two months’ imprisonment in the second division which Mrs. Kate Harvey is now undergoing at Holloway because of her refusal to comply with the regulations of the Insurance Act.
We urge our readers to make this demonstration as widely known as possible, and to bring all the friends they can to the Square to protest against this excessive sentence.
Vote sellers, literature sellers, collectors, and banner bearers will be in great demand, and we shall be glad to have names of volunteers at an early date.
“Would 20s. have ruined Mr. Hampden’s fortune?”
“No, but the payment of half 20s. on the principle on which it was demanded would have made him a slave.”
So Burke epitomised the attitude of John Hampden towards unjust taxation, and so with equal conciseness might the position of the modern tax-resister be summed up.
Beyond the fact that he resisted Ship Money, the majority of people know little about John Hampden, and we therefore commend the new edition of a pamphlet by Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison, of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Herself a well-known resister, the writer has depicted with sympathy and force the struggle between Hampden and the King, and with a novelist’s skill has made the events live again.
The character of this “rebel and leader of rebels” was marked by restraint and dignity, by respect for order and good government.
Slow to take up arms against the King, he acted directly his duty became clear; he received his death-wound leading his “Green Coats” at Chalgrove Field.
Incidently it is interesting to note that the loss of his case against the Crown roused people to see how degenerate the law may become, and paved the way for the Great Rebellion.
It was not the men alone who rebelled, but the women also refused to submit to unjust laws.
Among the twenty or thirty people who signed the protest against Ship Money in Great Kimble Church in 1635 were four women — Mrs. Westall and the Widows Bampton, Goodchild and Semple.
Women also presented petitions for peace at Westminster Hall.
“It may be thought strange and unbeseeming our sex to show ourselves here… but… we are sharers in the public calamities,” so ran the first petition.
This deputation was well received by Pym.
Not so fortunate was the later one of 5,000 women.
Because they pushed their way to the doors of the House of Commons, a cavalry charge was ordered, two women were killed and several injured.
One wonders if there was not a touch of sarcasm about the meek wording of these petitions.
One can imagine the lips of these brave women slightly curling with scorn at such words, as “We need not dictate to your eagle-eyed judgment the way,” or “We do this not… as seeking to equal ourselves with men either in authority or wisdom.”
But we forbear from further extracts, and advise all who wish to realise the continuity of the struggle for freedom through the centuries to read this little book.
M.L.
* “John Hampden” (second edition, with frontispiece).
By Mrs. Darent Harrison.
(Published by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, 10, Talbot House, 98, St. Martin’s-lane, W.C.
Price 1d.)
…some of us have just accompanied to the gates of Holloway the comrade and friend whose letter will be found in the columns of this issue.
Mrs. Harvey, of Bracken Hill, whose splendid work and gracious personality are known to so many of us, having been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment in the second division for refusing to pay her Insurance Tax, and to another month, in lieu of fine, for a license for a manservant, went to prison on Monday.
Our readers will understand that no effort will be spared by the League to make this iniquity known.
We have reason to believe that the law has been strained, if not broken, in the infliction of these sentences.
That will be ascertained.
It is our fervent hope that Mrs. Harvey will soon be with us again.
Meantime we hope and believe that every member of the League will help us to the utmost limit of their powers in the battle we are waging against this gross injustice.
In particular, will every member of the League in London and the neighborhood rally round our banners on , in Trafalgar-square, where a big demonstration of protest will be held?
We hope earnestly that you will not only come yourselves, but that you will bring others with you.
Just and righteous administration of the law is a question which affects men quite as deeply as it affects women.
Our Trafalgar-square Demonstration on , is to be a great success. It is being
advertised by the Caravan, which, covered with great banners, is parading
some of the principal thoroughfares all this week; it is accompanied by a
little band of chalkers and bill-distributers. The meeting is one of protest
against the biased administration of the law and its treatment of women, as
instanced in the two months’ imprisonment in the second division which Mrs.
Kate Harvey is now undergoing at Holloway because of her refusal to pay her
Insurance Tax and license for her manservant. We have a fine list of
speakers: Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Miss Nina Boyle, Miss Amy Hicks,
M.A., Miss Anna Munro, Mrs.
M[argaret].W. Nevinson, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. [Emma] Sproson,
Mrs. Tanner, Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett, Mr. Harry de Pass, Mr. George Lansbury,
Mr. H.W. Nevinson, Mr. John Scurr and Mr. Mark Wilks.
Vote-sellers, literature-sellers, collectors, and
banner-bearers please be at the office
We hope every London member will
attend the demonstration and bring as many friends as possible.
The meeting outside Holloway Gaol, held from the Women’s Freedom League Caravan, was small and not
particularly sympathetic. The speakers — Mrs. Hyde, Mrs. Despard, and Miss
Boyle — were heard without very much interruption, but with little
enthusiasm. The meetings at Bromley, on the other hand, held by the Women’s
Tax Resistance and Freedom Leagues alternately, have been more than
satisfactory. Miss Hicks and Miss Boyle, on
and
nights, secured excellent crowds on
the Market-square, and were listened to with deep attention and quiet
courtesy. These meetings will continue throughout Mrs. Harvey’s imprisonment.
The caravan will continue its advertising campaign through London and the
suburbs until ’s meeting is
over; and the list of speakers for the demonstration is more than satisfactory.
The following resolution will be put to the meeting:—
That this meeting protests with indignation against the vindictive sentences
passed on Voteless Women, and especially that on Mrs. Harvey; and demands
that the Government accord equal treatment to men and women under the law
and under the Constitution.
The arrangements are as follows:—
Platform 1. — Facing National Gallery.
Chair:
Miss Anna Munro.
.
— Mrs. Despard.
.
— Mr. George Lansbury.
.
— Mrs. Cobden Sanderson.
.
— Mr. Harry de Pass.
.
— Miss Nina Boyle.
.
— Resolution.
.
— Collection and Questions.
Platform 2. — Facing Strand.
Chair:
Miss Amy Hicks, M.A..
.
— Mr. John Scurr.
.
— Miss Nina Boyle.
.
— Mr. George Lansbury.
.
— Mrs. Nevinson.
.
— Mr. Mark Wilks.
.
— Resolution.
.
— Collection and Questions.
Platform 3. — Facing Pall Mall.
Chair:
Mrs. Tanner.
.
— Mr. H.W. Nevinson.
.
— Mrs. Tippett.
.
— Mrs. Sproson.
.
— Mr. John Scurr.
.
— Mrs. Despard.
.
— Resolution.
.
— Collection and Questions.
The Chair to be taken at .
Mrs. Despard’s letter to the Home Office asking for Mrs. Harvey’s release has
elicited the reply that the Home Secretary can see no reason to intervene,
and that he does not admit that “Queenie Gerald” is not still serving her
sentence.
Mr. Harben has addressed the following letter to the Home Office:—
Newland-park, Chalfont St.
Giles, Bucks. .
Dear Sir,— May I be permitted to appeal to you to use your power to secure a
reduction of the sentence on Mrs. Harvey, who as a matter of principle has
refused to pay the contribution due under the Insurance Act.
Justice can always afford to be merciful; unfairness is bound to fall back
on cruelty for its support. While women are voteless in the hands of men,
the sense of injustice is bound to arise among them; and that is all the
more reason why a Government, which does not propose to remove that
grievance, should be doubly careful to be fare in all other respects. Yet
more persons have been imprisoned for political offences in the last four
or five years than at any recent period in our history; and while the
administration of the law is thus openly prostituted for political purposes,
there is growing up in the public mind a contempt for the law so widespread
that it has already had a damaging effect on public order, and will
certainly lead to more serious consequences still.
I would ask you, Sir, what good purpose can possibly be served by such a
sentence as this? Two months in the Second Division will cause considerable
suffering to Mrs. Harvey herself; but so far from being a deterrent to her
or anyone else, its effect will be exactly the reverse. The fact that the
offences of Mrs. Harvey and Queenie Gerald are on the same level before the
law will ring as a challenge to all decent men and women throughout the
country to remove the poison from the springs of justice at all costs, and
with the utmost speed. Were it not that cruelty to women has now become a
Government pastime, and that the terrors of Holloway are so obviously the
panem et circenses thrown to the creatures of Llanystumdwy,
it would be impossible to suppose that in England such a sentence could be
allowed to stand. ―I remain, yours faithfully,
Suffragette propaganda postcard: “These useful little Articles / the enemy appals / You’ll find them come in handy / When the Tax Collector calls.”
“No Taxation Without Representation.”
Miss Marie Lawson asks us to publish the following abridged account of her
“snowball” protest, and to correct one or two errors in
our last issue. “Latter” was printed
for “former” in the second paragraph, and an impression was conveyed that the
“snowball” letter was to be anonymous, which is not the case.
Mrs. K. Harvey, of Bromley, has been committed for two months in the second
division for non-payment of a Government Tax and for non-compliance with the
requirements of the National Insurance Act.
As a declaration against the tyranny of arbitrary taxation, Mrs. Harvey
adopted the time-honoured protest of passive resistance — the only form of
protest, short of actual violence, that is open to the women of this country.
She had to choose between passive resistance and cowardly acquiescence. She
chose the former and, as a result, now lies in Holloway Gaol.
You are urgently requested to assist the agitation for her release in two
ways:—
By sending a postcard to the Home Secretary, The Home Office, Whitehall,
S.W., protesting
against the severity of the sentence and demanding her immediate
release.
By copying this statement in full and forwarding it to at least three of
your friends.
Printed postcards for collecting signatures in support of the protest can
be obtained from Miss Lawson on receipt of a stamped envelope.
The protest meeting , in spite of the numerous counter-attractions offered to the public, must be chronicled as one of our successes.
The resolution
That this meeting protests with indignation against the vindictive sentences passed on voteless women, and especially that on Mrs. Harvey, and demands that the Government accord equal treatment to men and women under the law and under the constitution,
was carried from each platform, and the crowd appeared entirely sympathetic.…
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard made the first speech…
A sentence of monstrous injustice had been passed on Mrs. Harvey.
She refused to pay the insurance tax.
Let her point out the inequality of the sentences passed on insurance resisters.
Mrs. Harvey was sued for a count of ten weeks, amounting to 5s. 5d. To this was added costs and special costs, till it mounted to £17. For refusing to pay a license for a man-servant she was further fined £22. But a man who defaulted for thirty-one weeks and, moreover, deceived his servants into the belief that all was straight, was fined 15s. We realise, therefore, that this is vindictive.
Mrs. Harvey was fined not for refusing to pay her tax but for being a rebel.
Mrs. Harvey was a woman who devoted her life to the help of others.
During the dockers’ strike she had taken into her own home three of the dockers’ children and cared for them as if they had been her own.
For the sake of justice — for the sake of our country’s reputation — she asked the people to help.
“I ask all men — workers or not — to send a card to Mr. McKenna, demanding Mrs. Harvey’s release.
Work for the time to come, when men and women shall stand together to make the world better, purer, happier and holier than that in which we are condemned to live.”
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden-Sanderson’s point was that Mrs. Harvey was worth of the vote as a human being.
She had worked for the great movement of universal brotherhood.
Even caddies were striking now against the Insurance Act.
But the caddies would have a vote one day, and Mrs. Harvey never.
She objected, naturally, to obey laws made without her consent; and if ever there was a law which touched women equally with men, and left them, in fact, in a worse position than men, that law was the Insurance Act.
Resistance to taxation is no new principle.
Mr. Harry de Passe, speaking next, said: “I only wish more people would protest against this insurance tax, which has been imposed against the people’s will.
The sending of a good woman to prison for refusal to pay makes it clear to us that we are living under a Government of compulsion.
It is this principle of compulsion that we must fight.
As for those who had the vote, let them not use it for the furtherance of bureaucratic legislation.
Let the privilege and monopoly everywhere be abolished, so that the people may come into their own and be delivered from the control of the expert.”
Miss Amy Hicks, M.A., who took the chair on No. 2 platform, said that Mrs. Harvey had been sent to Holloway Prison for two months for refusing to comply with the Insurance Act, and for refusing to pay the license in connection with her gardener, on the ground that taxation and representation ought to go together.
Miss Hicks then read the following message from Mr. [George] Lansbury, who was too unwell to speak at the meeting:—
“Please say that I hope every man and woman who really believes in freedom and justice will not rest until Mrs. Harvey is released.
It is perfectly monstrous that the law should be administered in the iniquitous manner it has been in her case.”
Mr. John Scurr said he had come to protest against the action of the Liberal Government in respect to women… Mrs. Harvey, in company with the rest of women, either taxpayers or working women, had not been consulted as to the National Health Insurance Act.
Although that Act has placed a poll tax of 3d. or 2d. on every woman who works or employs labour at all, they have neither been consulted as to whether they desired that tax, what the amount of that tax should be, or what should be the benefits given under the Act; therefore Mrs. Harvey contended that, as she had not been consulted, she under no circumstances was going to pay that tax.
(Hear hear.)
… They have given Mrs. Harvey two months in the second division — (shame) — because she refused to pay a fine three times more than that inflicted on any man, and they called this justice!
The same motion was also carried by another meeting:
Tax Resistance.
The meetings at Bromley continue to be satisfactory, and at night’s gathering in the Market-square the resolution carried on Trafalgar-square was put to the assembled crowd, and carried with only four dissentients.
A good many people, however, refrained from expressing an opinion either way.
The meeting was under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, the speaker being Mrs. Emma Sproson, who is now, we are glad to say, once more able to take up Suffrage work.
Bromley gave her a cordial reception.
Another item in the same edition concerns another meeting about tax resistance:
Tax Resistance.
A most enthusiastic meeting was held in the Market-square, Bromley, Kent, on night in connection with the imprisonment of Mrs. Kate Harvey for non-payment of her insurance tax and license on manservant.
Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, was followed by two Californian ladies, Mrs. [Eliza] Wilks and Mrs. [Laura] Grover Smith, both of whom enjoy the vote in their own country and voted in the recent election for President Wilson.
Both the American speakers supported tax resistance as one of the best methods of protesting against the present injustices to women.
The crowd throughout was entirely sympathetic and vigorously applauded the speakers.
Popular sympathy is obviously with Mrs. Harvey.
Mrs. Wilks is a Unitarian minister, and has worked for the Suffrage for fifty years.
Two charges of contravention of the Revenue Act were made at the instance of the Officer of Customs and Excise against Dr. Grace Cadell, 145, Leith-walk, Edinburgh, the well-known Suffragette, in the Midlothian County Justice of the Peace Court this afternoon.
The Clerk of Court read a letter from Dr. Cadell, dated from London, stating that as she was not a person in the eyes of the law it was impossible for her to appear personally.
Mr. Henry Seex, Officer of the Customs and Excise, stated that Dr. Cadell kept two carriages, and only held a license for one.
She had been told about it, and refused to take out the license.
A fine of £2, with the option of ten days’ imprisonment, was imposed.
The second complaint was that she had armorial bearings painted on one of her carriages, and had taken out no license for the same.
She had had armorial bearings painted on her carriage for years, but this year she had refused to take out the necessary licenses.
When remonstrated with she had only replied that she was a Suffragette.
A fine of £3 3s. was imposed, which included the license, with the option of ten days’ imprisonment.
An editorial by C. Nina Boyle in the same issue gave a criticism of government and taxation that was more radical than just the basic no-taxation-without-representation argument common to women’s suffrage tax resistance:
“False and Fraudulent Pretenses.”
People who “obtain money by false and fraudulent pretenses” frequently find themselves in the dock answering for their unhandsome doings before a jury of their fellow-men.
The ordinary man is supposed to have a prejudice against being defrauded; the law is supposed to protect him against it; the public is supposed to approve of such prosecutions and to be ready to assist the law in its pursuit of the misdemeanant.
What causes surprise, under these suppositious circumstances, is to note the very large class of persons who obtain money by false and fraudulent pretenses who never reach the dock at all, and the apathy of that other class which never makes any attempt to put them there.
The class known vaguely but comprehensively as “the authorities,” for instance, is never put in the dock to answer for its abuse of public trust and squandering of public money.
Yet it has earned that guerdon as fully and as conscientiously as the absconding clerk, the bogus company promoter, the false trustee, and the confidence-trick man.
Why do not “the authorities” reap the same reward as those other malefactors?
We wonder why not?
Mrs. Harvey is in Holloway because she will no longer consentingly give her money to dishonest trustees to handle for her.
She has been adjudged “guilty” of a crime which is in reality no crime, but a public service.
She has set an example of watchfulness in the nation’s interests that others would do well to follow.
She not only will not pay for what she may not choose; she will not pay for inferior goods, for bad service, foisted on her without her consent, by false and fraudulent pretenses.
What is it we pay for? In the taxes and duties levied on the population right down to the poorest and humblest of all — who pay through their tea and sugar and the very necessaries of life — there is a vested right to a good return and to honest and able management.
These paid servants of ours — the Cabinet, the House of Commons, the Army and Navy, the Civil Service — represent the skilled labour of national employment.
Some of them get the highest skilled wages paid.
It is only the exception when skilled work is given in return for those wages.
The legal advisers of the Government, one way and another, draw some £45,000 a year.
The Attorney-General, besides his £7,000 a year, is entitled to charge a daily fee when put on to a job.
The other is only a waiting fee.
The result has been that one of the Government’s chief measures had to be withdrawn because it was not in order and did not comply with the rules; and a few days before the close of the Session a Government amendment of more than ordinary importance, affecting the shameful taxing of married women’s incomes, had to be dropped for the same reason.
These two measures both were of deep importance to women.
One was to have an amendment granting to women the rights of their citizenship; the other was to give them relief from an entirely illegal form of levying taxes on their incomes.
Both attempts at remedying injustice failed because of the incompetence of the Law Officers of the Crown.
Women are still to be refused the benefits of the Married Women’s Property Act when it comes to taxation, and over two millions of unlawful booty are still to be collected and disposed of by those guilty of false and fraudulent pretenses.
No wonder Mrs. Harvey goes to prison sooner than let them spend money of hers!
The President of the Board of Trade draws £5,000 a year.
He has under him inspectors who hold inquiries and make reports, and occasionally a Commission is appointed to make a special report.
Such a report was made, at great expense, about two years ago.
It was then pigeon-holed — a common fate of reports.
Then the Titanic went down, and another Commission sat.
This one cost upwards of £30,000. The Attorney-General cut in and drew his fees, and the Solicitor-General did likewise.
Then it transpired that there had been the former Commission and that its report had been pigeon-holed.
Had its report been carried out, the mortality from the Titanic disaster would in all probability have been less.
The public paid for both Commissions, both reports; and it paid more — the list of casualties.
The Board of Trade is conducting another inquiry now.
Major Pringle is inquiring into the Aisgill disaster, just as three years ago he inquired into the Hawes Junction disaster.
The recommendation made then was that electricity rather than oil-gas should be used for lighting.
The railway boards smiled courteously; the Board of Trade responded in kind; the same recommendation will now be made again.
Women and children have paid with their lives for the false and fraudulent dealings of the Board of Trade, whose duty it is to maintain and to introduce safeguards up-to-date for those who travel by land and by water.
Small wonder that some women are refusing to pay these “wicked and slothful servants.”
There was a fire at Messrs.
Arding and Hobbs.
Nine girl children were roasted to death on the roof or smashed to pulp on the pavement.
It transpired that young lads monkeyed around among the piled heaps of celluloid with gas-rings and blazing sealing-wax.
L.C.C. inspectors had said nothing; the manager pooh-poohed fire-drill as farcical.
No report of this scandalous neglect ever reached the L.C.C. through its inspectors.
There was another fire at John Barker’s. Five more girls frizzled to death in that outbreak; and it transpired that only a trifle over 500 of the thousands of London firms that keep young employees on the premises had complied with the L.C.C. regulations of , regarding precautions against fire.
Women are only allowed to vote in proportion of one to every seven men in local government; they cannot turn out these inspectors, and can bring but little influence to bear, for the elections are run on party lines.
The power above the L.C.C. is the Cabinet.
No London County Councillors have been put in the dock.
The Cabinet is composed of persons who at divers and sundry times perambulate the country with their cohorts of supporters and parasites, telling the gullible public, with an unparalleled effrontery of bluff, that in their hands the finances, interests, and persons of the community will be safe.
Other sets of politicians also go on circuit giving this a flat denial and upholding their own peculiar political pills and potions and panaceas.
Sometimes the winners call themselves Unionist, sometimes Liberal; they are equally false and fraudulent in their pretenses.
They draw large salaries for themselves, secure office, titles and pensions for their following; make shameless inroads for their own advantage into the public purse entrusted to their keeping, and misadminister the bulk with a recklessness only equalled by its ineptitude and inefficiency.
Commissions sit eternally, for no apparent object but to enable commissioners to draw fees.
The Housing Commission that sat at Birmingham denounced the “back-to-back” design; but houses are still built on the “back-to-back” plan in Birmingham.
The Poor Law Commission presented a Majority and a Minority Report.
Neither have been acted on, and Mr. John Burns is now upholding and extending the crying evils that the Commission sat to remedy.
The Commission on the Jury System sat for months and months; its report gave no relief to sufferers and no promise of justice; but even what it did recommend goes unheeded.
The Divorce Commission’s Report is waste paper; its only result, a private member’s Bill, with no ghost of a chance to obtain time or consideration, let alone a third reading.
The legal advisers help the Cabinet to frame laws, and the legal members of the House discuss and amend them, with the result that no one knows what they mean until other legal gentlemen, or the same ones, have been paid a second time to discuss them before a judge and jury, who must also be paid to say what they eventually do men.
The public pays three times over in this business of law-making; is it any wonder that some women are rising up to say they will pay no more until they have power to ensure more efficiency?
Nay, is it not far more amazing that they have not done so long ere this?
The Government is the Great Fraud of the age.
It and its supporters, with their false and fraudulent pretenses, cannot even govern.
No one will pretend, in this the twentieth century, that “government” is rightly interpreted as mere coercion, repression, or exhibition of force.
Government that is good, government, above all, that claims to be “representative,” must be based on the goodwill of those governed.
The Government does not exist for one set or one class or one portion alone.
No matter who elects it, no matter what its name, party or politics, all the community has an equal claim on it.
Unrest in any direction should enforce on a Government the duty, the necessity, of immediate attention to that unrest, and an endeavour to remove the cause in some fashion that will allay the unrest without causing undue friction elsewhere.
None of our governments do this.
It is the fashion in governing circles to allow unrest to simmer, boil over and create uproar and outrage; upon which police, military, and specially enrolled forces are most improperly burdened with the task of quelling riot and keeping order.
Governments that cannot govern, that delegate their proper functions to subordinate institutions, that prate of the voice of the people and the mandate of the people and the welfare of the people, but heed none of these things until driven to do so by outbreaks of violence; that keep office but neglect their work; that take pay and do not earn it, are an anachronism.
They obtain and keep their power by a system of false and fraudulent pretenses; and just as it is said in our little wars that “regrettable incidents” will continue to occur until one or two generals have been hanged, so lives will be sacrificed, children demoralised, and the people robbed wholesale, until some of the “managing directors” of our national firm make their appearance in the dock charged with obtaining money by false and fraudulent pretenses, or some other charge that will properly describe their crime.
Meanwhile women should not pay their national contributions; Mrs. Harvey will not do so; the goods are not worth the money.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League has decided to hold a protest meeting in
Hyde-park at , to express indignation at the imprisonment of Mrs. Kate
Harvey, who has for conscientious reasons refused to subscribe to the tyranny
of unrepresentative government. The speakers will be Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton
Parkes, Mr. H.W. Nevinson, and others.
we are holding an Indignation
meeting at Caxton Hall, the indignation expressed to be generally against the
Government, non-representation, mis-representation and imprisonment of
voteless women, and particularly against the sentence of two months’
imprisonment in the second division, which Mrs. Harvey is now serving in
Holloway because of her refusal to comply with the regulations of the
Insurance Act passed over the heads of women without consulting women. The
speakers will be Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mrs. Kineton Parkes (of the
Women’s Tax Resistance League), Mrs. Mustard, and Mr. John Scurr. The chair
will be taken by Miss Nina Boyle at . Admission is free, and there will be no reserved seats. This
is the first of a series of political meetings to be held by the Women’s
Freedom League during the Parliamentary recess.…
At a public meeting held in Market-place, Bromley, Kent, on
, the following resolution was put
and carried with one dissentient:— “This meeting expresses deep indignation
at the imprisonment of Mrs. Harvey for non-payment of Imperial taxes, demands
her immediate release, and further demands that the Government act in
accordance with its own principles, and introduce a measure for Votes for
Women without delay.”
Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, reminds
us that Miss [Ethel] Sargant, the first woman to be appointed president of a
section of the British Association, is a keen Suffragist, and has worked for
the National Union for many years, being president of their Tunbridge Wells
Branch. She is also a tax-resister, and had goods seized and sold by public
auction in Cambridge this spring, and is sister to Mrs. [Mary] Sargant
Florence, the well-known decorative artist, one of the founders of the
Women’s Tax Resistance League.
A splendid open-air meeting, to protest against Mrs. Harvey’s imprisonment,
was held on at the Mound. We were
fortunate in having in the chair
Dr. Grace Cadell, who is
herself at this moment a “concrete example” of the form of militancy for
which Mrs. Harvey is suffering.
Dr. Cadell’s inability to
“appear personally” in court, as she is not a person, has been greatly
appreciated locally, but fortunately it does not extend to Suffrage
platforms!…
The morals of Somerset House [the offices of Inland Revenue] are like those of the much abused “heathen Chinee.”
The Department has a very simple and convenient maxim by which it regulates its conduct, and that is, Never be aware of anything unless it pays.
So long as money could be easily obtained by annexing Mrs. Wilks’ furniture and effects, the Inland Revenue authorities shut their eyes to the fact that she was Mrs. Wilks, living with Mr. Wilks, and therefore might be assumed by any intelligent person to be married.
Their excuse is that she never “told” them she was married until recently, and so they assumed she was not!
Presumably they thought Mr. Wilks was her father-in-law or her grandfather-in-law, or that she called herself Mrs. Wilks by way of a joke.
So soon as they found no more money would be obtainable from her, they conveniently realised that she had a husband, from whom they demand the tax.
“But a great many excuses must be made for a Department which has only become officially alive to woman’s existence during the current year,” writes Mrs. [Ethel] Ayres Purdie to us.
“Hitherto all official letters began with ‘Sir,’ regardless of the fact that women pay taxes, and pay for the official stationery and clerical work.
As I objected to having ‘Sir’ hurled at me every time I opened an official letter, I drew up a form letter, in which I observed that ‘business men’ were in the habit of addressing women clients or customers as ‘Madam,’ and I should be much obliged if they would remember this fact, and refrain from the solecism of addressing me as ‘Sir.’
Every public official from the humble clerk up to Departmental secretaries and arrogant Treasury clerks received one of these letters as regularly as clockwork every time they called me ‘Sir.’
At last they have learnt to address women as ‘Madam,’ and this year even the printed forms begin ‘Sir or Madam,’ for all the world like a respectable business firm.
That “the Law is a Hass” no one has ever seriously attempted to deny; but what one wants to know is what to say of the people who make it?
This is an aspect of the case that has been much neglected; but with a little goodwill and concentration, we hope to make up for lost time and direct attention to the real offenders.
It is a poor kind of wit or wisdom that breaks its shaft over the suffering head of the Law, and keeps silence on the subject of the Law-maker.
The gentlemen who draw salaries large and small, ranging from £10,000 to £400 a year for performing what one might describe as the most highly skilled work required by the country, and who perform that work in such a way as to create such situations as that leading to the arrest of Mr. Mark Wilks for non-payment of taxes not his own and due on an income over which he has no control and whose amount he can only guess at, are surely playing the biggest “bluff” ever put up, on their long-suffering fellow-men.
One’s mind wanders between the alternative possibilities, that those in office are knaves while the others are fools, or that they are all knaves together; or that they are “mostly fools,” both in office and out.
…
…Acts in conflict with each other, such as the Income Tax and Married Women’s Property Acts, the National Insurance and the Truck Acts, should be brought into harmony on some definite ruling; and some attempt should be made by future legislators so to simplify their language as to make their meaning plain without the superfluity of litigation which their unhappy ambiguity at present inflicts on the nation.
While waiting for this legislative millennium, we fill in the time by demonstrating on every possible occasion how poor is the workmanship for which we are called upon to pay such preposterous prices, and how entirely logical and correct a fashion of protesting our displeasure and disability is the Tax Resistance policy, of which Mr. Mark Wilks and Dr. Wilks are the latest exponents.
All Suffragists will thank them for their spirited action, which from the nature of the case must have been painful and unpleasant for them both.
We shall not readily forget such support as that given by Mr. Wilks; and the demonstration on by the W.F.L., the W.T.R.L., the Men’s League and the Men’s Federation, showed how forcible is such action.
The position was entirely appreciated by the large crowds which gathered round the Lions in Trafalgar Square; and in spite of a good deal of laughter and “chaff” which was never ill-natured, a large section of the “long-suffering” British public testified to its dissatisfaction with the present state of the law and its approval of the tactics of the Women Tax Resisters.
True “Queen’s weather” favoured the opening of our autumn campaign on , when the Freedom League, in conjunction with the Tax Resistance League, the Men’s League, the Free Church League, and the Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage met in the Trafalgar-square to demand the enfranchisement of women and to protest against the imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks for the non-payment of his wife’s taxes.
Mme. Mirovitch and Mr. Herbert Jacobs were among those who supported the speakers.
The large crowd, which gathered half an hour before the meeting began and remained throughout the two hours of its duration, showed the widespread interest in votes for women.
Both before and during the speeches members of the Tax Resistance League paraded the Square, carrying sandwich-boards bearing the words in bold letters, “We demand the immediate release of Mark Wilks.”
There were two platforms on the plinth, one presided over by Miss Anna Munro and the other by Mrs. [Isabel] Tippett.
At both of these the following resolution was put and carried by a large majority:— “That this meeting demands from the Government the political enfranchisement of women this Session, and the immediate release of Mr. Mark Wilks.”
Ridiculous Position of the Government.
Mrs. Tippett, in opening the meeting, pointed out the extraordinary and ridiculous position in which the Government has placed itself by the arrest of Mr. Wilks.
The crowd was intensely interested while she read a statement of Mr. Wilks with regard to his position.
Mr. Futvoye, of the Men’s Federation, in moving the resolution, said how glad he was to be on a common platform with so many suffrage societies.
The women’s movement had drawn together people of different parties, religions and sexes.
He emphasised the fact that women will be unable to get fair conditions of life and labour until they get the vote.
As long as they are unrepresented the Government will take no notice of their demand for a living wage.
Mrs. Merivale Mayer, seconding the resolution, said there was much talk about progress in these days, but when women talked of it it seemed to be thought that she required man’s permission to rise.
This was not progress.
Miss Boyle, in supporting the resolution, showed the ridiculous situation brought about by the incompatibility of the laws with regard to Income-tax and the Married Women’s Property Act.
Members of Parliament are the servants of the people, paid, whether they be ministers or ordinary members, out of the pockets of both men and women.
Though paid to make laws, they did their job so badly that other people then had to be paid to find out what the law meant.
Women wanted better value for their money, especially when it was taken from them under compulsion.
Suffragists had found that Tax Resistance was very effective; but though Government was spending public money in trying to put down the Suffrage movement, they would not succeed.
In being so blind as to the strength and significance of the movement, and in their treatment of the women of this country, they were obliged to look either fools or brutes, and as they were not afraid to look either they succeeded in looking both.
An Appeal to Business Men.
Mr. Simpson supported the resolution.
He appealed to the practical business men in the crowd, who had the vote because others had fought for it for them.
After long years of legislation of the people for the people by the people they wanted less of Party politics and more improvement in social conditions.
In the Labour market, what had been done to raise wages was neutralised by the cheap labour of women.
Votes for women was the only remedy for this.
Miss [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, of the Tax Resistance League, explained that Mrs. Wilks refused to pay her taxes because she realised that such a refusal was the most logical protest a woman could make against a Liberal Government whose cry had been that with taxation must go representation.
The Government was bound either to remove the burden of taxation, or give women the vote.
She thought men ought to make the protest, for the Government had imprisoned a man, while Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Mrs. Pankhurst, and many other women who had not paid taxes for years, were still at large.
Worse than Ancient Rome.
At the other platform, presided over by Miss Munro, the mover of the resolution was Mrs. [Margaret] Nevinson, who kept her audience in a ripple of laughter.
She thought it was high time to alter the laws of this country, which in some respects were worse than those of ancient Rome, when in the twentieth century a man could be put in prison for doing nothing.
She told several very amusing and yet pathetic stories of cases she had known before the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, but said that the passing of that Act had brought about such anomalies as the present one, when a man could be arrested for not paying his wife’s taxes when he didn’t even know her income.
Mr. Lawrence Housman, in seconding the resolution, said that as a member of the Tax Resistance League he would like first to thank the Women’s Freedom League for allowing them to share in this meeting and to state a man’s grievance.
He found women always ready to help men, and felt that if men had been as ready to help women they would not be in the position they are to-day.
According to the Anti-Suffragists, the sending of a man to prison for his wife’s default is an example of the wife’s privileges under the law.
All honest women want to get rid of this privilege.
At the mention of Mrs. [Mary] Leigh’s release there was loud applause.
Mr. Housman said the Government dare not kill her because, whatever she had done, they knew she was fighting for a just cause.
Here was a case where physical force, so beloved by the Anti-Suffragists was defeated.
Man and Woman Standing Together.
Mrs. Despard, who was received with loud applause, said it gave her peculiar satisfaction to support the resolution, particularly the last part of it, for in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Wilks she saw coming true an old dream of hers, the dream of men and women standing together, not only in the family, but in that larger family — the State.
She was proud that these were her personal friends.
It was difficult to understand the actions of the Government with regard to tax resistance, for she had not paid taxes for two years, and the Government had done nothing but tell her that she should know their intentions.
In Ireland one weak woman had defied them; they had found it useless to coerce; the only possible course was to yield to the just demands of womanhood.
Poetic Justice.
Mrs. Tanner said that although everyone was indignant at the arrest of Mr. Wilks, there was some sort of poetic justice in a man having to suffer through the muddle made by men.
It showed how incapable men were of legislating by themselves.
Women asked for a share in the Government in order to try and prevent such muddles occurring in the future.
Mr. Kennedy supported the resolution as a member of the Men’s League.
He reminded his audience that the poet Whittier, in writing of Women’s Suffrage, had said that it was right because it was just, and although the consequences were not known, it was the safest thing, the truest expediency, to do right.…
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, of the Tax-Resistance League, also very briefly supported the resolution.
She begged for sympathy and support of Mr. Wilks and announced how this could be publicly shown.
…
Enthusiasm for Dr. Wilks.
At the end of the meeting Dr. Wilks spoke a few words from each platform.
She was received with great applause, which was redoubled when she announced that neither she nor her husband intended to pay the tax.
Mr. Mark Wilks, of 47, Upper Clapton-road, N.E., was arrested on while on his way to the school of which he is headmaster, and removed to Brixton Prison, for the non-payment of his wife’s Income-tax.
He is the husband of Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, suffragist and upholder of the principle “No vote, no tax.”
Her goods have been distrained upon on two occasions for non-payment of taxes.
In a “manifesto” he has issued Mr. Wilks says:—
In my wife claimed that such distraint was illegal, asserting that under the Income-tax Act she, as a married woman, was exempt from taxation.
The authorities then wavered in their claim, making it sometimes on her, sometimes on me, sometimes on us both conjointly, finally on me alone.
On my pointing out that her liability had already been established by forcible distraint upon her property, I was informed that for the future I should be held liable, as that by the Income-tax Act the “wife’s property for purposes of taxation is the husband’s,” although by the Married Women’s Property Act it is entirely out of his control.
Thus I am to be held liable for a tax on property which does not belong to me.
I am now told I am to be committed to prison until such time as I shall pay the “duty and costs” — over £37.
Dr. Wilks’s Statement.
Writing to the Standard (“Woman’s Platform”) Dr. Elizabeth Wilks states the case forcibly and clearly thus:—
Will you allow me a space in your columns to explain as clearly as I can the position my husband and I respectively take in regard to the non-payment of tax on my earned income?
The Press misrepresents the case when it speaks of Mr. Wilks’s refusal to pay the tax.
I refuse to pay any Imperial tax until the Parliamentary vote is granted to women on the same terms as to men.
He does not refuse to pay, but as an assistant-teacher under the London County Council he has not sufficient money to do more than pay the tax on his own income, which he has done.
While, however, married women are not recognised as taxable units the claim does not fall on the right person.
At present the Income-tax Act still holds a man liable for the tax on his wife’s income, in spite of the fact that a more recent Act, the Married Women’s Property Act, has taken from him all control over that income.
Yet we neither of us dreamed that this anachronism would be thus glaringly exposed by the imprisonment sine die of a husband earning a smaller income than his wife.
I am taunted with the fact that while asking for my rights I am unwilling to accept my liabilities.
This is untrue.
I am asking to be recognised as a person both as regards rights and liabilities.
If the State comes to recognise me as a person liable to taxation, but still denies me representation, I, as a voteless tax-resister, shall be in Holloway Prison instead of my husband, a voter and taxpayer, being in Brixton — perhaps a somewhat less absurd position than the present one.
In the meantime the law does indeed press hardly on my husband, and a very striking example is given of the tendency of present-day legislation to penalise those who desire to comply with the marriage laws of the country.
Had the tie between us been irregular my husband would have been practically exempt from Income-tax, and for years I could have claimed abatement.
Because we are legally married he has had to pay the tax on the whole of his salary.
There is one other point I should like to mention.
From the outset of my professional career the authorities have sent the claim on my earned income to me and not to my husband.
In , instead of paying, as I had previously done, I wrote across the form, “No vote, no tax.”
They then distrained on me for the amount.
In I questioned the legality of the threatened distraint, and the authorities then wavered in their claim, making it sometimes on me, sometimes on my husband, sometimes on us both conjointly, finally on him alone.
Now after two years’ intermittent correspondence he is in prison for inability to meet it.
Manifestly if he is liable I am not, and the distraints executed on my goods were illegal.
If I am liable his arrest was illegal and the distraints on me should have been continued.
Certainly it is open to suppose that my husband’s imprisonment is not only unjust but unlawful.
A remark made by Mr. Hobhouse in a debate on the Finance Act on , makes this supposition the more probable.
On this occasion (Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 20, No. 92) he said, speaking on Mr. Walter Guinness’s amendment: “It may be said by hon. gentlemen opposite, ‘Why don’t you send one of the demand forms to the wife?’
I am not at all sure if that course were taken that the Inland Revenue would not put themselves out of court subsequently in their demand from the husband.”
Have they not in this case so put themselves out of court?
Mr. Hobhouse was not sure at that time.
Have the officials become sure since?
Teachers Sign a Petition
A petition against the arrest of Mr. Mark Wilks, the Clapton headmaster, for the non-payment of his wife’s Income-tax, has been circulated among London County Council teachers.
On the first day a thousand signatures were received, and many others are rapidly being obtained.
Protest Meeting.
A public indignation meeting, to protest against the imprisonment of Mark Wilks, will be held on , at the Caxton Hall, Westminster.
The chair will be taken by the Hon. Sir John Cockburn, K.C.M.G., and the speakers will be Mr. H[enry].G[eorge].
Chancellor, M.P., Mr. Laurence Housman, Mr. Herbert Jacobs, Rev. Fleming Williams, and Mr. G[eorge].
Bernard Shaw.
Tickets: Reserved, 2s. 6d.; unreserved, 1s. To be had from The International Suffrage Shop, Adam-street, Strand; and from The Women’s Tax Resistance League, 10, Talbot House, St. Martin’s-lane, W.C.
…Mrs. [Marianne] Hyde and Miss Bennett addressed a meeting in Regent’s Park on , and a resolution was passed calling on the Inland Revenue authorities to release Mr. Mark Wilks, who is imprisoned in Brixton Gaol for the non-payment of his wife’s income-tax.
Mrs. Harvey was released from Holloway on morning in a very bad condition of health, her imprisonment having had a serious effect on her constitution.
She was met at the prison gates by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Miss Harvey, and Miss Watson, and taken to Brackenhill, where she will be nursed back to health.
The refusal of the Home Secretary to allow the attendance of a homœpathic doctor aroused great indignation at Bromley, and some women residents, deeply interested in her person as well as in her protest, paid the smaller fine to secure her release before actual injury should have occurred.
Mrs. Harvey has served her sentence for the Insurance Act resistance, and the remaining term of imprisonment would have been in respect of the gardener’s license.
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes next addressed the meeting.
In the first place she compared the sentences passed on persons who resisted taxation from conscientious convictions with those who resisted from selfish or dishonest motives, showing very forcibly that in the eyes of the Government the former were more worthy of contempt than the latter.
Secondly, she condemned the incompetence of the officials who administered the law showing the ridiculous and dilatory methods in which the proceedings against tax-resisters were carried through, often being allowed to extend over months, and in many instances eventually dropped.
Finally Mrs. Parkes drew attention to the policy followed previously in the cases of Miss [Clemence] Housman and Mr. [Mark] Wilks, as well as that of Mrs. Harvey, of waiting until Parliament was prorogued before making any attempt to bring such cases to an end, and carry out the sentences imposed.
Of course, it was quite easy to see the reason for this policy.
Had Mrs. Harvey’s imprisonment been effected while the House was sitting, numerous friends drawn from all parties would have been asking awkward and unpleasant questions.
…
More Indignation Meetings.
The usual meeting was held last week by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, in Bromley Market-square, to protest against the imprisonment of Mrs. Harvey.
The chair was taken by Mrs. Beaumont Thomas, and the speakers were Mrs. Despard and Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
Mrs. Despard emphasized Mrs. Harvey’s care for neglected children, even to taking them to her home for weeks together.
This, she said, was the kind of woman on whom the Government passed vindictively heavy sentences.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes also pointed out the peculiar hardships of the case.
At the close of the meeting the following resolutions was unanimously carried:—
“That this meeting protests against the sentences passed on Mrs. Harvey, and demands equal treatment under the law for men and women.”
A large and enthusiastic mass meeting was held by the League in Hyde Park on afternoon to protest against the injustice of Mrs. Harvey’s imprisonment.
The speakers were Mrs. Despard and Mr. H.W. Nevinson, and the chair was taken by Mrs. Kineton Parkes.
At the close of the meeting the resolution was passed unanimously followed by prolonged cheering and applause, and the crowd manifested a great interest in this case and remained for more than half an hour to have their questions answered.
…
Pertinent Questions to Mr. McKenna.
The following letter has been sent by Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Organising Secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League:—
To the Right Honourable R. McKenna, M.P., Home Office, S.W. .
Sir,— I am writing again on behalf of the Committee of this League with regard to the imprisonment of Mrs. Harvey.
I find that an urgent letter was sent to you about this matter on , setting forth the facts of the case in detail, and that though acknowledged by your secretary, no reply of any kind had been received.
Would you kindly see that a definite answer is at once sent to the following questions, either by yourself or whoever is acting at the Home Office during your absence?:—
Are you aware that one of the two months’ imprisonment to which Mrs. Harvey was sentenced is for non-payment of the license for her manservant?
If so, can you explain why Mrs. Harvey has been treated differently from other members of this League who for the same conscientious reasons have refused to pay licenses?
Can you explain why Mrs. Harvey is sentenced to a term of imprisonment in the second division instead of being placed in the first division, as Miss Housman was, who also refused to pay taxes?
Will you explain why the Insurance Commissioners were allowed to make a claim for special costs of two guineas in Mrs. Harvey’s case?
Such costs have never been claimed before from man or woman, and Mrs. Harvey’s court fees were already far in excess of the usual costs, viz. £4 10s.
Will you explain why the Bench was allowed to grant this unusual claim?
Can you explain why, if Mrs. Harvey’s imprisonment is a just one, she was not arrested immediately she refused to pay her fine instead of waiting until Parliament was prorogued, when no questions could be asked in the House of Commons by Members of Parliament about the injustice of the case?
At our last meeting Miss [Mary?] Trott addressed the members of the Branch, appealing to all to help in every possible way to secure the release of Mrs. K. Harvey and to work harder for the suffrage cause…
Manchester.
An interesting Branch meeting was held on , at which Miss Trott, from London, appealed on behalf of Mrs. Harvey.
Printed post-cards protesting against the vindictive sentence passed upon her are now ready for signature, and may be obtained at the office.…
Great Protest Meeting Against the Imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks.
“No Government Can Stand Ridicule. The Position is Ridiculous!”
The great meeting of indignant protest against the imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks, held at the Caxton Hall on , under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, will be not only memorable but epoch-making.
The fight for woman’s citizenship in “free England” has led to the imprisonment of a man for failing to do what was impossible.
Throughout the meeting the humor of the situation was frequently commented upon, but the serious aspect was most strongly emphasized.
Sir John Cockburn, who presided, struck a serious note at the outset; for anything, he said, that touched the liberty of the citizen was of the gravest importance.
He remarked that it was the first occasion on which he had attended a meeting to protest against the action of law.
The resolution of protest was proposed by Dr. Mansell Moullin, whose many and continued services to their Cause are warmly appreciated by all Suffragists, in a very able speech, and ran as follows:—
That this meeting indignantly protests against the imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks for his inability to pay the tax on his wife’s earned income, and demands his immediate release.
This meeting also calls for an amendment of the existing Income-tax law, which, contrary to the spirit of the Married Women’s Property Act, regards the wife’s income as one with that of her husband.
A Husband the Property of His Wife.
Dr. Moullin expressed his pleasure in supporting his colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, in the protest against the outrage on her husband.
The case, he said, was not a chapter out of “Alice in Wonderland,” but a plain proof that, although imprisonment for debt has been abolished in England, a man may be deprived of his liberty for non-payment of money which was not his, and which he could not touch.
The only argument that could be used was that Mr. Wilks was the property of his wife.
Twice distraint had been made on the furniture of Mrs. Wilks, the third time the authorities carried off her husband; it is the first occasion on which it has been proved that a husband is the property of his wife.
The law allows a man to put a halter round the neck of his wife, take her to the market-place and sell her, and this has been done within recent years; but there is no law which allows the Inland Revenue authorities to sell a husband for the benefit of his wife.
Governments, he added, can stand abuse, but cannot stand ridicule, and the position with regard to Dr. Wilks and her husband is both ridiculous and anomalous.
The serious question behind the whole matter was how far anyone is justified in resisting the law of the land.
The resister for conscience’ sake is the martyr of one generation and the saint of the next.
Dr. Moullin doubted whether the Hebrews or Romans of old would recognise what their laws had become; we are ashamed of the outrageous sentences for trivial offences passed by our forefathers; our children will be ashamed of the sentences passed to-day.
Everything in the law connected with women required reconstruction from the very foundation, declared Dr. Moullin.
Constitutional methods, like Royal Commissions, were an admirable device for postponing reform; all reformers were unconstitutional; they had to use unconstitutional methods or leave reform alone.
The self-sacrifice of an individual makes a nation great; that nation is dead when reformers are unwilling to sacrifice themselves.
No Man Safe.
Mr. George Bernard Shaw was the next speaker, and gave a characteristically witty and autobiographical address.
He said that this was the beginning of the revolt of his own unfortunate sex against the intolerable henpecking which had been brought upon them by the refusal of the Government to bring about a reform which everybody knew was going to come, and the delay of which was a mere piece of senseless stupidity.
From the unfortunate Prime Minister downwards no man was safe.
He never saw his wife reflecting in a corner without some fear that she was designing some method of putting him and his sex into a hopeless corner.
He never spoke at suffrage gatherings.
He steadily refused to join the ranks of ignominious and superfluous males who gave assistance which was altogether unnecessary to ladies who could well look after themselves.
“If my wife did that to me, the very moment I came out of prison I would get another wife.
It is indefensible.”
— George Bernard Shaw
Under the Married Women’s Property Act the husband retained the responsibility of the property and the woman had the property to herself.
Mr. Wilks was not the first victim.
The first victim was G.B.S. The Government put on a supertax.
That fell on his wife’s income and on his own.
The authorities said that he must pay his wife’s supertax.
He said, “I do not happen to know the extent of her income.”
When he got married he strongly recommended to his wife to have a separate banking account, and she took him at his word.
He had no knowledge of what his wife’s income was.
All he knew was that she had money at her command, and he frequently took advantage of that by borrowing it from her.
The authorities said that they would have to guess at the income; then the Government passed an Act, he forgot the official title of it, but the popular title was the Bernard Shaw Relief Act.
They passed an Act to allow women to pay their supertax.
In spite of this Act, ordinary taxpayers were still apparently under the old regime, and as Mrs. Wilks would not pay the tax on her own income Mr. Wilks went to gaol.
“If my wife did that to me,” said Mr. Shaw, “the very moment I came out of prison I would get another wife.
It is indefensible.”
Women, he added, had got completely beyond the law at the present time.
Mrs. [Mary] Leigh had been let out, but he presumed that after a brief interval for refreshments she would set fire to another theatre.
He got his living by the theatre, and very probably when she read the report of that speech she would set fire to a theatre where his plays were being performed.
The other day he practically challenged the Government to starve Mrs. Leigh, and in the course of the last fortnight he had received the most abusive letters which had ever reached him in his life.
The Government should put an end to the difficulty at once by giving women the vote.
As he resumed his seat Mr. Shaw said: “I feel glad I have been allowed to say the things I have here to-night without being lynched.”
Bullying Fails.
Mr. Laurence Housman laid stress on the fact that the Government was endeavouring to make Mrs. Wilks, through her affection, do something she did not consider right.
Liberty could only be enjoyed when laws were not an offence to the moral conscience of a people.
Laws were not broken in this country every day because they were not practicable.
Every man, according to law, must go to church on Sunday morning, or sit two hours in the stocks; it was unlawful to wheel perambulators on the pavement.
If the police were compelled to administer all the laws on the Statute Book, England would be a hell.
To imprison Mr. Wilks for something which he had not done and could not do was as sane as if a servant were sent to prison because her employer objected to lick stamps under the Insurance Act.
The Government had tried bullying, but women had shown that it did not pay.
Self-respecting people break down a law by demonstrating that it is too expensive to carry.
Question for the Solicitor to the Treasury.
The legal aspect was the point specially dealt with by Mr. Herbert Jacobs, chairman of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.
He said that it was stupidity, not chivalry, which deprived the husband under the Married Women’s Property Act of of the right to his wife’s earnings, but did not relieve him of responsibility to pay for her.
Imprisonment for debt has been abolished; but if it could be shown that a man had the means to pay and refused to pay, he could be sent to prison for contempt of court.
Mr. Jacobs suggested that the Solicitor to the Treasury should be asked to reply to the following question: “What has Mr. Wilks done or omitted to do that he should be imprisoned for life?”
The law, he added, does not compel a man to do that which he cannot possibly perform.
The action of the Internal Revenue authorities may be illegal; it certainly is barbarous and ridiculous.
Bad Bungling
Mr. H[enry].G[eorge].
Chancellor pointed out that the Married Women’s Property Act was an endeavour by men to remove injustice to women, but because they did not realise the injustices from which women suffer and avoided the woman’s point of view, they bungled badly.
No one can respect a ridiculous law, and the means to be taken in the future to avoid making ridiculous laws, must be to give women the right to make their opinions effectively heard through the ballot-box.
Mr. Chancellor said that he had investigated 240 Bill[s] laid on the table of the House, and had found that 123 were as interesting to women as much as to men; twenty-one affected women almost exclusively; six had relation to the franchise.
“When we consider these Bills,” he added, “we rule out the whole experience and knowledge of women.
We must abolish sex privilege as it affects legislation.
I appeal to men who are Antis to consider the Wilks case, which is possible just so long as we perpetuate the huge wrong of the continued disenfranchisement of women.”
Refinement of Cruelty
In a moving speech Rev. Fleming Williams declared that the case of Dr. Wilks and her husband ought to appeal to men all over the country.
He spoke of the personal interviews he had had with Mr. Wilks in the presence of the warder, and of the effect of imprisonment upon him.
It was impossible to contemplate without horror the spectacle of the Government’s attempt to overcome the wife’s resistance by the spectacle of her husband’s sufferings.
If she added to his pain by humiliating surrender, it would lower the high ideal he cherishes of her principles.
“She dare not do it; she will not do it!” exclaimed Mr. Williams. He added that he had had an opportunity of waiting upon the Inland Revenue Board and tried to show them how their action appears to outside people.
He had suggested that, in order to bring the law into harmony with justice, representative public men in co-operation with the Board should approach the Treasury to secure an alteration in the law.
“But,” declared Mr. Williams, “if women are made responsible by law it will not bring the Government an inch nearer the solution of the difficulty.
They may imprison women for tax resistance, but married men would not stand it.
The only way is to say to Dr. Wilks, “We will give you the right to control the use we intend to make of your money.”
The resolution was passed unanimously with great enthusiasm, and thus ended a meeting that will be historic.
The Campaign.
A great campaign is being carried on for the release of Mr. Mark Wilks.
On , the Women’s Tax Resistance League held a meeting, followed by a procession in the neighborhood of the prison, and on Sunday there was a large and very sympathetic meeting in Hyde Park.
Mrs. Mustard took the chair.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard and Mrs. [Margaret] Parkes were the speakers.
The resolution demanding the release of Mr. Wilks was carried unanimously.
Nightly meetings are held in Brixton by the Men’s Federation for Women’s Suffrage.
A great demonstration will take place on , in Trafalgar-square.
Members of the Women’s Freedom League and all sympathisers are asked to come and to bring their friends.
There will be a large attendance of London County Council teachers — more than 3,000 of whom have signed a petition against the arrest of Mr. Wilks.
A deputation of Members of Parliament and other influential men is being arranged by Sir John Cockburn to wait upon Mr. Lloyd George and to see him personally about the case.
We hope earnestly that before this issue of our Vote appears, news of the release of Mark Wilks will be brought to us.
It seems to us impossible that the authorities of the country can persist in their foolish and cruel action.
But, in the meantime and in any case, it may be well for us seriously to consider the situation.
We are bound together, men and women, in a certain order.
For the maintenance of that order, it has been found necessary for communities and nations all over the world to impose laws upon themselves.
In countries that call themselves democratic, it is contended that the civil law is peculiarly binding, because the people not only consent, but, where they have sufficient understanding, demand that the laws which bind them shall, in certain contingencies, be made or changed or repealed according to their need, and because by their voice they place in seats of power the men whom they believe to be honest and wise enough to carry out their will.
That, at least, is the ideal of democracy.
For several generations the British nation has claimed the honour of being foremost in the road that leads to its achievement.
We (or rather the men of the country) boast of our free institutions, of our free speech, of the liberty of the individual within the law to which he has consented, of the right to fair trial and judgment by his peers when he is accused of offences against that law; above all — and now we have the difference between a democratically governed country and one under despotic rule — not to be liable to punishment for the omission of that which he is unable to perform.
It seems clear and simple enough — what any intelligent schoolboy knows; and yet our so-called Liberal Government, which flaunts in every direction the flag of democracy, which proclaims, here severely and there with dulcet persuasion, that liberty for all is their aim, and that “the will of the people shall prevail,” does not hesitate, when it is question of a reform movement which it dislikes and despises, to set itself in direct opposition to its own avowed principles.
For what do the arrest and imprisonment of Mark Wilks mean?
We are perfectly certain that it will not last long.
Stupid and inept as it has been, the Government, we are certain, will not risk the odium which would justly fall upon it if this outrage on liberty went on.
A Government which has much at stake and which lives by the breath of popular opinion cannot afford to ignore such strong and healthy protest as is being poured out on all sides.
To us, who are in the midst of it, that which seems most remarkable is the growth of public feeling.
In the streets where processions are nightly held, we were met at first by banter and rowdyism.
“A man in prison for the sake of Suffragettes!”
To the boy-mind of the metropolis, on the outskirts of many an earnest crowd, that seemed irresistibly funny; but thoughtfulness is spreading; into even the boy-mind, the light of truth is creeping.
If it had done nothing else, the imprisonment of Mark Wilks has certainly done this — it has educated the public mind.
It is not we, the Suffragists alone — it is women and men in hosts who are asking, What do these things mean?
On the part of these in our movement they mean courage, determination, skilful generalship — aye, and speedy triumph.
On the part of our opponents, perplexity and failure.
“This is defeat, fierce king, not victory,” said Shelly’s Prometheus, when from his rock of age-long pain he hurled heroic defiance at his tormentor.
The ills with which thou torturest gird my soul To fresh resistance till the day arrive When these shall be no types of things that are.
Woman, in this professedly liberty-loving country, may echo the hero’s words.
Defeat, in very truth, for what can the authorities do?
Their position is an extraordinary one.
In a lucid interval, politicians — not clearly, it may be, understanding the issues involved — passed the Married Women’s Property Act.
We believe there were no Antis then to guide and encourage woman-fearing man.
This may partly account for it.
In any case, the deed was done.
Married, no less than single women and widows, became owners of their own property and lords of their own labour.
It would have saved the country from much unnecessary trouble if, then, politicians had gone a step further, if they had recognised woman’s personal responsibility as mother, wage-earner or property-owner, and had dealt with her directly.
Love of compromise, unfortunately, weighs too deeply on the soul of the modern politician for him to be able to take so wise a course, and it is left for his successor to unravel the tangle.
What are the authorities to do?
While, with threats of violence and dark hints of disciplined, organised resistance, Ulster defies them, Suffragists by almost miraculous endurance are breaking open prison doors.
While brutal men, under the very eyes of a Minister of the Crown, are torturing and insulting women, in token, we presume, of their devotion to him, the story of the wrongs of women — not only these but others — is being noised abroad.
None of our recent publications has been bought so freely as “The White Slave Traffic.”
While well-known women tax-resisters are left at large, a man who has not resisted, but who respects women and will not coerce his wife, is arrested and locked up in prison without trial, and, since he cannot pay, for an indeterminate time.
A pretty mess indeed, which will take more than the subtlety of an Asquith, a Lloyd George or a McKenna to render palatable to the men on whose votes they depend for their continuance in power!
In a few days they will be faced with a further difficult problem.
Women are prepared to resist, not only the Income, but also the Insurance Tax.
Let us see what the alternatives are.
Mark Wilks may be let out as Miss [Clemence] Housman was; but that will not help the Government.
It is a poor satisfaction to a creditor of national importance to know that his debtor is or has been in prison.
He wants his money, and the example of one resister may be followed by many others.
If so, that big thing the Exchequer suffers.
The creditor may, when Parliament comes together, pleading urgency, pass an Act which will make married women responsible for their own liabilities.
That might result in a revolt of married women which would have serious consequences.
Men who live at ease with their children, shepherded by admirable wives, would find it, to say the least, inconvenient to be deprived periodically of their services.
And these men might be in the position of Mark Wilks.
They might not be able to pay, while their wives might have no goods on which distraint could be made.
Truly the position would be pitiable.
Over the Insurance Act the same difficulties will arise.
What is a distraught Government to do?
The answer is clear.
The one and only alternative that lies before our legislators is at once to take steps whereby women — workers, mothers, property-owners — shall become citizens.
That done, we will pay our taxes with alacrity; we will bring our quota of service to the State that needs our aid, and the unmannerly strife between man and woman will cease.
In the meantime, the law and the legislator are defeated ignominiously, and it is becoming more and more evident that, in a very near future, “the will of the people shall prevail.”
It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to devise a situation which would show more clearly than does the Wilks’ case, how absolutely incapable is the average man of grasping a woman’s point of view, or of realising her grievances and legal disabilities.
For seventy years men have been cooly appropriating the Income-tax refunded by the Inland Revenue on their wives incomes.
Did anybody ever hear of a man raising a protest against the state of the law which made it possible and legal for a husband to do this?
My own experience covers a good many years of Income-tax work, and the handling of some hundreds of cases, but the only complaints I have ever heard have come from the defrauded wives.
I have observed that the men always accepted the position with the utmost equanimity.
But now, when by the exercise of considerable ingenuity, women have contrived, for once in a way, to put the boot on the other leg, the Press and the public generally is filled with horror, and the air is rent with shrieks of protest from the male sex.
The Evening News sapiently remarks that women might have been expected to have more sense than to seek to show up a law which is “so obviously in their favour”!
And The Scotsman says: “One would imagine that the last thing the Wilks’ case would be used for is to illustrate the grievance which woman suffers under the law.
Here two laws combine to favour the wife and inflict wrong upon the husband.”
And it goes on to deride women and “their inherent illogicality.”
Here we see clearly manifest the absolute incapacity of man to realise the existence of any injustice until it touches himself or his fellow man.
Nothing could well be more logical than the holding of a man responsible for non-payment of his wife’s Income-tax, since it is the necessary and inevitable corollary of the theory that a wife’s income belongs to her husband, and that all refunds of Income-tax must be made to him, and to him only.
It is in accordance with logic and also with strict business principles that no person can claim the advantages of his legal position while repudiating its disadvantages.
Thus if a man dies leaving money, his son cannot claim to take that money and at the same time repudiate his father’s debts.
He must accept the one with the other.
And in exactly the same way, women are no longer going to allow men to claim their legal right to demand re-payment of their wives’ Income-tax, unless they also accept their legal responsibility for its non-payment.
The game of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose is played out, and the sooner men realise this fact the better it will be for everybody.
The “logic” of The Scotsman and its contemporaries is no longer good enough for women.
The law must be forced to take its course where men are concerned as it does where women are concerned.
As to the provisions of the Income-tax Act favouring the wife and wronging the husband, I can only say that Mr. Wilks’ case is the first in all my experience where these provisions acted adversely to the husband.
And even in this case they only so acted because women had laid their heads together to bring it about, and thus show how little men relish a law of their own making when it begins to act on the boomerang principle, and they find themselves “hoist with their own petard.”
A few actual instances, casually selected out of a large number, will show how wives have hitherto been “favoured.”
A man and his wife have £100 a year each, taxed (at 1s. 2d. in the £) by deduction before they receive it.
There are four children, on each of whom the husband is entitled to claim a rebate of £10 a year.
(The wife, it should be noted, can never claim any rebate whether she has a dozen or a score of children.
And if a widow, having children, re-marries, the rebate on these children goes to their step-father.)
Consequently the husband can, and does, reclaim not only the tax deducted from his own income, i.e. £5 16s. 8d., but also the £5 16s. 8d. deducted from his wife’s income.
So he really pays no tax at all, and gains £5 16s. 8d. while she loses a similar amount.
Thus the actual position is, that the wife is only worth £94 a year, while he is worth £106 a year, though nominally their incomes are the same.
If single, each could claim repayment of £5 16s. 8d., therefore marriage represents a loss to the wife, but a profit to her husband.
A member of the Women’s Freedom League was forced to leave her husband on account of his misconduct, and to bring up and educate her children without any financial aid from him.
But for a number of years he regularly drew the “repayment” of her Income-tax, until a merciful Providence removed him from this mundane sphere, by which time it was calculated that she had lost, and he had gained, about £200. At his death she, of course, ceased to be a legal “idiot,” and was allowed to claim her repayment for herself.
I may remark here that the Income-tax Act has a favourite method of classifying certain sections of the community, namely, as “idiots, married women, lunatics and insane persons.”
I don’t know precisely what the difference is between a “lunatic” and an “insane person,” but doubtless there is a difference, though unintelligent persons might think they were synonymous terms.
As regards the point of resemblance between the “idiot” and the “married woman,” it is rather obscure, but after intense mental application I have succeeded in locating it; and really when somebody illuminates it for you it becomes clear as daylight.
It is quite evident to me that our super-intelligent legislators are convinced that the woman who is capable of going and getting married is an utter “idiot,” and in fact next door to a “lunatic.”
Well, men ought to know their own sex, and if they say that the women who marry them are idiots, it must be true, I suppose.
We may therefore take it that a woman evinces her intelligence by remaining unmarried.
I ought humbly to explain that, being married myself, I am only one of the idiots, and therefore my ideas on any subject must not be taken to have the slightest value.
But to return to our instances of “favouritism,” another man has £230 a year and his wife £170 a year.
She pays Income-tax (deducted before receipt) to the tune of £9 18s. 4d., and he pays 2s. 6d..
It sounds impossible, perhaps; but when you know the rules it is quite simple.
To begin with, he gets an abatement of £160, which leaves him with £70. Then he gets a further abatement of £67 for insurance premiums, a great part of which premiums are paid by his wife on her own life.
This leaves him with a taxable income of slightly over £3, on which he pays 9d. in the £1., amounting to half-a-crown.
This couple have no children.
If they had any he would begin not only to pay no tax himself, but to have some of hers repaid to him.
She, however, under any circumstances, will always be mulcted of the £9 18s. 4d.; unless she becomes a widow, when she will be able to reclaim the whole amount.
(The official forms supplied to those reclaiming Income-tax read: “A woman must state whether spinster or widow.”)
If we reverse the financial position of this couple, and assume that she receives £230 and he only £170, she would then be paying £13 8s. 4d. Income-tax.
Contrast this with his payment of half-a-crown in the same circumstances, and observe how highly she is “favoured.”
He, however, would then pay nothing and would receive a “refund” of nearly £3 10s. a year.
A very enterprising and smart young fellow was able to treat himself to a really nice motor-cycle — not the sort that has a side-car for a lady — out of his wife’s “repaid” tax; repaid to him, I mean.
He can’t support himself, but depends on her, as she has just about enough for them both to rub along on, though she can’t afford luxuries for herself, and wouldn’t have paid for his.
But the Inland Revenue gave him her money quite cooly and without the slightest fuss.
The “Scotsman” will be pleased to hear that this poor husband manages to bear up quite bravely under his “wrongs,” and seems indeed to get a considerable amount of satisfaction out of them.
His wife, I am truly sorry to say, doesn’t properly appreciate the favour shown to her by the law.
But then men are naturally brave, and women are by nature a thoroughly ungrateful lot I expect, if they could only see themselves as The Scotsman and The Evening News see them.
In this connection it is interesting to note that three years ago two members of our Edinburgh Branch, the Misses N[annie]. and J[essie].
Brown, walked from Edinburgh to London, chatting of Woman Suffrage with the villagers all along the line of route southwards, many of whom had then not even heard about this question.
They started from Edinburgh in and reached London before .
A further point of interest is that the father of these ladies was the last political prisoner in Claton Gaol in .
Mr. Brown’s offence was his refusal to pay the Annuity Tax which he considered an iniquitous imposition.
He was imprisoned for one week, but received the treatment of a political prisoner; he had the satisfaction of knowing that his protest led to the repeal of the Annuity Tax.
The next people who committed a political offence in Edinburgh were two Suffragettes, who — fifty-two years later than Mr. Brown’s incarceration — were imprisoned, but were not treated as political prisoners.
Notwithstanding the showers a good crowd gathered on to hear Mrs. Despard, who spoke of the anomalies existing in our laws affecting women and taxation, and referred at length to the imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks for his inability to pay his wife’s taxes on her earned income.
A resolution expressing indignation at this and demanding Mr. Mark Wilks’ release was passed with only five dissentients.
The chair was taken by Mrs. Mustard, who told the audience of the indignation felt by the Clapton neighbours and friends of Mr. and Dr. Elizabeth Wilks over his imprisonment.
…On evening we had our usual open-air meeting.
Mr. Hawkins kindly chaired, and Mrs. Tanner spoke with her usual excellency, bringing in the “Wilks” case in her speech, as a specimen of anomaly in law in which the man suffers.
The crowd was sympathetic as regarded “poor old Wilks,” but was swayed otherwise by mistaken ideas of our aims and motives.…
“We began with a Mud March; I wonder whether we shall end with one!”
So said a marcher afternoon; the relentless rain and the merciless mud gave point to the observation.
Neither rain nor mud deterred the women from their protest procession long ago, nor did they have any daunting effect on in the march from Kingsway to Holloway.
The change in attitude of the onlookers was extraordinary and emphasises the educative influence of such demonstrations.
No word of scorn or ridicule was heard on ; such words have passed; little but amazement remained, amazement at the courage shown in trying weather conditions.
Truly it was a brave show.
Bands and banners lend splendid aid on such occasions, but the gratifying sight was to see the solidarity and co-operation of many societies.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League led the way, and were followed by the Women’s Social and Political Union, the Women’s Freedom League, the New Constitutional Society, and Actresses’ League, the Fabian Women’s Group, and, finally, the men’s societies; the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement, and the Men’s Committee for Justice to Women.
Faithful friends these, whose help is always available, and one could not help noticing that some of the men were bringing up their small sons in the way they should go!
Let us hope that the boys will not have to do much more marching for the Suffrage Cause!
An hour of it!
Who can describe the determination and courage needed?
But we arrived, and in a very few minutes the chairman, Miss Christabel Pankhurst, was in her place on the cart, surrounded by the speakers.
One’s eyes were rivetted by the sight of the tall, self-possessed lady, quiet and undemonstrative, who scarcely twenty-four hours before had been inside those prison walls.
The singing and the enthusiasm were to reach her in her cell, but the action of the authorities in releasing Miss Housman enabled her to be the seen instead of the unseen centre of the demonstration.
Her words, too, carried great weight.
Humorously she contrasted the treatment of men voters and of voteless women: agents to do everything for the men, motors to take them to the polling booth.
Turning to the prison, Miss Housman exclaimed dramatically, “Holloway is woman’s polling booth; it is there that I have been able to register my vote against a Government that taxes me without representation.”
Only words of courtesy were heard concerning all the officials with whom Miss Housman had come into contact, and she was cheered to the echo when she declared that, glad as she was to be outside Holloway, she was ready to go back again to win the fight for the recognition of woman’s citizenship.
“If that great act of justice, the Conciliation Bill, fails to carry next year, there will be not merely one but hundreds of women in prison to make the nation realise that justice is not being done.”
Thus spoke Mr. Laurence Housman, whose pride in his sister’s devotion to the woman’s Cause was shared by those who listened.
Women were only doing what men had gloried in doing in times past, he added, they were struggling for constitutional liberties; women, too, had caught the spirit of democracy.
Mrs. Despard, heedless of the drenching rain, made an appeal which touched the hearts of all who heard it; she rejoiced in the victory won by Miss Housman’s courageous act of self-sacrifice, and said that tax resistance was drawing women together in a bond as strong as death.
She laughed to scorn the idea that men had all the chivalry and clear-sightedness, women the tenderness and self-sacrifice; neither sex had a monopoly of these qualities, but she looked for the coming of the new day when man and woman should stand side by side as equals.
Miss Adeline Bourne, speaking for the actresses, amused the audience by insisting that if women united in a protest such as Miss Housman had made, the Government would be powerless to deal with them.
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, who succeeded Miss Pankhurst in the chair as soon as the resolution had been moved, gave some remarkable facts as to the predicament of the officials with regard to women tax resisters; amazing differences of treatment were recorded for the same offence, as also the practical sympathy of some who have to carry out a disagreeable duty towards women resisters.
The resolution, which was passed unanimously and with enthusiasm, ran as follows:
That this meeting, held at the gates of Holloway Gaol, congratulates Miss Clemence Housman on her refusal to pay Crown taxes without representation, a reassertion of that principle upon which our forefathers won the constitutional liberties which Englishmen now enjoy, and also upon the successful outcome of her protest.
It condemns the Government’s action in ordering her arrest and imprisonment as a violation of the spirit of the Constitution and of representative government; and it calls upon the Government to give votes to women before again demanding from Miss Housman or any other woman-taxpayer the payment of taxes.
Miss Housman’s communication to the Home Secretary, asking for information as to a definite term of imprisonment, contains so able a statement of her point of view that it should be widely known.
It runs thus:—
That she has resolved to abide by the conditions by law appointed for a woman who, lacking representation, has personally fulfilled a duty — moral, social, and constitutional — by refusing to pay taxes into irresponsible hands.
But, while willing to satisfy the requirements of the law at the expense of her personal liberty to any extent, she learns that no limit has been set to these claims either by statute or by judgment, and she believes that it rests with his Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Home Department to rectify what she feels to be a grievance not intended in such a case as hers.
She begs, therefore, that he will be so good as to define her term of imprisonment, and she desires this not on personal grounds only, but that, thereby, the comparative cost and value of a woman’s liberty and a man’s vote may be officially recorded for the understanding of others, women and men.
A large and enthusiastic crowd listened in Hyde Park on morning to Mrs. Clarkson Swann, who explained fully the Conciliation Bill now before Parliament, and to Mrs. Emma Sproson, who has recently served six weeks in Stafford Jail for non-payment of her dog-tax.…
The employment of tax-resistance as a method of protest against disenfranchisement appears to be due, in the first instance, to Miss Charlotte Babb, whose goods were distrained upon in the early days of the suffrage agitation thirteen times because she refused to pay Imperial taxes.
Following her heroic persistence, there was a series of isolated resistances to taxation by unrepresented women, of whom the best known are Miss Henrietta Müller and the Misses [Anna Maria and Mary] Priestman, of Bristol, who resisted taxation about , and Mrs. [Dora] Montefiore, whose final resistance in gave occasion for the famous six weeks’ siege of her house at Hammersmith.
There were other individual instances as well as these, but the Women’s Freedom League in made the first organised attempt to run a definite tax-resistance campaign.
Instead of isolated instances we have now got a steadily-increasing body of yearly resisters, and the action of these women has been made use of to drive home to the public the concrete injustice of taxation without representation.
a Tax-Resistance League came into existence, confining itself to the development of this one line of protest.
This year, as a sign of further growth, the sister militant society has decided to adopt the tax-resistance policy as a means of bringing additional pressure upon the Government.
These signs of the progress of this very practical anti-Government action are good to see; but just at this moment they are particularly to be welcomed, for the National Executive of the League has just decided to adopt and develop a further line of tax-resistance, in which we hope all the societies approving this general policy will concur.
So far, the strength of the tax-resistance movement has rested with the women who were spinsters or widows; but the new line of action will make the married women a more effective agent of protest.
The most that can be done by the widow and spinster is to enter her protest, and thus delay the passing of her money into the Treasury.
Except in the case of Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard — which is exceptional — no widow or spinster has successfully withheld the contribution demanded of her by the State; but with married women this is possible.
She is enabled by the state of our present law not only to enter her protest, but actually to withhold her moneys, and so to deplete the Treasury coffers.
There are many anomalies with regard to married women upon our Statute Book, and a large number of them are due to the basic wrong done by our Common Law assumption that a married woman is the subject and property of her husband, having no independent existence apart from him.
In spite of the Married Woman’s Property Acts this assumption is still acted upon to-day, old laws that ought to have been rendered null and void by the passing of the Acts, which gave the married woman the control of her own property still remaining on the Statute Book, are being applied by the authorities.
The Income Tax Commissioners provide a case in point.
This legal inconsistency places the woman at a disadvantage, sometimes the man, but if it is dealt with in the right way in this case of Income Tax the Government itself can be made to bear the burden.
It is our duty as suffragists to take advantage of every opportunity which may offer.
Even when the initial cause of the opportunity is an insulting denial of the woman’s independence, we must still employ it.
We must make this very insult to us a means of attack upon the Government which denies us liberty.
We must turn the ridiculous survivals of coverture into weapons of enfranchisement.
The existing law so stands that married women can escape the payment of Imperial taxes.
Then let them take advantage of the law.
Let them organise a depletion of the Treasury.
Let them go tax free until women are enfranchised.
This is the new tax-resistance policy which we have adopted, and which we mean to spread throughout the land.
Let us examine the position.
The standard of Income Tax law is the Finance Act of , upon which all our present Inland Revenue procedure is based.
Section 45 of this Act deals with the position of married women, and declares that the income of a married woman living with her husband shall be deemed the income of the husband, and the same shall be charged in the name of the husband, and not in her name or of her trustee.
So stands the law for the protection of the wife.
The Income Tax authorities cannot legally apply to a married woman for the payment of any Imperial tax; they cannot cite her for non-payment, they cannot levy distraint upon her.
She is not liable to Income Tax in any form whatsoever while living with her husband.
The husband is legally liable for the taxes levied upon his wife’s income, whether earned or unearned, and generally, with her co-operation, he has been able to satisfy the Income Tax authorities as to the extent of that income, and to hand over to the same body the taxes with which she provided him in respect of the claim made upon her through him.
The authorities have been, as the man in the street would say, having it both ways.
They have refused to recognise or deal with the woman, and yet they have insisted upon her husband acting as their agent in levying taxes upon her; but all the time since they and the husband have been acting illegally.
The Married Woman’s Property Act took from the husband the old jus mariti by means of which he became possessor of all his wife’s goods and properties; it took away also his old right of administration of his wife’s property, and deprived him of any legal right to control, inquire into, or interfere with, his wife’s economic affairs.
Therefore, every time a husband, acting with the compulsion of the law behind him, compelled his wife to reveal the extent and nature of her income he was breaking a bigger law and a more recent law than the one which he was obeying.
The husband has no legal right of inquiry, no legal power of control, over the income of his wife.
He cannot be forced to do what is illegal.
He can make no return for his wife.
He cannot be assessed for payment of taxes on an income that he cannot declare.
The plan of campaign is unfolded, and it is only necessary to indicate the details of procedure.
These are simple.
When the demand for a statement of the wife’s income is made for the Government by the husband, the wife must refuse to supply any information, and must refer her husband to the Married Woman’s Property Act (England, ; Scotland, ).
This refusal and reference the husband will convey to the Revenue officials.
In all probability the form will be returned once or twice, and, finally, a form will be sent direct to the wife.
She will return this, calling the attention of the senders to the fact that she is a married woman living with her husband, and referring them to the Income Tax Act of , section 45. If both husband and wife stick firmly to their guns, the authorities would seem to be able to do nothing.
The law allows everyone who pays Income Tax to claim redress for any undue and illegal levy made during the last three years.
Therefore, a married woman’s payment during the last three years can be reclaimed, if she can prove that they were paid by herself or deducted from her personal income.
This course should be followed wherever moneys are paid out by trustees and agents, or deducted from interest on investments.
By this means not only this year’s taxes, but a portion of previous years’, can be withdrawn from the Treasury.
The cumulative effect of this additional development of the tax-resistance campaign and the new impetus given to the old lines of resistance should go some considerable distance towards convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer that women are preferable as allies and peaceful enfranchised citizens than as an army of sharpshooters interfering constantly with the smooth conduct of his financial army.
This is our plan.
Why pay taxes?
Married women, respond!
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, Secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, held a very large gathering .
A part of her long and interesting speech was taken up in pointing out to the audience how we women could obstruct the Government by refusing to pay the Imperial taxes.
She was listened to with deep attention, and many questions were asked.…
No Vote, No Tax.
— “It was mentioned on at the Suffragist demonstration in Alexandria Park, Manchester, that many of the lady Suffragists have refused to fill up their income tax forms, or to answer the urgent notices posted to them in consequence.
This plan is to be carried out all over the country as a protest against taxation without representation.”
— Manchester Evening Chronicle.
Several married women Suffragists, acting on the advice of Mrs. E[thel].
Ayres Purdie, the only woman income tax expert, were able last year to
withhold moneys from the Treasury. So strong is the law in favour of the
position we take up that a case is now in hand to claim back the moneys
taken in taxation from a married woman during the last three years. The
legal inconsistency will provide us with an effective weapon.
Married women who have been separately taxed, or who have resisted taxation
and had their own goods seized in default should put their cases into Mrs.
Purdie’s hands. The law allows every one who pays income tax to claim
redress for any undue and illegal levy made during the last three years.
Therefore a married woman’s payments during the last three years can be
reclaimed if she can prove that they were paid by herself or deducted from
her personal income. This course should be followed wherever moneys are paid
out by trustees and agents, or deducted from interest on investments. By
this means not only this year’s taxes but a portion of previous years’ can
be withdrawn from the Treasury.
On morning Mrs. [Mary McLeod]
Cleeves appeared in the Swansea Police Court to answer a summons for keeping
a carriage without a license. Mrs. Cleeves made a clear and dignified
statement of her position, but the bench sentenced her to a fine of
10s. and costs, or in
default to seven days’ imprisonment! This alternative was evidently given in
the hope of frightening our Swansea Tax Resister into paying; for immediately
before her case was called an almost identical case was considered, the
defendant — a man — being called upon to pay
10s. and costs with no
alternative. However, Mrs. Cleeves was determined not to pay her fine and
was quite prepared to be taken off to prison at once. Mrs. Cleeves, Mr.
Hyde and I drove back to Sketty in the offending carriage. Later in the day
we heard through a solicitor that the Bench had made a slip regarding the
seven days and that a distraint warrant had been issued. Since then Mrs.
Cleeves has been beseiged by friends asking to be allowed to pay her fine;
but like a true Suffragette, she refused. And on
the police came to execute the
warrant, with orders from the Superintendent to take the carriage, which they
did with as little delay as possible. The warrant was issued for a guinea,
yet the officers of the law come along and seize a carriage valued at £30!
This is a piece of gross injustice. Whatever the motive that prompted it,
which most assuredly was not a friendly one, it has turned out to be the best
thing that could have happened. The newspapers took and published photographs
of the carriage being taken away, and gave splendid notices of this peaceful
protest. The Cambria Daily Leader says:—
“No Vote, No Tax!”
Swansea Suffragette at the Police Court.
At the Swansea Police Court , Mrs.
Mary Cleeves, Chez Nous, Sketty, was summoned for having a carriage without
a license.
Sergeant Thomas, Sketty, said he called at defendant’s house and asked if
she had a license. She replied, “No,” and she didn’t intend to take one
out. “No vote, no tax!” (Laughter.) The officer told Mrs. Cleeves he would
have to report her.
Clerk: And you have seen Mrs. Cleeves use the carriage?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Before this occasion? — Yes, almost daily.
Clerk (to Mrs. Cleeves): Have you any question to ask witness?
Mrs. Cleeves: No; I perfectly agree with what he has said.
Clerk: Have you any statement to make?
Mrs. Cleeves: As a matter of principle I have decided to pay no Imperial
tax till I get the vote.
Chairman (after consultation with the clerk): This can’t be called an
Imperial tax, Mrs. Cleeves, because the local authorities get the benefit.
However, we won’t say anything about that. An offence has been committed
and proved. You will be fined
10s. and costs, or in
default seven days.
Clerk: Seventeen shillings in all, Mrs. Cleeves.
Mrs. Cleeves: I refuse to pay.
Chairman: You had better consider the matter: I’ve hinted to you that I
think you may relieve your conscience a great deal when I say that this is
not an Imperial tax.
Mrs. Cleeves sat down where defendants usually sit who cannot or will not
pay the fine.
Clerk: No, you can go, Mrs. Cleeves.
Thanking the Clerk, Mrs. Cleeves retired, and the Clerk observed to the
Inspector: “Issue a distress warrant.”
On morning all Swansea opened its
eyes in amazement and admiration. The good people of the town are used to
seeing Mrs. Cleeves drive about in her carriage. On Saturday they saw her
driving, not her carriage — that is in the hands of the police — but her
cart. Everyone looked, everyone smiled, and everyone talked of the
Suffragette Tax Resister. One vehicle we passed on the road was full of women
who, on catching sight of Mrs. Cleeves in her cart, called out: “Well done,
ma’am!” Many another smiled encouragement, and we may fairly say that Swansea
is thoroughly roused by this last instance of Governmental tyranny. Now we
are waiting to hear when the sale will take place, and we shall hold protest
meetings all over Swansea. The Cambria Daily
Leader has a paragraph headed “Mrs. Cleeve’s Resource,” in which it
says that:
Notwithstanding the loss of her vehicle she was
seen driving about in a market
cart.
On night Mrs. Cleeves, Mr. Hyde
and I drove drove over to Llanelly and held a meeting in the Town Hall
Square. On we had a magnificent
meeting at Briton Ferry. There was very great interest and enthusiasm shown
in our work. At the close of the meeting we received quite an ovation — a rare thing here in Wales. Many pamphlets and
Votes were sold, and no less than seventy-four
postcards signed. These postcards are to Mr. Lloyd George asking him to
withdraw his opposition to the Conciliation Bill. Here again friends rallied
round and asked us to return on , for two meetings which they will advertise. Wherever we have been
with our cards friends have written asking for a packet to get signed amongst
their fellow-workers. Our Post Card Campaign in Wales has opened
successfully, and we hope this augurs well for the future.
A very successful drawing-room meeting was held on the evening of
, when
Dr. Lewin kindly invited
members of the above league to meet at 25, Wimpole-street, and in spite of
the stormy night her spacious rooms were crowded.
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson presided, and in a forcible little speech urged
the members to redouble their efforts to make this very logical form of
protest known amongst their tax-paying friends. Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard was
the speaker, and her eloquent address was listened to with the deepest
attention and admiration. She threw quite a new sidelight upon the somewhat
prosy subject of taxation by showing how men were giving themselves body and
soul to the piling up of gold and how commercialism was spoiling all that was
best in our nation. Women then, observing this, must attack the stronghold,
and see to it that John Bull’s money-bags were not so easily filled in the
future, as they would assuredly not be if the money of the women taxpayers
is withheld. Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes dealt with the business of the
league, and members signed pledge cards to signify which Imperial taxes they
would resist if the Conciliation Bill does not become law this Session.
An interesting discussion followed, and the collection amounted to £27.
At the Garden City.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, by
kind invitation of Miss Stephen Strong, held two most successful meetings at
Letchworth Garden City on .
She pointed out how needful it is to grasp the present opportunity of pushing
on the Conciliation Bill. She called attention to the continued injustice to
women by asking them to contribute imperial money where they had no voice in
its spending. She further urged that much had been said about indiscriminate
charity and the harm it did, yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer placed women
in the childish position of being responsible without an atom of authority.
Many of us had much too alarming ideas as to what would personally happen did
we become so courageous as to resist the tax — should we be sold up, should
we be imprisoned? for in spite of Mr. Winston Churchill’s less severe rules
than those imposed by Mr. Herbert Gladstone, prison has its horrors. Mrs.
Parkes allayed these natural fears by stating that articles to the value of
the required (unjust) tax are taken away and auctioned.
We had a capital meeting; converts were gained, earnest questioners were
satisfactorily answered, subscriptions flowed in, and a spirit of
determination took the place of uncertain fears and hesitation. Many ladies
pledged themselves to resist by filling up cards for that purpose.
Miss Lee, “Thistledown,” 2, Norton-way, Letchworth, Herts., will be glad to
give information and distribute literature.
Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League attended the dinner of welcome held at the Hotel Cecil to the Men’s International Alliance for Women’s Suffrage, and the League was represented at the Congress by Mr. Laurence Housman.
Reception to Dr. and Mr. Mark Wilks.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League wish to announce that they have decided to hold a public reception to Dr. and Mr. Wilks on .
They trust that all Suffrage Societies will support this effort, because not only do they wish to do honour to those who have made such a brave stand for tax resistance, but to use the occasion, as one of many others, to keep before the public mind the necessity for the alteration of the laws which affect the taxation of married women until the reform promised by Mr. Lloyd George is debated in the House of Commons.
Amongst the speakers will be Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, Mr. George Lansbury, M.P., Mr. F. Pethick Lawrence, and Mr. Mark Wilks.
Tickets, 2s. each, including refreshments, may be had from all Suffrage Societies and from the office of the League, 10, Talbot House, St. Martin’s-lane.
The Case of the W.F.L. Hon. Treasurer.
On the hon. treasurer of the Women’s Freedom League was summoned to appear before the Hampstead Petty Sessions Court, at the instance of the London County Council, for refusing to contribute to taxation in the form of dog license.
Dr. Knight did not appear in person, and was represented by Miss Nina Boyle, of the Political and Militant Department, who was supported by Miss Andrews (National Executive Committee), Miss Hunt (assistant secretary to the League), Mrs. Spiller (hon. secretary of the Hampstead Branch), Miss Hicks, Mrs. Garrod, and other friends and supporters.
Mr. Dashwood Carter put the case for the London County Council, and Miss Boyle, invited by the chairman, Mr. Henry Clarke, to state Dr. Knight’s case, asserted that Dr. Knight was “not guilty,” as it was manifestly improper that she should be called upon to contribute to the upkeep of the Government when women were denied representation.
The chairman declared that those were considerations into which they could not go, as they were there to administer the law; whereupon Miss Boyle, expressing her desire to put her case “with the utmost courtesy,” contended that as women not only had to pay for the upkeep of the Government, but also for the upkeep of police-courts, they considered themselves fully entitled to make use of them for the ventilation of their grievance.
The Bench, after a period of indecision, suddenly remembered that the Council had not proved its case; and a witness was hurriedly summoned.
The prosecution incautiously admitted that since calling on Dr. Knight, a license had been taken out in respect of a dog, “but whether it was in respect of the dog at Hampstead, or another at Woodbridge (Suffolk), the prosecution could not say.”
Miss Boyle pointed out that if that were so, there was no proper case for the prosecution; and she would call attention to the grossly improper and slovenly fashion in which the case had been brought into court.
After much consultation, and on Miss Boyle stating that they were not there to contest the case, the Bench fined Dr. Knight £2, with 5s. costs, which, with extraordinary lack of understanding, the court then asked Miss Boyle to produce.
On the assurance that Dr. Knight had not the least intention of paying fines to the Government, the sentence was altered, after more deliberation, to “seven days.”
The prosecuting counsel then greatly improved his case by saying that more witnesses could have been brought from Suffolk, but he had not brought them “because of the expense.”
(Any law and any evidence, apparently, is good enough on which to convict voteless women.)
Dr. Knight’s friends were thereby enabled to leave the court with another emphatic protest against the slovenly and slip-shod procedure in bringing a case.
Dr. Knight has heard nothing further from the Arm of the Law, and is now awaiting developments with her well-known composure.
In Glasgow.
According to The Manchester Guardian, a Sheriff’s officer in Glasgow on , acting on behalf of the Crown, exposed to public sale a number of articles belonging to three women suffragists who as a protest had refused to pay their Imperial taxes.
Two are members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and one is a member of the Women’s Freedom League.
A solid silver tea service, a gold watch and brooch, and a table and clock were sold.
They were bought on behalf of the parties concerned.
The women addressed the large crowd that assembled.
Miss Janet Bunten is, no doubt, our member referred to, and next week we hope to publish particulars.
Our hon. treasurer is still
at large, and members of Headquarters’ office, and those who kindly
volunteer to help with the arduous duties wrestled with there, still have the
pleasure of seeing Dr.
[Elizabeth] Knight coming and going as usual, in perfect unconcern. The
sentence of “seven days” has neither ruffled her serenity nor interfered with
the even tenor of her way; and the discharge of her term appears to have
receded into the dim and distant future. In this connection we may recall to
the minds of our members that the threat of immediate arrest levelled at Mrs.
[Charlotte] Despard some two years ago, for non-payment of taxes, has not yet
been carried out! Mrs. [Kate] Harvey’s barricade against the tax-collector
also remains unbroken, and has in no way hampered her magnificent energy on
behalf of the International Suffrage Fair.
Probably not one of our keenest observers would, on a casual acquaintance
with Mrs. Kate Harvey, discern a fraction of the capacity for organisation and
business-like execution possessed by this unassuming woman. Even after many
years’ personal knowledge of her and of her generous support of our League in
so many ways, this splendid characteristic came as a revelation to me when I
called at her residence in Bromley the other day.
The house itself has been in a state of siege against the tax collector for
some months past, the windows bearing placards of the Tax Resistance League.
Entrance, therefore, was not too easy, even for a comrade. The locked gates
and the silence of the surrounding grounds gave an appearance of inertia,
but what a contrast when once admission was gained! The whole house, which is
a large one, seemed to have been converted into a warehouse and factory
combined. Here was the great clearing house on which the success of our Fair
depends.…
Suffragists will rally in force to greet Mr. Mark Wilks and his wife,
Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, at the
reception, organised in their honour by the Tax Resistance League, to take
place at the Caxton Hall, on The sympathy of
teachers with Mr. Wilks’ protest and imprisonment is shown by the fact that
the chair will be taken by Mr. R. Cholmeley, Headmaster, Owen’s School,
Islington, N. For particulars see page 30.
Mrs. [Ethel] Ayers Purdie’s splendid success at Sunderland, single-handed
against the Board of Inland Revenue, will be given in detail next week. The
Inland Revenue authorities, we understand, intend appealing to the High
Court.
The goods of Mr. J.A. Hall, of “Glenamour,” on
, Waterloo-park, Lancashire,
were sold for the second time against distraint consequent on his refusal to
pay income-tax on house property belonging to his wife. The goods were bought
in by a friend for the amount of the tax and expenses.
Mrs. Hall, who attended the sale in the unavoidable absence of her husband,
explained — by the courtesy of the auctioneer — to the large company of
sympathisers present that this action was taken as the most practical and
emphatic protest possible against the stupid and unjust action of the Revenue
authorities who despite the fact of the Married Woman’s Property Act under
which she herself is liable for her own debts, had forced the issue under the
Income Tax Act of 1842. This Act, whilst making the husband liable for the
payment of any tax on his wife’s own income, leaves him absolutely without
any power to obtain from her any information with regard to her income if she
declines to disclose it.
Mrs. Hall emphasised the absurdity and unfairness of such an enactment,
and said it was matter for considerable surprise that, quite apart from the
merits of the woman’s question, men had not bestirred themselves to force
the Government to remedy this utterly impossible state of things and make
women, if they could, pay this or any other tax whilst withholding
from them the Parliamentary vote.
There is a piquancy which women tax-resisters will not fail to appreciate, in the declaration of Mr. Lloyd George that he is really one of their growing company — have not the Unionist business men in Belfast joined in?
Can it be a result of the tax-resistance campaign now gathering strength in his own Principality, or is it the first indication of an intention to deal fairly with women over that million and a-half sterling which the Treasury conveniently pockets?
Those who live will see.
The “John Bright” Tradition: No Taxation Without Representation.
For a Liberal Government which has repeatedly declared that there must be “No Taxation without Representation” to discover the grandson of John Bright amongst the tax resisters, must be seriously discomforting.
Mrs. Clark, of Street, Somerset, wife of Mr. Roger Clark, grandson on his mother’s side of John Bright, is a member of the old constitutional society for Woman Suffrage, but is also a strong believer in the “No Vote No Tax” policy of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, considering that so long as women are taxed and refused representation it is their duty to make this constitutional protest against injustice.
She, therefore, refused to pay her Income-tax, but was told that though the income was hers, her husband was the person liable to pay the tax.
Mr. Clark, inheriting the “John Bright” tradition, upheld his wife in her determination to demonstrate that, as far as she was concerned, there should be “No Taxation without Representation”!
A silver jug and an Indian rose-bowl were taken to satisfy the claim of the law, and were sold by public auction on at the Crispinian Hall, Street.
There was a crowded audience, and the auctioneer opened the proceedings by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his capacity as tax collector.
After the sale a public meeting was held, presided over by Mr. Roger Clark, at which Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, organising secretary of the Women’s Tax Resistance League spoke, emphasising the constitutional character of tax resistance, and insisting that a nation which approved the action of John Hampden by erecting statues to his memory must also approve the action which tax-paying women are taking to protest against unrepresentative Government.
At the close of the meeting many questions were asked, new members joined the League, and the following resolution was passed with enthusiasm, and only one dissentient:
“That this meeting is of opinion that women tax-payers are justified in refusing to pay all Imperial taxes until they are granted the same control over national expenditure as male tax-payers possess.”
A further and most startling piece of news has come to hand.
In Belfast last week 5,000 men of business came to a “momentous decision.”
They have pledged themselves to “keep back payment of all taxes which they can control, so long as any attempt to put into operation the provisions of the Home Rule Bill is persevered in.”
It would almost seem as if these “hard-headed” men of business who represent £144,000,000 of capital, and who, we learn, are ready to risk the loss of everything, had taken a leaf out of the book of the “wild and evil spirits” whose contumacy they deplore.
But that to which we desire here to draw special attention is the extraordinary lack of any sort of principle on the part of those who govern us.
Women who persist in tax-resistance are imprisoned, and treated with the harshest rigour that the law permits; no recognition of motive; no first division; no permission, except under strict regulation, to see friends; one man is imprisoned for asking soldiers not to shoot their brothers — this in a civilised and Christian country; two or three others because they preached resistance against intolerable trade conditions, exposed the wickedness of the mere money-mongers, and advised hunger-stricken people not to pay rent until the industrial dispute was at an end.
Other people meanwhile conspire to break the laws, should they not be to their liking, threaten armed resistance, and actually drill and organise a provisional citizen-army and government, and, so far from imprisoning and torturing them, the authorities speak them fair, invite them to confer, and hint at a possible compromise.
[Our readers will be specially interested in the following account by Mrs. Ayers Purdie of her successful appeal against the Inland Revenue authorities.]
I desire it to be clearly understood that the following narrative is not an extract from Alice in Wonderland, neither is it a scene out of a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera.
It is a simple and faithful account of a successful Income-Tax appeal which was heard at Durham on .
The appellant was a Suffragist, belonging to the Women’s Tax-Resistance League and the Women’s Social and Political Union.
I was conducting the case for the appellant, which I am legally entitled to do under Section 13 of the Revenue Act, 1903.
Dramatis Personæ
The dramatis personæ are as follows: Two Commissioners of Taxes, elderly gentlemen, inclining, like all their kind, to baldness; spectacled of course; one of them wearing his spectacles high on his forehead, and looking out at me from under his eyebrows with a pair of piercing eyes.
These gentlemen hear appeals under the Income-Tax Acts, and are the judges therein.
Their decision is absolutely final, except on a point of law, in which case a further appeal may be made to the High Court.
To continue the list, there is also the Clerk to the Commissioners, who is a solicitor, member of a well-known North-country firm.
His business is to record everything, and to help the Commissioners on knotty legal questions; and, finally, the Surveyor of Taxes, who conducts the case for the Crown.
Opposed to all these learned gentlemen are my client and myself.
Unlike all other cases, in which the plaintiff or appellant has the opening and closing of the case, the procedure in these appeals is reversed; the Crown has the first and the last word, which puts a handicap on the appellant.
Accordingly the Surveyor of Taxes is invited to open the proceedings with a statement of his case; and he sets forth that Dr. Alice Burn, of Sunderland, Assistant Medical Inspector for the County of Durham, is receiving an official salary of so much per annum, and, though she has a husband, he lives in New Zealand, according to her own admission, so an assessment has been made on her salary and the Surveyor claims that he is fully entitled to do so.
Then it is my turn to put my case, and I freely admit all the facts as stated by the Surveyor, but challenge the conclusion he has drawn from them; my case being that by Section 45 of the Income-Tax Act of 1842 Dr. Burn cannot be held liable for the tax.
The solicitor reads this section aloud to the Commissioners.
Most women are familiar, since the famous [Elizabeth & Mark] Wilks episode, with the words on which I am relying.
They are, “the profits (i.e., income) of any married woman living with her husband shall be deemed the profits of the husband, and shall be charged in the name of the husband, and not in her name.”
One of the Commissioners asks in whose name was Dr. Burn’s salary assessed, and is told that it has been charged in her own name.
Geographical Separation.
The Surveyor, invited to offer any arguments or evidence to support his case, says that as Dr. Burn is here and Mr. Burn is in New Zealand, she cannot be living with him.
I argue, as against this, that the case really involves a point of law as to what is meant or implied by the words “living with her husband;” that these words must be interpreted strictly in accordance with their legal signification, and therefore I shall contend that my client lives with her husband in the legal sense, though I fully admit the geographical separation.
This term, “geographical separation,” seems to strike one of the Commissioners very forcibly; he repeats it with much relish, adding, “Yes, I can see what you mean, and I suppose you will say that the Crown cannot take any cognisance of a mere geographical separation.
Quite so.”
Apparently he thinks this is a good point, and he glances towards the solicitor, as if wondering how in the world they will get over it.
By this time both Commissioners, who started with the expression of men about to be frightfully bored, have become thoroughly alert and impressed; and the Surveyor appears to realise that his task will nt be such an easy one as he anticipated.
He becomes slightly nervous and confused, a little inclined to bluster, and to take the matter personally, which causes him sometimes to contradict himself and to refute his own arguments.
Being now invited to consider the point about “the geographical separation,” he declines to have anything to do with it, and strenuously denies that any point of law is involved.
He absolutely refuses to consider the matter from this standpoint, and declares that the Commissioners do not take the legal aspect into account in forming their decision.
According to him, this case is purely one of fact, and what the Commissioners have to do is to consider the actual fact, and nothing else.
He knows that if a woman’s husband is at the other side of the world she is not living with him in actual fact, and therefore cannot be said to be living with him at all.
Impertinent Questions
Asked by me to state on what authority he bases this last assertion, he says that he bases it on his own authority; and on his own common-sense.
This leads me to inquire how it happened that, being so fully convinced that my client was not living with her husband, he yet had written to her asking her to furnish him with her husband’s name, address, occupation, the amount of his income, &c. He begs this question by complaining that her reply had been that she could not tell him her husband’s address; and, of course, if a woman could not give her husband’s address it was perfectly plain that she could not be living with him.
I point out that this does not follow, and one of the Commissioners mildly suggests that my client shall explain why she made this reply.
She readily answers that her primary reason was indignation at his questions.
The Commissioner, who seems to be rather human, and quick at grasping things, remarks, “Ah, I see.
You thought he had asked you a lot of impertinent questions, and that was your method of showing your resentment.
Very natural, I’m sure.”
The Surveyor being apparently unprepared with any further argument or evidence beyond the assertion of his own common-sense, it is again my innings.
I take up the tale by reference to the decision in Shrewsbury v. Shrewsbury, which showed that the Crown can only claim to levy tax on spinsters, widows, or femes soles, and my client does not correspond to any one of these descriptions.
I quote precedents set by the Inland Revenue Department on other occasions; as witness the successful objection made to taxation by Miss Decima Moore, Miss Constance Collier, and sundry other ladies, whose circumstances were precisely the same as those of my client.
The Surveyor pretends to be too dense to understand how those ladies whose names I have mentioned could have husbands, and has to have it all minutely explained to him before he is convinced.
A Commissioner asks if I can give any other instances, and I reply, “I am an instance myself, if that will do.
My husband’s business compels him to live in Hampshire, while my own business equally compels me to live in London; but no Surveyor of Taxes has ever ventured to assess me, or to insinuate that I am a feme-sole.
Perhaps you will tell me that I do not live with my husband,” I gently suggest to the present Surveyor of Taxes, who looks as if nothing would give him greater satisfaction if he only dared, but he does not offer to accept this invitation, and the Commissioner hastily says, “I think we are now quite satisfied on the question of precedents.”
I am then proceeding to state that the Crown has itself embodied the correct attitude towards married women in one of the forms issues from Somerset House, in which reference is made to the treatment of “a married woman permanently separated from her husband,” when the Surveyor interrupts — “Are you giving that as evidence?”
“Yes, I am,” I reply.
“Then I shall object to it,” he says.
“I deny that there is any Revenue form having such words upon it, and I object to that statement being received as evidence.”
“As he repudiates the existence of this form, I fear we must uphold his objection,” says the Commissioner apologetically to me.
“Oh,” I exclaim, affecting to be greatly dismayed, “this really was my strongest point.
Do you mean to say you will not admit it because you have not this form before you?”
“I am afraid we cannot, if the Surveyor persists in his objection.
As you see, he is also making avery strong point of it,” is the reply.
The Surveyor intimates that he will persist.
“Very well,” I say, in a tone of resignation to the inevitable; and then there is a short and uncomfortable pause.
The Surveyor looks pleased, as though he fancies he has scored at last.
The other three appear to sympathise with me; even my client begins to look apprehensive, as if she fears I am done for.
Because (as she tells me subsequently) she also thinks I cannot produce this thing, and that I have only been bluffing.
Piece de Resistance
But I make a sudden dive down to my satchel, which lies open on the floor at my feet, and where, unseen by anybody else, the disputed form (No. 44A) has been lying in wait; my last act, before I left London, having been to equip myself with this most important document.
It is laid in front of the Commissioners, and they and the solicitor stare very hard at it, shake their heads over it, and murmur to one another, “Yes, it says so, right enough,” and “This settles it, don’t you think?”
When they have quite done with it, the Surveyor has his turn, and he pounces upon it, examines it intently, up and down, and all round, as if to convince himself that there is no deception, and that it is not a conjuring trick.
(I must do him the justice to say that I honesty believe he has never seen or heard of this form before, as it is very little used.)
It is now fairly evident that my pièce de résistance, No. 44A, has clinched the business, as I knew it must, and that my case is as good as won.
But the Surveyor starts off desperately on a fresh tack.
“Even if those words are on this form,” he says, in portentious tones, “it does not follow that what is stated on official forms is necessarily in accordance with law.”
“I quite agree with you there,” is my cordial reply.
“If everything that is contrary to law were to be eliminated from the form, there would be very little left.
But you may take it that the part I am relying on is perfectly good law,” and I glance toward the solicitor, who nods his assent.
“Then I shall maintain that you cannot reply upon what any form says, because the Board of Inland Revenue can at any moment alter the wording of a form,” says the Surveyor.
“Yes, the Board always have the power to vary the forms when they think fit,” echo the Commissioners.
“But they have not yet altered this one,” I object, “and you cannot raise a valid argument against it by simply saying that it might be something different if it did not happen to be what it is.
The Board have put these words on this form to serve some particular purpose of their own; and it so happens that it equally suits my purpose to make use of them here and now.
It is ‘up to you’ to decide this case in one way or the other; but the Crown is not going, as hitherto, to claim to have things both ways.”
“Both ways, indeed,” laughs one of the Commissioners.
“Why, the Crown will have it three ways, if it is possible.”
“And I am here to show the Crown that it is not possible,” I retort.
The Surveyor is disinclined further to contest the validity of Form No. 44A; but the solicitor seems to be uneasy, as if he feels that the Crown is losing prestige, and that somebody must make the running for it.
So he starts to read an obscure and wearisome section of the Income-Tax Act relating to “foreigners” coming to reside in this country!
Ethel Ayers Purdie.
(To be continued.)
I’ll post the second part of the above article on .
After inexplicable delays, the representatives of the Law have finally made up their minds to wrestle with the case of Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight.
On , the Hon. Treasurer of the League received a call from a gentleman who embodied in his person the might, majesty and power of the London County Council, and the Court of Petty Sessions, and showed a desire to annex Dr. Knight’s property in lieu of the £2 5s. which she declines to pay.
It is hardly necessary to tell readers of The Vote that he got very little satisfaction out of his visit, seeing that no fine was forthcoming, no property could be seized, and no information was vouchsafed.
After some slight altercation, and an almost pathetic attempt at persuasion, in neither of which was any advantage gained, the Law retired, to return at some future period (unstated) with a warrant for the arrest of the smiling culprit, who declined, in accordance with the attitude taken up by the Women’s Freedom League, to furnish any information or facilities to the agents of the Government.
Miss Janet Bunten, whose goods were seized in Glasgow at twenty-four hours’ notice, was absent from home with the women marchers at the time that the Government executed its mandate for the distraint.
We are glad to be able to say that a staunch friend of Miss Bunten’s, who belongs to the Women’s Social and Political Union — some of whose members were in the same plight — bought in the goods for her.
Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Last week Mrs. Kineton Parkes spoke at Manchester and Leeds, and on Mrs. [Caroline] Fagan spoke at Woking on the subject of Tax Resistance.
New members joined the League at each place.
On , a Tax Resistance meeting was held under the auspices of the Hampstead W.S.P.U., and was presided over by Mrs. [Myra Eleanor] Sadd Brown.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes and Mr. Mark Wilks were the speakers.
Particulars appear in another column [sic] of the Caxton Hall Reception, on , to Mr. Mark Wilks.
Great interest will also be attached to the account of the case of Dr. Alice Burn, Medical Officer of Health for the County of Durham.
Mrs. Ayers Purdie appeared for her in Durham, and won our case against the Inland Revenue — a notable triumph for the Cause.
The Women’s Tax Resistance will join the Marchers at Camden-town on and proceed with the John Hampden Banner to Trafalgar-square.
“If anyone fears that he has not courage to go to prison he will soon find, when he is inside, that one of its peculiar characteristics is to produce a determination and courage undreamed of to resist, not its discipline, which is a farce, but its tyranny, which oppresses the weak, and vanishes like the mist before the strong.”
— Mark Wilks
Two meetings; the same hall; the same man as the centre of interest; yet what a difference!
In , Mr. Mark Wilks was in prison, and the Caxton Hall rang with the indignant demand for his release.
In Mr. Mark Wilks was on the platform, and the Caxton Hall rang with enthusiastic appreciation of his service to the Woman’s Cause.
“It is fitting that on this memorable day, when the Government has been defeated in the House of Commons, that we should meet to celebrate the defeat of the Government by Mr. Mark Wilks,” said Mr. Pethick Lawrence.
One had only to scan the platform and glance round the hall on to note that the Women’s Tax Resistance League has the power to call together men and women determined to do and to suffer in order to win the legal badge of citizenship for women and the amending of unjust laws.
Mr. Wilks and his brave wife, Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, had a fine reception, and their speeches were clear, straight challenges to all to carry on the fight.
“We must never tire,” said Dr. Wilks, as she showed the injustice of the working of the income tax methods of collection, and told heartrending stories of the betrayal of young girls, “until we have won sex equality.”
“If anyone fears that he has not courage to go to prison he will soon find, when he is inside, that one of its peculiar characteristics is to produce a determination and courage undreamed of to resist, not its discipline, which is a farce, but its tyranny, which oppresses the weak, and vanishes like the mist before the strong.”
Thus, Mr. Mark Wilks; and, having been inside himself, he declared that he was most anxious that Captain Gonne should enjoy a similar experience, because he is resisting taxation, largely on account of the White Slave Traffic.
“They seized an obscure man; let the important ones be seized.
They did not know you were behind me; we will show the one or two men who really stand for the great scheme we call ‘Government,’ that we are behind Captain Gonne.
I have been inside and know how to do it.
Play the band and cheer.
The effect is electric!”
Mr. Robert Cholmely, M.P., from the chair, blessed the Tax Resistance movement; Mr. Pethick Lawrence acclaimed it as part of a militant policy against a Government which abandons its Liberal principles and finds itself defeated; Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard rejoiced that the best men were standing by the women; Mrs. Cobden Sanderson pleaded for more recruits for the League to help it to find more Mark Wilks; Miss Bensusan and Miss Decima Moore delighted and amused everyone by their recitations of imaginary Antis and real tax collectors.
A notable gathering on a notable day.
After many months of barricade, “Brackenhill” was broken into by the tax-collecting authorities, and “in the King’s name” the doors were battered in and Mrs. [Kate] Harvey’s goods were seized to cover the amount of taxes which she refuses to pay so long as no woman in the land has a voice in controlling the expenditure of the country.
The tax-collector wanted these goods to be disposed of peacefully, and therefore insisted that they should be sold on the premises and not in a public hall, as on a previous occasion.
On morning a band of Suffragist men carried placards through the streets of Bromley, on which was the device, “I personally protest against the sale of a woman’s goods to pay taxes over which she has no control,” and long before , the time fixed for the sale, from North, South, East and West, people came streaming into the little town of Bromley, and made their way towards “Brackenhill.”
Punctually at the tax-collector and his deputy mounted the table in the dining-room, and the former, more in sorrow than in anger, began to explain to the crowd assembled that this was a genuine sale!
Mrs. Harvey at once protested against the sale taking place.
Simply and solely because she was a woman, although she was a mother, a business woman, and a tax-payer, she had no voice in saying how the taxes collected from her should be spent.
The tax collector suffered this speech in silence, but he could judge by the cheers it received that there were many ardent sympathisers with Mrs. Harvey in her protest.
He tried to proceed, but one after another the men present loudly urged that no one there should bid for the goods.
The tax-collector feebly said this wasn’t a political meeting, but a genuine sale!
“One penny for your goods then!” was the derisive answer.
“One penny — one penny!” was the continued cry from both inside and outside “Brackenhill.”
Then men protested that the tax-collector was not a genuine auctioneer; he had no hammer, no list of goods to be sold was hung up in the room.
There was no catalogue, nothing to show bidders what was to be sold and what wasn’t.
The men also objected to the presence of the tax-collector’s deputy.
“Tell him to get down!” they shouted.
“The sale shan’t proceed till he does,” they yelled.
“Get down! Get down:” they sang.
But the tax-collector felt safer by the support of this deputy.
“He’s afraid of his own clerk,” they jeered.
Again the tax-collector asked for bids.
“One penny! One penny!” was the deafening response.
The din increased every moment and pandemonium reigned supreme.
During a temporary lull the tax-collector said a sideboard had been sold for nine guineas.
Angry cries from angry men greeted this announcement.
“Illegal sale!”
“He shan’t take it home!”
“The whole thing’s illegal!”
“You shan’t sell anything else!” and The Daily Herald Leaguers, members of the Men’s Political Union, and of other men’s societies, proceeded to make more noise than twenty brass bands.
Darkness was quickly settling in; the tax-collector looked helpless, and his deputy smiled wearily.
“Talk about a comic opera — it’s better than Gilbert and Sullivan could manage,” roared an enthusiast.
“My word, you look sick, guv’nor!
Give it up, man!”
Then everyone shouted against the other until the tax-collector said he closed the sale, remarking plaintively that he had lost £7 over the job!
Ironical cheers greeted this news, with “Serve you right for stealing a woman’s goods!”
He turned his back on his tormentors, and sat down in a chair on the table to think things over.
The protesters sat on the sideboard informing all and sundry that if anyone wanted to take away the sideboard he should take them with it!
With the exit of the tax-collector, his deputy and the bailiff, things gradually grew quieter, and later on Mrs. Harvey entertained her supporters to tea at the Bell Hotel.
But the curious thing is, a man paid nine guineas for the sideboard to the tax-collector.
Mrs. Harvey owed him more than £17, and Mrs. Harvey is still in possession of the sideboard!
In the Market-square in the evening Miss Boyle presided at a large and orderly meeting at which Mr. Mark Wilkes, Mr. Bell, Mr. Webber, Mr. Steer, and Mr. Jouning spoke.
The Tax Resistance banners mingled with those of the Women’s Freedom League, and the meeting was the event of evening at Bromley.
At the instigation of Mr. Webber enthusiastic cheers were given for Mrs. Harvey and the Cause, and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, responding to an insistent call, wound up the meeting with a short speech.
At the Grand Concert Hall, Hastings, on night a public meeting was held under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, which created immense interest in the town owing to the recent decision by Judge Mackarness in favour of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies against the Mayor and Corporation of Hastings.
It will be remembered that owing to the Anti-Suffrage riots on , the authorities prohibited the protest meeting to be held that night, and it was the same mob which attacked the members of the National Union a few days later.
The postponed meeting of the Women’s Tax Resistance League was held night, and in the unavoidable absence of the Countess Brassey the chair was taken by Lady Isabel Hampden Margesson, a direct ascendant of John Hampden.
Lady Isabel, in her opening speech, fully vindicated the action of her historic ancestor, and illustrated by her well-chosen words and clearly expressed sentiments, that she is equally prepared to resist injustice and expose bad government.
Mr Laurence Housman, in a brilliant political speech, traced the constitutional history of Tax Resistance from Magna Charta to the present day, proving that only through refusing to submit to imposition have all great reforms been won.
Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, who was the other speaker, accused the Government of unconstitutional action in demanding taxation from a large section of the community from whom they withheld representation.
She also gave the moral reasons why women should demand the vote, and why they should also unite in protesting by the time honoured way of Tax Resistance against its continual denial.
At the close of the meeting the following resolution was carried with one dissentient:—
That this meeting is of opinion that women are justified in refusing to pay all Imperial taxes until they are granted the same control over national expenditure as male taxpayers possess.
It is satisfactory to know that there was adequate police protection.
It is stated on good authority that the Chief Constable was himself in attendance at this meeting, together with seventy members of the Force, and as many of these men were taken from night duty it caused the authorities a good deal of extra expense.
This police protection would have been more to the point if it had been in evidence in the streets of Hastings on .
On , Mrs. Kineton Parkes spoke at Bristol under the auspices of the New Constitutional Society, and on Wednesday, at Cardiff, under the Women’s Social and Political Union.
No Vote, No Dog License.
At the Assize Court, Kingston-on-Thames, on , Miss Isabelle Stewart, B.Sc., was summoned for non-payment of her dog license.
Defendant did not appear, but it was explained that she had declined to pay the tax on conscientious grounds.
As a suffragist she believed that it was unjust to tax women while they were unrepresented in Parliament.
She was accordingly fined £2 inclusive, and [as] it was stated that she would not pay a fine she considered unjust, distraint was ordered to be levied.
A number of sympathisers were in the Court, including Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who is refusing to pay the licences on her eight dogs.
A meeting was held by the Coronation Stone in the Market Square.
Miss M. Lawrence presided, pointing out that had Miss Stewart been a man she would have had two votes; as a woman she had none.
Mrs. [Myra Eleanor] Sadd Brown then addressed the crowd.
She commented on the treachery of a Government that had gone back on its principle of no taxation without representation and on the different forms of treatment meted out to Sir Edward Carson, Jim Larkin, and the Suffragists respectively.
The crowd throughout was sympathetic, and at the end of the meeting swarmed round the speaker and argued in an amicable way with her.
Mrs. Harvey’s Thanks.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League has received a very charming letter of thanks from Mrs. Harvey for the bouquet presented to her by Miss Clemence Housman on behalf of the League at the Caxton Hall Meeting on .
Few places could seem so unpropitious as a field for Suffrage propaganda as Bromley, in spite of the constant presence of a Suffragist of the calibre of Mrs. [Kate] Harvey; yet, strange to say, the outcome of her protest meeting on Monday was more than gratifying, and the event must be chronicled as an unmitigated success.
By the skilful handling of Miss Munro, a dense crowd which threatened disorder settled down to listen in patience to four speeches of more than average excellence; and when at the close three cheers were raised for Mrs. Harvey, there was a definite show of goodwill and appreciation of the attitude and view which inspired the protest.
From early in the day Mrs. Huntsman and a noble band of sandwich-women had paraded the town announcing the sale and distributing leaflets.
In the afternoon a contingent of the Tax Resistance League arrived with the John Hampden banner and the brown and black pennons and flags.
These marched through the town and market square before entering the hall in which the sale and meeting were to be held, and which was decorated with the flags and colours of the Women’s Freedom League.
Mr. Croome, the King’s officer, conducted the sale in person, the goods sold being a quantity of table silver, a silver toilette set, and one or two other articles.
The prices fetched were trifling, Mrs. Harvey desiring that no one should buy the goods in for her.
Much hostility was displayed throughout the proceedings; and several Freedom Leaguers were of opinion that it was long since so much unpleasantness had been experienced as during the day’s campaign.
When the Inland Revenue vacated the rostrum and Miss [Anna] Munro took the chair, an ugly spirit appeared to possess the meeting for a few brief moments; but it was charmed away by the chairman’s tact and firmness, and an excellent and most courteous hearing was given to all the speakers — melting, towards the end, into real sympathy.
The first speech was from Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, in her most spirited style, winning a hearty meed of applause; and she was followed by Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, who has an admirable “way” with a crowd.
Miss [C. Nina] Boyle then spoke, provoking much amused laughter; and the last speaker, Miss Hicks, closed the “case for the defence” with a well-pointed and finely-balanced argument.
After that came questions, which Miss Munro dealt with in her usual adroit manner.
The audience departed well satisfied and good-humoured, and several new members were won.
Tea was served at Brackenhill after the meeting, a party of ten having been entertained to lunch earlier in the day by Mrs. Clarkson Swann.
In the forenoon Mrs. Harvey and some of her friends, including Mrs. Snow, Mrs. Fisher, Miss Boyle, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Mrs. Clarkson-Swann, and some members of Mrs. Harvey’s household held rendezvouz at the local Sessions Court to hear the case against Mrs. Harvey in respect of not paying a tax on her gardener.
As when Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight was summoned, the representative of the London County Council brought his case into court in the most slovenly, scandalous fashion — these cases furnishing a lurid light on the way the liberties of the public are held cheap by careless authorities.
A spirited defence, which made the cocksure representative aforesaid look extremely foolish, was put up by Mrs. Harvey’s counsel; the verdict of the court being 30s. fine, and costs.
Mrs. Harvey declared she would not pay fine or costs, and the ultimate verdict was “distraint or seven days” — in the second division.
Among those who were at Bromley for the protest were Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Huntsman, Mrs. Kux, Mrs. Macpherson, Mrs. Smith, Miss F[lorence].
A. Underwood, Miss Howard, Miss Rowell, Mrs. Thomas, Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr, Miss Barrow, and Miss Taylor.
In pursuance of our policy of tax-resistance, the Women’s Freedom League has decided to resist the Insurance Act on the ground that we refuse to acquiesce in any legislation which controls the resources of women without the consent of women.
We are now threatened with prosecution by the Insurance Commissioners, but it remains to be seen whether the latter will make good their case.
Government Rests Upon the Consent of the Governed.
They had decided not to insure; they attended great gatherings at the Albert Hall and passed resolutions with fervour, and clapped and cheered the incitements to rebellion, and when the fatal Bill went through and July 1 came, they formed a conspiracy to defraud — the little mistress, and the cook, and the housemaid, who was also her daughter.
“Nothing,” said the little mistress, who was developing unsuspected powers as a street-corner orator, “nothing will induce me to pay a fresh tax levied on women without their consent.
I will not lick stamps at the bidding of Mr. Lloyd George; I will go to gaol as a protest against such an unconstitutional Government.”
“’Ear, ’ear ma’am,” said the cook; “I ’ate that ole Lloyd George; I’d do anything to spite ’im.
I always did ’ate Radicals, and as my ’usband says, they always do leave a mess for other folks to red up.
They takes us poor people’s money and pays theirselves salaries out of it: Gladys read that out of the paper to me the other day.
Old John Burns is ’aving thousands a year, and when we lived in Battersea I remember his saying as no man weren’t worth five ’undred, and quite enough, too, I says.
Conservative gentlemen are rich and knows about governing the working classes, but this ’ere set of Radicals don’t know nothing abou it; they aren’t no better than us, and just on the make for a bit of money.
What’s the good of the Insurance Act to folks as aren’t never ill?
I never ailed nothing in my life except when I was upstairs with the children.
No more ain’t my old Dad, and he’s just on ninety.
When he broke his leg two years ago and the doctor wanted ’im to swallow some nice-looking red medicine, he just took it for to be perlite, and then spat it out and said ’is stummick had lasted him eighty-seven year and ’e weren’t going to start a-poisoning of it then.
“Silly talk I call it.
I ’ate men — I ’ate the sight of them! and me, a married woman with eight, having to turn out and keep ’im and the little ones as I can’t do with the paltry pittance of my wages and Gladys, and now sixpence a week out of our wages and them children’s stummicks — taking to-day’s bread to pay for to-morrow’s medecine I calls it,” and the cook grasped the scrubbing-brush and viciously attacked the speckless kitchen table.
The month of July came and the husband, whose business took him abroad for long periods, returned to his revolting family, and what Gladys reported as a “few words” were spoken at the dining-table.
He would not dream of resisting the Insurance tax.
He was the master of the house and the women would please obey.
He was not going to be summoned for any silly fad of his wife’s; besides, he had a vote and would look a fool in dock.
The wife replied that she had made inquiries, and her Suffrage Society considered she would be liable to be summoned as the servants were in her employ.
They were ready all three to go to gaol like John Hampden for what they considered an unjust and unconstitutional tax.
The newspapers were consulted, and Mr. Masterman’s great and illuminating answer to a questioner in the House on that point of responsibility was quoted by the wife to show they might settle between them: “It is a purely domestic matter.”
Then a brother, who was also a solicitor, was questioned, and deprecated such an evasive reply from a Cabinet Minister, stirring up domestic quarrels in many a home.
In his opinion the husband only was responsible for all payments; a wife, of course, was under coverture and had no civic existence: she acted as her husband’s agent only.
“I am allowed to have my money, though, under the Married Women’s Property Act, ,” said the little mistress, angrily.
“That has nothing to do with it.
I understand you pay the servants out of your husband’s money.”
“Then you may stamp-lick yourself, Claude,” said the little mistress.
“I will not defile my tongue with Government gum.”
Then she went upstairs and cried bitterly.
The master sent for the servants and reduced them, as he thought, to submission.
The housemaid became one year and a-half younger than the age at which she was engaged over a year ago; and though it seemed incredible, her statement was accepted, for the master knew that “to think a girl sixteen” is a valid excuse before any magistrate, and argued that the converse would also hold good, and no man with any chivalry could contradict a lady.
The cook procured a card as she was bidden, and because she quoted the Truck Act and the illegality of stopping wages, the master paid the lot, licked Government gum till his tongue was sore, and then, his house in order, departed to his business in far countries.
Then the revolt burst out once more.
In spite of her boast of good health, the cook, finding six shillings paid down for ill-health and medical attendance, immediately developed the usual domestic ailments, swimmings here and sinkings there, pains in various regions, which, with the assistance of advertisements for quack medicines, she scientifically diagnosed as liver, kidney, “tisis,” and “pneumonia.”
When she was told that these must be endured till January without State assistance, but that if she was really so ill the family doctor should at once be summoned, she replied she would not dream of such a thing, she never did ’old with doctors, but if she paid money down she liked something to show for it, and not a ’alfpenny more would she put on that card.
Then the “Mark Wilkes’ case” happened, and the power of the law of coverture was proved, so the little mistress went down to consult her society.
She had been brought up on cricket, and it did not seem fair, as she said, to get her husband into prison in his absence.
“Serve him right,” said the honorary secretary.
“Quite enough women have been to gaol,” said the treasurer; “it is time a few men got there for their own folly in allowing such laws.”
“You know we have your pledge as a passive resister, prepared with your two servants to go to gaol; you cannot go back on your word, Mrs. James.”
“We don’t wish to do so; but if they only fine my husband, who has a vote, our protest falls flat; he won’t be a Mark Wilkes and go to gaol for us.”
“You can, of course, take back your pledge.”
“But then cook won’t, and she is very obstinate.”
“You might dismiss her.”
“Yes, but she can cook, and so few cooks know how.”
“My dear,” said a white-haired woman, “if she can cook give her the best bedroom and anything she desires and go on talking about the Insurance Act when your husband comes home.
Discussions on Women’s Liberty are glorious, but disputes over spoilt victuals are degrading.”
As time went on the little mistress, who had both a conscience and a power of attorney, became appalled at the revolt of the women.
The little governess who came to teach the children refused to insure.
She was a Christian Scientist and did not believe either in illness nor doctors.
“Why,” she asked, with unanswerable logic, “should one insure against anything non-existent?”
The charwoman said no one would engage her because of “them stamps,” they took up girls under sixteen instead; but now she suddenly posed as a married woman, wife of a wage-earner, her husband, whom she had supported for years, having once found employment as a buckler-on of skates when, at rare intervals, the climate allowed the ponds on the common to be opened to the public for the exhilarating exercise.
The little dressmaker, who came to renovate and repair, was not insured.
She had been dismissed from her place, she said, in July, and since then no one would employ her because she had not card.
As she would probably end shortly in the workhouse, she thought she might as well go there via prison — both supplied board and lodging gratis.
The model, who came to pose for the figure of Justice which the little mistress was designing for a Suffrage banner, also said that the ladies of her profession would not dream of insuring; and as, apparently, Mr. Lloyd George had never heard of the trade they were safe.
When October 15 drew nigh the cook, after several exhortations, was given an evening off and money for stamps, and sent to join an Approved Society.
She returned very late, having missed a train on the Tube, and very vituperative against the Government; in fact, her command of Limehouse was worthy of the Chancellor himself.
The next afternoon she again was granted a holiday, but returned this time depressed and lachrymose.
She had heard, she said, of a gentleman at Lilac Cottage on the Common who would make excellent terms with her, and she was going back after tea.
“No,” said the little mistress, “you cannot go out again; I am expecting a friend and you must stop at home and cook the dinner.”
The meal came up as incoherent and confused as the Insurance Act itself, and amongst the rare refreshing fruits of the macédoine a big white onion flaunted so aggressively that the eldest son of the house, who came down to dessert, announced that he “could hear it smell.”
The ladies took refuge in the drawing-room, the little mistress jealous of her reputation as housekeeper quite overcome.
“I can’t think what is the matter with cook, the Insurance Act seems quite to have unhinged her.[”]
“No wonder,” said the honorary secretary, as she lit her cigarette.
Our enthusiastic member in the Garden City, Miss [Clara] Lee, has been working hard for some time trying to form a Branch of the League there, and now her efforts are to be crowned with success.
A meeting was arranged for , at which the speakers were Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard and Mrs. [Margaret] Nevinson.
It had been well advertised by Miss Lee in various ways, her poster parade at creating quite a sensation in Letchworth.
The result was a splendid meeting; the Howard Hall was full, and in response to Mrs. Despard’s inspiriting appeal, a number of people gave in their names as members of the new Branch.
Miss Lee, who, on more than one occasion, has refused to pay taxes, had the joy of learning that, as a result of Mrs. Nevinson’s speech on tax-resistance, she will now be supported by many other tax resisters in the first Garden City.
A resolution, moved by Mrs. Tudor, calling upon the Government to include women in the proposed Reform Bill, was carried, one might almost say unanimously, for, though one gentleman dissented, he admitted afterwards that his position was that of “sitting upon the fence.”
Miss Lee, who has kindly agreed to be hon. secretary of the new Branch, will be glad to hear from any sympathisers in the district.
The public examination of Dr. Patch (Women’s Freedom League) in the bankruptcy proceedings against her by the Inland Revenue Department brought together a large crowd of suffragists belonging to all suffrage societies at Bankruptcy Buildings last Tuesday morning.
The officials were astonished to see women bringing in extra benches and overflowing into the solicitors’ seats and the Press pen.
The usual first item on the programme is the swearing of the alleged bankrupt.
Dr. Patch was therefore invited to take the oath, but replied that that was impossible, as she could not bow to the authority of that Court; a suggestion that she should affirm instead of swearing received the same answer.
The Court, being thus up against an insurmountable obstacle, waited a moment and thought it over.
Dr. Patch refused to answer any questions, “not recognising that the Court had any authority over her,” and the only information that the Court could secure was that she was determined not to pay the tax demanded, and that nothing they could do would maker her.
Asked whether she quite understood the fearful consequences of persistence (imprisonment &c.), she assured the Court that she was prepared for anything that might come.
Further progress seemed difficult, and the solicitor to the Commissioners of Inland Revenue suggested that the proceedings should be adjourned sine die, but the Court preferred to adjourn the case for three weeks, making the cryptic remark that three weeks would be “quite sufficient.”
The next gathering, therefore, will be on at Bankruptcy Buildings, Carey-street.
is the date of the official “Women’s Day,” and very appropriate for the next state of this protest.
Meeting at the Women’s Freedom League Headquarters.
There was a splendid gathering at the meeting at Headquarters to support the protest of Dr. Patch, and keen appreciation was expressed of her courageous stand at this time on behalf of unenfranchised women.
Dr. [Elizabeth] Knight presided, and pointed out that if the Government would enfranchise women much time would be saved that is now spent in endeavours to discover facts about tax-resisters, and the country would be better administered.
Dr. Patch’s statement of her experiences as a tax-resister and of the steps which led to the proceedings of , aroused special interest.
She declared that her action was not prompted by unpatriotic motives, as she was ready to give her utmost to the country — but of her own free will; her protest was against taxation without representation.
Mr. Pethick Laurence said that, as far as he knew, he and Dr. Patch were the only suffragists who had gone through the inconvenient form of protest of bankruptcy proceedings.
It was a form which caused inconvenience to the authorities, and brought home to the public the meaning of the suffrage agitation.
In an interesting survey of the situation to-day he discussed the Report of the Electoral Conference, and insisted that no franchise would be satisfactory which did not achieve equality for men and women.
Even in the most remote and unlikely possibility of the votes of all men being cast on one side and of all women on the other in an important issue, it would only mean the majority rule on which the administration of the country is based.
Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, a veteran tax-resister, said she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by the Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted, and spoke strongly on the importance of resisting the possible conscription of voteless women.
The League meant to live up to its title, and women would only be free when they stood shoulder to shoulder as equals with men in the service of humanity.
Miss [Kate] Raleigh, another tax-resister, showed how the very universe works by the power of resistance, and urged the need for continuous resistance to fictitious ideas, including man’s domination of woman.
If conscription of voteless women should be attempted, sex oppression will follow.
Miss [Florence A.] Underwood, in paying tribute to Dr. Patch, as did all the speakers, made a stirring appeal to women suffragists to rally round the Flag and show Parliament, the public, and the Press that they were alive and active and meant to win their victory — the vote on equal terms with men.
Refusal to pay Imperial taxes, which has been described as the best of all
protests, was the subject of an interesting address given by Mrs. [Margaret]
Kineton Parkes at the Caxton Hall on , when Mrs. [Edith] How Martyn presided and Mr. Bart Kennedy was
also amongst the speakers. Mrs. Parkes introduced her subject by explaining
that as one of the planks of the Suffrage platform was “Taxation without
representation is tyranny” it was inconsistent for any Suffragist to pay
Imperial taxes. They should not refuse to pay rates, for they had the
municipal vote, but they should, if they wanted to be consistent to their
principle, decline to pay Imperial taxes, such as inhabited house duty, taxes
on armorial bearings, income-tax,
&c. The
society she represented, which was organising this refusal to pay Imperial
taxes, had been in existence , and included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative,
Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get
a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes, and thus cause a
block at Somerset House. The isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only
caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause
considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue
home to them. Even now it had been found that the Government rather than go
to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant “debtor,” and attracting
attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in
several instances. Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard had had no application for taxes
since she had been sold up .
This principle of taxation and representation she had found appealed to
women who had not given the subject any previous consideration, and it always
had an immediate influence on a male audience. A working woman was not asked
to pay less taxes because she was a woman, though she was usually asked to
receive less by her employer.
To married women with incomes she suggested that they should ask their
husbands not to fill in the amount in the space left on the income-tax
paper for details of wife’s income. Then, if they sent her a separate paper,
she could refuse to pay. In the past they had not given the Government half
enough work, and they should make it as difficult as possible for them to
recover money from women. She asked anyone present who knew women who paid
taxes to send in their names, that they might be approached by her society.
The Women’s Freedom League had been the pioneers in this method of Government
resistance.
Miss [Muriel] Matters, who spoke subsequently, observed that, while the
Government gave the male taxpayer a vote as receipt for his money, they said
to the woman, “Pay up and shut up.” Mrs. [Dora] Montefiore gave a brief
account of how to make it difficult for the Government to recover taxes from
women.…
A highly successful meeting under the auspices of the Women’s Tax Resistance League was held in the Town Hall, Buxton, on .
Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr presided.
The principal speaker was Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard, who said that for five years she had refused to pay imperial taxes, and pointed out that women were virtually in a position of slavery so long as they were forced to obey laws which they had no hand in making.
The secretary, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, explained the object and progress of the League.
A resolution to the effect that women were justified in resisting taxation until they were enfranchised was carried with only three objectors.
The Chapel-en-le-Frith Glee Singers gave an admirable rendering [of] “Women of To-day” (music by Montague King).
A drawing-room meeting had been previously held at Park House, by kind invitation of Miss Ashmall-Salt.
In connection with the League, a shop has been opened at Spring Gardens, where daily meetings are held.
On , Dr. [Winifred] Patch, of Highbury (Women’s Freedom League), made her second appearance at her public examination in the bankruptcy proceedings brought against her by the Inland Revenue Department, adjourned from .
The crowd of suffragist sympathisers was far larger than on the previous occasion, and included Mrs. Despard, Dr. and Mrs. Clark; Miss Evelyn Sharp, Mrs. Juson Kerr, Mrs. [Barbara] Ayrton Gould, Miss [Bertha] Brewster, Miss Smith Piggott, Miss [Agnes Edith] Metcalf, Mrs. Kineton Parkes, Miss [Kate] Raleigh, Mrs. Julia Wood, Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, Miss Gertrude Eaton, Mrs. Mustard, Mrs. Tanner, Miss [Sarah] Benett, and many others.
To vary the proceedings Dr. Patch offered this time to make an affirmation, and answer any questions which seemed to her to merit a reply.
These were not very numerous.
Dr. Patch then stated her position:—
I do not acknowledge the authority of the Court, for it is being employed by the Crown not to fulfill its proper function of adjusting equitably the claims of creditor and debtor, but to enforce an unconstitutional demand, as did the Court of the Star Chamber 250 years ago.
It is to the British Constitution that the British Empire owes its place among the leading nations of the world, and it is the duty of her children to whom her honour is dear to keep her true to those principles.
I was a tax resister before the outbreak of the war.
The political truce with the Government was tacitly accepted by suffragists, and this would have prevented me from beginning tax resistance after war broke out.
I have paid no taxes for many years, and it is a breach of faith of the Government to have just started proceedings against me now.
By taking my money which is at my bank you only prevent me from putting it into War Loan, as I intended to do.
As regards the money left to me by my brother, who fell a few months ago, gallantly fighting for our country, I do not know whether you wish to take this from me.
I am a suffragist, I love my country, but I claim the right to give to my country in my own way what she has no right to take from me by force until women are represented in the Councils of the nation.
I ask that the judgment of bankruptcy against me be annulled.
The Court adjourned the proceedings for another fortnight, pending the receipt of the signed statement of particulars from Dr. Patch, which the authorities are so anxious to add to their documents.
Further developments will be announced.
Luncheon to Dr. Patch at Headquarters
After the proceedings at Bankruptcy-buildings, Dr. Patch was entertained at headquarters to luncheon, for providing which the Minerva Cafe added to its crown of laurels.
Mrs. Despard presided over a large gathering of supporters.
She expressed, amid applause, the warm appreciation and admiration of all for Dr. Patch’s service to the great cause of Votes for Women.
Dr. Clark praised the ability she has displayed in her plucky action, and declared that no class which possesses power gives in without a struggle.
Mrs. Kineton Parkes pointed out the heavy cost at this time of her sacrifice for conscience’ sake, and hoped that a memorial would tell future generations of Dr. Patch’s service to the cause of Votes for Women.
After short speeches from Miss Evelyn Sharp and Mrs. Mustard, Dr. Patch thanked everyone for their support, and used the words of the late Professor Kettle as expressing the attitude of unenfranchised women:
Bound in the toils of hate we may not cease, Free, we are free to be your friends.
It’s been a while since I’ve dug into the archives to hunt for information on how tax resistance was used in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement.
Here is a very early example, as reported by the Buffalo (New York) Express on :
London, — Miss Muller [Henrietta Müller, I think —♇], a member of the London School Board for the Lambeth District, is the first woman in England to pose as a martyr in the cause of woman suffrage.
She has undertaken in her own person to prove her devotion to the principle “No taxation without representation.”
Miss Muller is a leader of the Woman Suffragists, and was one of the first to propose, during the pendency of Mr. Woodall’s amendments to the Franchise bill, that women throughout the kingdom should form societies to resist the payment of taxes until the franchise should be extended to women householders.
When Mr. Woodall’s amendment was so overwhelmingly defeated in the House of Commons the ardor of the ladies perceptibly cooled, and but little has lately been heard of the proposed tax-resistance societies and defense fund.
Miss Muller, however, never wavered, and when the rate collector made his rounds this year she promptly and absolutely refused to pay a farthing for taxes upon her house.
This is situated in the fashionable precincts of Cadogan Square.
The collector argues and implored in vain, and finally distrained a portion of the furniture in Miss Muller’s residence in satisfaction of the levy.
was set for the execution of the writ, and Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.
Miss Muller was visited by a Cable News correspondent, and was found to be full of fight and determination to continue in her resistance.
She is a small and slender but sinewy woman of about forty-five, and gives one the impression of a veritable volcano of temper and pluck.
She sadly bewailed the seizure by the minions of the law of her favorite belongings, and said that the wretches had purposely picked out those articles which were most cherished by her on account of their associations and overlooked others of greater value.
“But,” she added, “they did not collect the rates, and they never will if they rob me of every stick of my furniture and pull the doors and windows out of my house.
I shall continue this fight if I am the only woman left in England to do so, but I hope and believe that thousands of English women will be found brave enough to follow my example.”
A paragraph of unsigned editorial commentary accompanied that piece:
The Smith sisters [Abby & Julia] of Glastonbury, Ct., who struggled so hard for the principle of “no taxation without representation,” now have an imitator in England.
The Smith sisters regularly refused to pay their taxes because they could not vote, and as regularly saw their cows sold by the tax collector, they protesting but bidding them in.
Miss Muller, the English woman who is following the same principle, lives in a fashionable quarter of London.
She witnessed the carting off of some of ber choicest furniture by the minions of the law, and invited several hundred other women to be present and witness the outrage.
It was no doubt a touching spectacle.
Our cable special clearly shows that Miss Muller was very mad.
But the public will refuse to sympathize very profoundly with a reform martyr of that sort.
Women suffrage may be advisable, though some of us do not believe in it.
But the policy of trying to reform the laws by refusing to obey them is certainly not the height of wisdom.
My next example is a brief note from the Camperdown Chronicle:
Women can refuse, as Mrs Montefiore is again doing, to pay income tax so long as they remain unenfranchised, on the old historic ground that “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”
If resistance, passive or active, ever can be justified, it assuredly is so justified in the case and cause of injured and insulted womanhood.
—“Ignota.” in “Westminster Review.”
From the Albany Advertiser:
Resistance Overcome.
London, .
The widow of Sir James Steel, a former Lord Provost of Edinburgh, refused to pay house or property tax on the ground that she is denied a vote.
A portion of her furniture was sold by auction to cover the amount of the tax.
Five thousand persons were present at the sale.
At first I thought that must be referring to Flora Annie Steele, but she was never married to a James Steel[e].
Turns out this was Barbara Joanna Steel.
She promoted tax resistance in 1907 to the Edinburgh National Society for Woman’s Suffrage, telling them:
On the ground that the franchise has not been extended to women, and she is therefore without a vote, the widow of Sir James Steel, a former Lord Provost of Edinburgh, lately refused to pay her house and property taxes.
The authorities thereupon ordered the sale by auction of a sufficient portion of Lady Steel’s household furniture to meet the demand of the tax collector, and the sale was held in the presence of 5,000 people.
A boycott of the census is (says the “Daily Chronicle” of ) to be the latest method of the militant suffragists for calling attention to their claims to the vote.
The announcement was made by Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard at a “King’s Speech meeting” of the Women’s Freedom League, held in the Caxton Hall.
The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor.
So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.
“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women.
We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”
Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship.
Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?”
That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.
Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week.
Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.
Tax resistance is to be another method of obstruction, and Mrs. Despard, who has already been “sold up” twice for refusing to pay taxes, produced a third summons to which she intimated that she would pay no attention.
A diamond ring, the property of the Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, seized because she refused to pay fines inflicted for failing to take out licenses for five dogs, a male servant, and a carriage, was sold by auction at Ashford (Middlesex) lately.
It was explained that the princess, as a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance league, refused to pay money to a Government which failed to give women representation in Parliament.
The ring was sold for £10, and was subsequently, on behalf of the league, returned to the princess.
London, — The first instance of a suffragist being committed to prison for non-payment of taxes as a protest against the disfranchisement of women occurred when Miss Clemence Housman, an authoress, and sister of Lawrence Houseman, was taken to Holloway Gaol by the Sheriff’s officer.
Similar protests have previously ended in distraint but Miss Houseman had no distrainable goods and was accordingly committed.
Miss Houseman, who belongs to the Women’s Social and Political Union and is on the committee of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, refused to pay for the taxicab in which she was taken to prison and the Sheriff’s officer paid the fare of $2,50, which curiously enough was the amount of the tax she originally declined to pay.
The monotony of purely educational work for woman suffrage has been enlivened by the arrest, imprisonment, and release of Miss Clemence Housman, writes an English correspondent, for non payment of the habitation tax.
Miss Housman a year ago refused to pay this tax, which was only 4/6 (1.10 dollar), and during the year has had sundry notices served upon her, the cost of which brought the amount up to between twenty five and thirty dollars.
The Government offered to compromise, but Miss Housman remained firm.
At length she received notice that she would be arrested on a certain day.
This was made the occasion by the Tax Resistance League of a protest meeting and a tea at the home of Miss Housman’s brother, Lawrence Housman, the noted dramatist and noted suffragist, for Mr. Housman is always speaking and writing for this cause and has thoroughly identified himself with it as his own.
The “John Hampden” dinner was the name under which the members of the “Women’s Tax Resistance League” gave a dinner recently in London.
At the end of the dining hall hung a picture of the hero, who resisted the ship money imposition, and on the menu cards appeared the legend, “No vote, no tax.”
The guests included many well-known people interested in woman suffrage, and the speakers, Earl Russell, Mrs. Despard, Sir Thomas Barclay, and Mr. Laurence Houseman, all upheld the right of women in refusing to pay taxes while they had no voice in the government of the country.
Miss Green, a member of the New Constitutional Society, and honorary treasurer to the Women’s Tax Resistance League, London, having again refused to pay inhabited house duty for 14 Warwick Crescent, Paddington, her bookcase was sold at Messrs.
Gill’s auction rooms in Kilburn.
Many sympathisers attended the sale, and the usual speech of protest having been made, three cheers were raised for Miss Green before the party left the auction room.
A procession then formed up, headed by a waggon decorated with the colours of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and an open air meeting was held on the High-road, Kilburn.
Dr. Helen Hanson, who presided, spoke of the special injustice under which the voteless taxpaying women are suffering, and expressed her satisfaction in finding that they are now combining to protest in this way.
I’ve encountered “Miss Green” in the archives a couple of times before, but never with enough information for me to be able to attach a first name to her.
Discovery by Mrs. Mark Wilks Gives Suffragets Brilliant Idea.
Campaign of Sympathy
Wilks in Jail Because His Wife Refused to Pay Her Taxes.
London, . —
Mrs. Mark Wilks, whose husband is in jail because she refuses to pay her taxes, is entitled to immense credit for discovering a new and very formidable weapon for suffragets, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union said .
Suffragets are very generally women of property and will follow Mrs. Wilks’ example.
Their husbands in turn will follow Wilks’ example — go to jail, because they can’t help themselves.
It is not, of course, that the suffragets have anything against their husbands.
Many of these husbands are themselves suffraget sympathizers.
Indeed, suffragets are campaigning to create sympathy for Wilks.
Mrs. Wilks’ discovery is too valuable not to be utilised, however.
Husbands will have to be sacrificed on the altar of votes for women.
The plan will work only in the case of husbands whose wives have independent incomes.
Nor will it work in cases where husbands pay taxes on their wives’ incomes.
Some husbands, like Wilks, have not enough money to pay the taxes.
Suffraget-sympathizing husbands, who can pay, are counted on to refuse to do so.
Thus will a large proportion of Englishmen with suffraget wives be in jail shortly.
The suffragets think the scandal and injustice of it will be a big thing, for them.
Under the married women’s property act a husband has no control over his wife’s property or income.
Under the income tax act, he is responsible for the taxes.
If the taxes are not paid the husband — not the wife — is imprisoned.
Mrs. Wilks refused to pay her income tax, $185, and her husband was locked up.
He will spend the rest of his life in prison unless his wife says otherwise or the law is changed.
When at liberty, he is a teacher in the suburb of Clapton.
The arrest and imprisonment “during the King’s pleasure” of Mr. Mark Wilks, the Clapton schoolmaster, who is unable to pay the tax on his wife’s income, is to be the subject of numerous protest meetings, organised by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, during the next few days (said the “Daily News and Leader” on ).
the Wilks campaign opens with a demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
On there will be another mass meeting in Hyde Park, and on a procession will march from Kennington Church to Brixton Gaol, where the central figure in the fight is detained.
In addition, a protest meeting is to be held outside the gaol every morning, and on Mr. Bernard Shaw will address a similar gathering in the Caxton Hall.
Under Two Acts.
A clear and humorous account of the affair was given to a “Daily News and Leader” representative by Mrs. Charles Stansfield; a sister of Mrs. Wilks.
“Mr. Wilks is in prison,” she said, “because he has not got £37 to pay a tax on property he does not own and cannot control.
That is really the whole case.
Under the Income Tax Act the property of his wife is his property for the purposes of taxation, but under the Married Women’s Property Act it is entirely out of his control.
“Every man who is married to a woman with an income of her own is in that position; and if he cannot pay his wife’s taxes he is liable to imprisonment.
It seems to place an enormous weapon in the hands of rich wives.”
It seems that in and Mrs. Wilks refused to make any return of her income either to the Inland Revenue authorities or to her husband, and, in consequence, the furniture, which is hers, was seized and sold.
The Schoolmaster’s Plight.
“In ,” her sister explained, “she claimed that such distraint was illegal, asserting that under the Income Tax Act she, as a married woman, was exempt from taxation.
As a consequence, all taxes charged upon her were withdrawn, and the authorities contented themselves afterwards with making their claim, sometimes on Mr. Wilks, sometimes on both conjointly, and, finally, on him alone.
“All this is interesting,” she added, “as showing the ridiculous position that arises through the operation of the two Acts.
But the serious side of the matter is that Mr. Wilks is in prison for debt, and his position as a master in a London County Council school must be endangered.
He does not know for what period he will be in prison, and he has no possible way of settling the debt.”
Which prompted George Bernard Shaw to wax wittily (from the Barrier Miner):
Mr. G.B. Shaw was the chief speaker at a meeting held in Caxton Hall, London, by the Women’s Tax Resistance League last month, “to protest against the imprisonment of Mr. Mark Wilks for his inability to pay the taxes on his wife’s earned income.”
Sir John Cockburn was in the chair.
Mr. Shaw said that this was the beginning of the revolt of his own unfortunate sex against the intolerable henpecking which had been brought upon them by the refusal by the Government to bring about a reform which everybody knew was going to come, and the delay of which was a mere piece of senseless stupidity.
From the unfortunate Prime Minister downwards no man was safe.
He know of cases in his boyhood where women managed to make homes for their children and themselves, and then their husbands sold the furniture, turned the wife and children out, and got drunk.
The Married Women’s Property Act was then carried, under which the husband retained the responsibility of the property and the woman had the property to herself.
As Mrs. Wilks would not pay the tax on her own income Mr. Wilks went to gaol.
“If my wife did that to me,” said Mr. Shaw, “the very moment I came out of prison I would get another wife.
(Laughter.)
It is indefensible.”
Women, he went on, had got completely beyond the law at the present time.
Mrs. [Mary] Leigh had been let out, but he presumed that after a brief interval for refreshments she would set fire to another theatre.
He got his living by the theatre, and very probably when she read the report of that speech she would set fire to a theatre where his plays were being performed.
The other day he practically challenged the Government to starve Mrs. Leigh, and in the course of the last fortnight he had received the most abusive letters which had ever reached him in his life.
The Government should put an end to the difficulty at once by giving women the votes.
As he resumed his seat Mr. Shaw said — “I feel glad I have been allowed to say the things I have, here to-night without being lynched.”
A resolution protesting against the imprisonment of Mr. Wilks was unanimously carried.
Mr. Zangwill wrote, expressing sympathy with the protest, and said, “Marrying an heiress may be the ruin of a man.”
Anna Stout, wife of the former New Zealand prime minister Robert Stout, gave her opinions of the suffrage movement (as found in the Perth Western Mail), including these remarks:
…the Tax-Resistance League… secured hundreds of converts to the cause.
“Twenty-six million pounds” Lady Stout said, “are paid annually in taxes into the Treasury by English women, and naturally there is much resentment created when the injustice of their not having a voice in the expenditure of it is pointed out to them.
We appeal to their pockets first, but almost invariably find hearts and brains behind them.”
Urges This Method of Getting Jailed for Non-Militant Suffragettes.
The non-militant suffragettes of Britain have decided to “let slip the dogs of war” to help win the cause that window smashing, red pepper distribution, mall destruction, and other gentle forms of militant protest have been ineffective in promoting.
Mrs. [Ethel] Philip Snowden, whose husband is an M.P. for Blackburn, announced on in a talk before the Equal Franchise Society how the dogs were going to be utilized.
Any old dog will do.
Mrs. Snowden herself has a dog, the breed of which she did not mention, and Philip Snowden, M.P., is not responsible for the dog.
Mrs. Snowden herself must pay the license for the dog.
Mr. Snowden, as a Member of Parliament, is responsible for the other taxes of Mrs. Snowden, which she has refused to pay, declaring that taxation without representation is unjustifiable, a sentiment that has been uttered on this continent, but they cannot put Mr. Snowden in jail for the refusal of Mrs. Snowden to pay her taxes, as he is exempted as an M.P..
The proposition of Mrs. Snowden seems to squint at the acquisition by all British maids and matrons of dogs and the refusal of the owners to pay the dog license.
Mr. Snowden, M.P., may not even know that Mrs. Snowden, N.M.S. — non-militant suffragette — has a dog; but she has.
By buying up dogs of all sorts and refusing to pay the licenses the suffragettes may get into jail with facility and honor.
Why place a bomb on the front porch or spread carbolic acid in a mail box, when you may get jugged just as well merely by refusing to pay your dog tax?
Mrs. Snowden commented on the “outrageous incompetence of the Liberal Government” and said she felt that her party no longer could trust its affairs with the Liberals.
The physical force party, Mrs. Snowden said, might destroy the sympathy of the British public.
Mrs. Pankhurst had started a crusade that she could not control.
The doctrine that the end justified the means might wind up with the blowing off of [Prime Minister H.H.] Asquith’s head.
The dodging of the dog tax seemed to Mrs. Snowden the lever with which the non-militants might pry themselves into prison.
The possibilities were large.
Every male member of the audience admitted this.
Think of a lady who had accumulated a pack of hounds refusing to pay the licenses thereon and thus making herself liable to a life sentence!
If one dog sent you to prison for one month, how many months would you be forced to serve if you owned 100 or 200 dogs?
Meanwhile you might put on all the dogs blankets inscribed “Votes for Women” and turn them loose in the Strand to the confusion of the bobbies and Parliament.
Destraint has been levied upon [Mary Russell] the Duchess of Bedford, who, as a protest against the non-enfranchisement of women refuses to pay property tax for the Prince’s Skating Rink, which is owned by her.
The tax is eight months overdue.
(When she first announced that she would resist payment of the tax the Duchess of Bedford said:— “I am very strongly opposed to the militant tactics adopted by a portion of those who are in favour of women’s franchise, and I have therefore taken this, the only course open to me, which appears justifiable, of protesting against the way in which the question of woman suffrage has been treated by the Government.)
This is an interesting example of how the violent tactics of the most militant wing of the British women’s suffrage movement (which make today’s “black bloc” look like the kumbaya chorus) gave the tax resistance movement space to present themselves as the reasonable non-militant alternative.
At this time in the United States, by contrast, tax resistance was considered a far-out militant tactic only adopted by the most radical fringe of the suffragist movement.
Distraint was levied on the Duchess of Bedford for non-payment of taxes due in respect of Prince’s Skating Rink.
A silver cup was taken to satisfy the claim.
The Duchess, who refused to pay the taxes on suffrage grounds, has instructed the Women’s Tax Resistance League to point out that the distraint is quite out of order, because as a married woman she is not liable to taxation.
The assessment or demand not should have been served not upon her, but upon the Duke of Bedford.
“Obviously,” she adds, “it was not my business to point out the law to those duty it should be to understand it.”
Carrie Chapman Catt was an American suffrage activist who felt the need to distance herself from the militant tactics of some of her fellow-strugglers across the pond.
But she had kinder words to say about the tax resisters.
From the New York Sun:
“The non-militant organization that interested me most was the Tax Resistance League, which has an enormous influence in England just now.
I went to the sale of the Duchess of Bedford’s curios, on which she had refused to pay taxes.
A member of the league made a speech along the lines of no taxation without representation which had a familiar Fourth of July sound.
It was expressly stated that this was the Duchess’s manner of protesting against militancy, though I fancy we should have considered it rather militant here.”
“No Vote, No Helping Government,” Is Suffragettes Latest Slogan.
Homes Sold Over Women.
One Firm Soldier of “The Cause” Calm While Husband Languishes in Jail for Her.
London, — The suffrage impasse in England is to be solved by a new and startling campaign.
This is to take the form of resistance to paying taxes — and is to be run by all the militant suffragettes in the kingdom who have homes but no votes.
The militants themselves are already jubilant at the prospect of their success, and are asking what Mr. Lloyd-George can possibly do to make up for this leakage in the revenues of England.
This movement is seriously worrying Lloyd-George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and those unfortunate and always unwelcome officials — the tax collectors of England.
The women are either going to jail or having their jewelry and furniture distrained upon and sold by public auction, for the settlement of the Government’s claims.
Everyone of these public auction sales, too, is made the occasion for a grand procession of women tax resisters.
They march to the scene of the fray with drums beating and banners and pennons flying.
Some of the best suffrage speakers in the country are rallying to their aid.
Frequently thousands of people surround the auction halls and when the sale is over the “victim of distraint” mounts a platform outside the hall and addresses the multitude on the text “No Vote, No Tax.”
The suggestion that “taxation and representation should go together” and that “taxation without representation is tyranny” evidently appeals to the sense of fair play in a British crowd, so that converts are easily made, money comes rolling in, and propaganda goes merrily on.
Tax Resistance Three Years Old.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League started as a small cloud — no bigger than a man’s hand — in Lloyd-George’s financial sky, about three years ago.
That it has been growing steadily ever since is probably due to the fact that it is continually stirring the imagination and touching the sense of humor of the “man in the street.”
The society has been able to attain such proportions that shortly it will give a preconcerted “signal” to the women householders in every large city and town in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, causing a general “tax strike.”
Every sympathizer who is a householder will, at a given moment, openly refuse to pay any more imperial taxes until political representation is accorded her.
Some startling developments are likely to follow.
Among the important and extremely active members of the league are the Duchess of Bedford, whose husband owns over 84,000 acres of land and whose collection of pictures at Woburn Abbey is one of the finest and most historic in the world; Princess Sophia Dhulep Sing, an Indian lady, at present in residence in England; Beatrice Harraden, author of “Ships That Pass in the Night,” and Miss Clemence Housman, sister of Laurence Housman, whose fame as an author and artist are recognized in America as well as in his own country.
His “Englishwoman’s Love Letters” made quite a sensation over here some years ago.
All London was agog when it became known that the Duchess of Bedford, aided and abetted by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, had definitely and emphatically refused to pay property tax and house duty on one of her own houses.
People who were not versed in the law speculated as to whether Mr. Lloyd-George would have the courage to order the Duchess to be arrested like an ordinary commoner and dragged off to Holloway Jail, there to endure the rigors of a plank bed and jail fare or to win her freedom by resorting to the hunger strike.
Fortunately, however, such indignities are not necessary in collecting the King’s taxes in England if tax-resisting rebels possess furniture, plate, or jewelry upon which distraint can be made.
Mr. Lloyd-George’s emissaries were therefore able to seize and carry off a beautiful silver trophy cup from the Duchess’ collection of plate, and sell it by public auction.
The auction sale of the Duchess of Bedford’s silver cup proved, perhaps, the best advertisement the Women’s Tax Resistance League ever had.
It was made the occasion for widespread propaganda.
The newspapers gave columns of space to the event, while at the big mass meeting, held outside the auction room, Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, the secretary of the league; Mrs. Lilian Hicks, the honorary treasurer, and other Suffrage speakers held forth on the advisability and necessity of every self-respecting woman householder in Great Britain following the Duchess of Bedford’s lead.
Miss Clemence Housman’s Case a Poser.
The case of Miss Clemence Housman was really a “poser” for Mr. Lloyd-George.
It led to a long struggle between the woman and the authorities, and a denouement which was of the nature of an anti-climax for the Government.
The amount in question was an exceedingly small one — about $1 — but Miss Housman, incited and encouraged by the belligerent Tax Resistance League, refused on principle to pay.
As she had no goods on which to distrain, she was herself seized and thrown into Holloway Jail, there to remain until the tax was paid.
When it became evident that Miss Housman was a woman of determination and was quite prepared to spend the rest of her natural existence within the grim walls of Holloway Castle, the authorities reflected that the maintenance of a prisoner thirty or forty years in jail, and the public excitement this would involve, was too expensive and troublesome a method of collecting $1, so the doors of her cell were, after five days, thrown open and Miss Housman emerged a free and triumphant woman.
The most important and sensational event in the history of the tax-resistance movement, however, was the capture by the Government of the unfortunate husband of a woman tax-resister.
The case arose through the refusal of Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, as a Suffragist and tax-resister, to pay the tax levied on her earned income.
On two previous occasions this refusal had been followed by a distraint on her goods, but one of the peculiar anomalies of the income tax law, as distinct from the property tax in England is that, in spite of the Married Woman’s Property Act, a husband can be made liable for his wife’s income tax.
Dr. Elizabeth Wilks, realizing, therefore, that as a married woman she was not really liable to this taxation, informed the authorities that the claim should be sent not to her, but to her husband.
The government fell into the trap and sent the claim to Mark Wilks, a schoolmaster, who immediately declined to pay on the grounds that he had no legal means of ascertaining his wife’s income.
The treasury refused to accept this plea, and after a long correspondence decided to seize the person of Wilks and throw him into jail.
A public agitation was immediately started, among those who made strong protests on the platform and in the press being George Bernard Shaw, Sir John Cockburn, K.C.M.G., the Rt.
Hon. Thomas Lough, M.P., and Laurence Housman, with the result that Wilks, after being several weeks in jail, was suddenly released, no reason being given by the British Home Secretary for this act of clemency and wisdom.
The incident formed excellent subject for jest by all the humorous papers in England, and one of them suggested that now that husbands could be placed in durance vile for the non-payment of their wives’ income tax, it would be an excellent way for women who held the purse strings not only to get rid of lazy and troublesome husbands, but to have them maintained at the expense of the state!
Another ingenious form of protest adopted by women tax-resisters has been to refuse admission to the officials of the Inland Revenue who came to seize the goods, barricading their homes against the intruders.
Mrs. Dora Montefiore, a well-known Australian Socialist, was the first to adopt this novel method, and several others have since followed her example, the last being Mrs. [Kate] Harvey, whose house has been barricaded for months past.
Mrs. Harvey decided to resist Mr. Lloyd George’s insurance tax, and also refused to pay her gardener’s license.
In the meantime she took the precaution of getting a bill of sale on her furniture, so that the authorities, balked in every direction of their prey, have now seized the lady herself and committed her to jail for two months.
A vigorous agitation for her release is going on, and it is confidently expected that within a few days Halloway’s portals will again open wide and that a huge mass meeting already being organized, in Trafalgar Square, will publicly welcome her back to the arms of her fellow tax-resisters.
Primitive but effective means were resorted to by a bailiff, who, acting on a distraint order, sought to enter the house of a leading suffragette.
The lady in question was Mrs. Kate Harvey, of the Women’s Freedom League.
She had declined to pay taxes, and was being supported in her resolve by Mrs. Charlotte Despard, the well-known president of the league.
Mrs. Harvey resides in “Brackenhill,” a large mansion in Highland road, Bromley (Kent).
Failing to gain an entrance to the house, the bailiffs procured a battering ram, and, with the assistance of the police, accomplished his purpose at the end of two hours by smashing in the front door.
[Mrs. Harvey has for years been an ardent exponent of tax resistance.
In her goods were seized and sold for inhabited house duty, and her residence was barricaded against the King’s officers for eight months, entry by force being a last effected under a warrant.
On the same date Mrs. Harvey was sentenced to distraint or seven day’s imprisonment for a tax unpaid on a male servant.
Her companion, Mrs. Despard, has served two terms of imprisonment.]
Considerable difficulty attended the levying of a distress upon the goods of Mrs. Harvey, of the Tax Resistance League; at Bromley, Kent, on Tuesday.
Upon the arrival of a tax collector, a bailiff, and a police sergeant, they found the outer gate locked and the doors of the house barricaded.
The gate offered little obstruction, but to get the door of the house open was a difficult matter.
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
The remaining articles concern the resistance of Sophia Duleep Singh.
First, from the New York Herald:
Sophia Duleep Singh, of Woman’s Tax Resistance League, Refusing to Pay, Loses Gems.
A pearl necklace and a gold bangle studded with pearls and diamonds, belonging to Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, have been seized to satisfy fines and costs of about $80, which she was ordered to pay for keeping a carriage, a groom and two dogs without a license.
The jewels will be sold at a public auction.
The Princess is a member of the Woman’s Tax Resistance League.
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, of Faraday House, Hampton Court, made her second appearance at Feltham Police Court, Middlesex, on .
She is a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and was summoned for keeping a male servant, a carriage, and two dogs without licences.
The Magistrate imposed fines of £5 each in respect of the groom and carriage, and £1 5/ for each of the dogs, with costs amounting, to 18/.
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, of Faraday House, Hampton Court, saw her jewels seized under a distress warrant rather than pay fines and costs amounting to over £16 for keeping a groom, a carrage, and two dogs without licences.
By order of the Justices of the Spelthorne Division of Middlesex, the jewels were offered for sale by public auction at the Twickenham Town Hall on .
The auctioneer (Mr. Alaway) explained that the jewels seized by the police consisted of a necklace, with 131 pearls, and a gold bangle, with a heart-shaped pendant, with a diamond centre surrounded with pearls.
He was proceeding with the sale when Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who occupied a seat in the front of the hall, rose, and exclaimed:— “I protest against this sale, seeing it is most unjust to women that they should be compelled to pay unjust taxes, when they have no voice in the government of the country.”
The bidding started at £6, and when it had reached £10 the lot was knocked down to Miss Gertrude Eaton, a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League.
Bidding for the gold bangle started at £5, and only two other bids being received, it was sold to the same lady for £7.
In the Washington Herald, Clara Bewick Colby continued her impressions of the British women’s suffrage movement with a note on tax resistance:
There is a league existing for this very purpose to enroll women who are willing to have their property sold for taxes.
When a member is to be sold up a number of her comrades accompany her to the auction-room.
The auctioneer is usually friendly and stays the proceedings until some one of the league has mounted the table and explained to the crowd what it all means.
Here are the banners, and the room full of women carrying them, and it does not take long to impress upon the mind of the people who have come to attend the sale that here is a body of women willing to sacrifice their property for the principle for which John Hampden went to prison — that taxation without representation is tyranny.
Not of American Origin.
I always felt at home on these occasions as I saw the familiar mottoes ranged around.
I had supposed they were of American origin, as we had quoted them in our suffrage work; but I found that all the principles embodied in our Declaration of Independence belonged to an earlier struggle for freedom which had been won on British soil, and exactly the same as the women are waging now.
The women remain at these auctions until the property of the offender is disposed of.
The kindly auctioneer puts the property seized from the suffragists early on his list, or lets them know when it will be called.
The object lesson of the sale and the subsequent meeting on the street corner or in the nearest park carries the message to an outlying part of London, and to a people who otherwise would know nothing of the agitation.
The discrimination which the government shows on every hand is apparent in this matter of seizing goods, for some are never annoyed for their delinquent taxes, while others are pounced upon with severity.
The league makes resistance systematic and effective so that no effort is lost.
Sometimes no one will bid for the sufragist’s property and they carry it home again, but the government cannot seize it for that assessment.
Of all forms of militancy this is most logical, and it is one that women might well adopt everywhere, as it was inaugurated in America when the Smith sisters of Glastonbury, Conn., allowed their New Jersey cows to be sold year after year under protest.
Mrs. Despard, sister of Gen. Sir John French, who is president of the Woman’s Freedom League, has been sold out repeatedly, until she has around her only the barest necessaries of life.
There is an imperial tax for the non-payment of which the person and not the property is seized.
Miss Housman, sister of the distinguished dramatist, Lawrence Houman, lives with him, but owns a little property subject to the imperial tax.
It was only a trifle — four and six ($1.05) — but she refused to pay.
Various processes were served upon her until the sum had grown to about $15. She was warned repeatedly by the officer that she would be arrested if she did not pay, but she was obdurate.
At length the officer arrived to escort Miss Housman to Holloway jail.
He was very polite and took her in a taxi, which cost exactly the sum of the original tax.
(Here it would have been for that distance the sum of the tax and costs).
Miss Housman was from day to day interviewed by various officials to get her to pay her tax, which she declared she had no intention of doing.
The government was in a quandary.
There was a law to put Miss Housman in prison but there was no law to let her out until she paid the tax and costs.
The government offered to knock off the costs and let her off with the original four and six.
Miss Housman was still obdurate.
To all intents and purposes she was in Holloway for life.
To make capital of the situation and to keep up her courage the Tax Resistance League organized a procession to Holloway.
I was extremely glad to be on the spot and able to show that I was not a fair-weather suffragist, for the weather had been perfect on the occasions of the five processions in which I had already taken part in England, and this day was rainy and the streets muddy.
It was a long trudge the four miles to Holloway but many made it, and, lo! when we got in front of the frowning old fortress the meeting that had been planned for protest became one of victory, for the government had weakened and Miss Housman was free.
She was a very quiet, delicate woman who had never taken any other part in the movement, and she made her first suffrage speech this day under the walls of Holloway jail.
Miss Housman has just been called upon by the board of inland revenue to pay arrears on her taxes, and she has again expressed her determination to abide by “plain constitutional duty in refusing consent to taxation without representation.”
There is a general movement among tax resisters to send their dues to one or other by the national funds for relief labeled “Taxes withheld from the government by voteless women.”
Jail Procession Frequent.
How many times had the women gone to Holloway to welcome out the prisoners on the day of their release!
This was before the days of forcible feeding and the hunger strike which has made it necessary to take away the tortured victims in an ambulance and to a nursing home as quickly as possible.
In the earlier days they have often been met with bands, sometimes the horses would be taken off the wagon and young girls would draw it in a triumphal procession.
Then there was breakfast and speaking, and everything to make it a gala occasion.
I was present at one of these breakfasts in Queen’s Hall decorated with flowers and banners and with tables for hundreds.
It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young women — I remember that on this occasion one was the niece of the violinist Joachim — and to know that they had actually been prisoners.
It was not long before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their numbers mounted up to the hundreds.
One, of their favorite banners bears the inscription:
“Stone walls do not a prison make. Nor Iron bars a cage.”
I came across the poem the other day from which this is taken.
It contains four stanzas, written by Sir Richard Lovelace in prison in the middle of the seventeenth century.
The balance of the stanza quoted is:
“Minds innocent and quiet, take That for a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love. And in my soul am free. Angels alone, that soar above. Enjoy such liberty.”
We shall see in the next paper which will deal with Lady Constance Lytton’s two prison experiences, that this is the spirit that animates women in prison even when undergoing tortures.
They are upheld by a sense of devotion to a great cause, and they feel that they are enduring this for the sake of all women.
With such consecration there often comes to such prisoners a development of spirit that is truly marvelous.
All ordinary values have slipped away and the sense of personality is lost in the new sense of solidarity.
They are at one with all the suffering women and the wronged women of the past and of the present.
I never talked with one who regretted having gone through the tortures of the prison.
They are the birth-pangs of the new age.
Rides in the Wagon.
From this wonderful breakfast and the inspiring speaking I was privileged to ride with the group that accompanied the released prisoners to the suffrage headquarters.
Notwithstanding that the young girls dressed in white and harnessed to the wagon with their green, white and purple ribbons, had drawn the six women all the way from Holloway, they gaily took up the march and drew the wagon the additional two miles to St. Clement’s Inn.
There was one young woman not released with the rest because she had infringed a prison regulation and had written a letter to her mother.
She was to be out a week later, and the same demonstration was made for her, only varied with elaborate use of the Scotch heather which gave the colors of the Union, white, purple and green.
Again the girls drew the wagon from Holloway and the young Scotch woman who was being escorted away in triumph bore a banner with the words (warning Mr. Asquith) “Ye mauna meddle with the Scotch thistle, laddie.”
The story of the birth of Jesus, as given in the gospels, begins with his pregnant mother and her husband on the move to Bethlehem in order to enroll in the census that Caesar Augustus had launched as part of his plan “that all the world should be taxed.”
A government doesn’t launch a census just because it’s curious, but usually, as with Augustus, as the prelude to a tax.
It’s the government’s way of “casing the joint” before the big heist.
And so some tax resistance campaigns have started by resisting a census.
Today I’ll review some examples.
Poll Tax resistance in Thatcher’s Britain
Refusal to register was one of the ways people resisted Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
And the government’s difficulties in tracking people as they moved from place to place, and from one council’s jurisdiction to another, made enforcement difficult.
Resisters also successfully refused to provide information about their employment that could be used to seize taxes from their paychecks.
According to one account:
[T]he councils still had one insurmountable headache.
They had to find out where people worked.
This was a real nightmare because other than asking the people concerned, they had no real way of getting the information they needed.
When a liability order was granted by the court, non-payers were sent a form which requested details of employment.
Failure to fill it out carried a fine of £100 and £400 if the non-payer provided false information.
But this didn’t act as a deterrent either, because, if people couldn’t pay the Poll Tax itself (and the court costs which were added), then it made little difference if the council added another £100. A survey carried out by the Audit Commission in showed that, nationally, only 15% of people who received the form actually sent it back.
Like electoral registration, it was widely ignored even though this was a criminal offence.
Household Tax resistance in Ireland today
The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland is defined by refusal by households to register to pay the tax.
This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout.
Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt.
Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax.
By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.
When the registration deadline hit at , only about half of Irish households had registered.
Ruth Coppinger of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes declared victory:
This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, , and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition.
Episcopalians in Scotland
The official church of Scotland had a habit through the centuries of taxing everyone in Scotland for the support of that church, whether they were members or not.
This tended to annoy those who belonged to other churches.
And this annoyance became especially loud whenever the “official” church got swapped from one denomination to another.
When the Presbyterians replaced the Episcopalians in the official chair in , one way the Episcopalians resisted was by refusing to pay the tax and refusing to participate in a church-run census.
William Maitland, in his History of Edinburgh, fretted over difficulties in estimating the population at this period of time, noting:
[T]he greatest Defect is owing to the Episcopalian Inhabitants, who, being of a different Communion from the established Church, are not subject to the Controul and Examination of its Ministers; wherefore, many of them refuse to give Accounts either of the Names or Numbers of Persons in their Families.
Queensland water tax strike
In Queensland, Australia, in , the government tried to sneak in a tax on farmers who used wells or water pumps to irrigate their lands.
The farmers rebelled.
Since the “tax” took the form of a stiff fee accompanying the mandatory registration of such wells or water pumps, it was natural that the tax resistance included mass refusal to register.
Local Producers’ Associations across Queensland gathered and voted to refuse registration.
A month after the tax went into effect, facing mass refusal, the government backed down and rescinded the tax… though without eliminating the requirement to register wells and water pumps.
Some Associations continued to counsel their members to refuse to register even after the tax resistance victory.
A Mr. Roome of the Woodmillar LPA put it this way:
A lot of farmers were under the impression that because of registration fee had been withdrawn, everything in the garden was lovely.
But the regulations were still there, and farmers who were under that impression would receive a rude awakening.
Only formal registration had to be made, but they would find that if they furnished the particulars asked for they would give the Government an opportunity to later on impose the charges.
The danger was still there, whereas if they refused to register the onus was on the Government to get the particulars, and prove that the farmers put down wells or sunk dams, etc. Once they gave the information they were at the mercy of the Government.
… The excuse by the Government was that they wanted to get a survey of the water facilities which was absolutely ridiculous.
The whole thing was a farce, and an excuse to impose a tax.
The only way was to refuse to register, which he hoped would be done by members of all branches, and also refuse to pay the tax.
A motion that the members of the Association refuse to register was passed.
Zakāt resistance in Malaysia
When the Malaysian government assumed control of the traditional Islamic religious tithe called the zakāt, made it mandatory, and fixed its rate based on the acreage and yields of farmers, this also meant that the government had to do a census of agricultural land and monitor the crop yields.
This led to widespread, varied, mostly quiet, but strikingly effective resistance.
James C. Scott, who studied the resistance, writes of one technique:
Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent.
Resistance to a pre-tax census in Fiji
A poll tax on indentured workers from India was initiated in Fiji in .
The Indians had no political representation on the island, were banned from the schools, and could only emigrate on a single ship voyage offered once per year: they were essentially considered disposable migrant labor.
The workers thought the tax, which amounted to the pay of 12 days labor, was a sort of bait-and-switch on the contracts that had brought them to Fiji, and vowed to resist.
As one account put it:
A start will be made in to register all those liable to pay the residential tax, and prison will be the fate of him who does not comply with the law.
Leading Indians in every district declare that they will willingly go to gaol before they register their names, and a general passive resistance is highly possible, with all its attendant strikes and bitter feeling.
a badge worn by members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League
The British women’s suffrage movement
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, more so than anywhere else, used tax resistance in its struggle.
“No taxation without representation,” was the cry.
Suffragists also resisted government attempts to get information from them, both because these attempts were part of the effort to tax them, and because the laws that governed such information-gathering were passed by a male-exclusive government.
In , Winifred Patch wrote:
I have recently received a paper from the Inland Revenue Office headed “Duties on Land Values.
Notice to Furnish Information,” asking for the names and addresses of any persons to whom I pay rent or for whom I may collect rents, a penalty not exceeding £50 being incurred if this information is willfully withheld.
… As I am denied the rights of citizenship I absolutely decline to facilitate in any way the carrying out of the provisions of Mr. Lloyd George’s Finance Bill, and am returning my paper with this written across it.
I am hoping, through the Women’s Tax Resistance League, of which I am a member, to obtain expert information which will enable me to make it impossible for the Government to exact the £50 penalty, and will leave them with no alternative but to imprison me in default.
Will other women join me in making this protest?
I feel that there must be many like myself who would gladly risk imprisonment for the cause, but who, for various reasons, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to take part in the more active protests which have hitherto brought women into conflict with the law.
I cannot help hoping that we have here another vantage ground from which to attack a Government which refuses us justice.
Teresa Billington-Greig took up Patch’s suggestion and rallied the troops:
The famous forms on which the owners and lease-holders of the country have to prepare the necessary statistics for the levying of the new [land] tax have been issued now in practically all parts of England, and they will be issued in Scotland within a few days.
Already these forms have been returned unfilled up, and with a curt comment as to the status of the women applied to, by some of our members in England.
They will be so returned by many Suffragists across the border.
Neither information nor money will be forthcoming in response to the Inland Revene Department’s demands.
As far as possible this piece of Government business will be impeded first by the determined refusal of information, and, second, by the withholding of the money claimed in taxes.
Such refusal to yield to tyranny is always desirable.
But at the present moment it carries an additional value in that it can be employed to improve the chances of the Conciliation Women’s Suffrage Bill.
From now until the fate of the Bill is decided, every woman to whom any Government application for information or for taxes is made should not only refuse to comply because of the unrepresented condition of her sex, but should add a rider to the effect that she will gladly supply information and provide the money claimed if the Women’s Suffrage Bill at present before Parliament becomes law this Session.
Margarete Wynne Nevinson put it this way:
Here I have one of Mr. Lloyd George’s wonderful forms, with its numerous questions, to answer which intelligently I should require, apparently, the training of a lawyer and surveyor, and a fund of universal knowledge which I do not possess.
I am asked to answer those questions, but am not considered fit to vote for a member of Parliament.
This Form is addressed to me because I have a little freehold property, but it starts off with “Sir.”
I am sending it back, pointing our that I must be addressed as “Madam,” and not “Sir,” and that as I have not vote, I do not see what this matter has to do with me.
If you think of it, it is rather an insult to all women property holders to be addressed as “Sir,” and not by their proper title of courtesy.
The State seems to take for granted that there can be no free women or women freeholders in the country, but that all the land must be owned by men.
, Charlotte Despard announced that this strategy of non-cooperation would be extended to the census proper.
One news account said:
The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor.
So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.
“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women.
We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”
Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship.
Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?”
That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.
Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week.
Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.
Rallies outside the courthouse or prison are one way of supporting resisters who are looking at doing time for taking their stand (see The Picket Line for ), and supporting their families while they’re being held captive is another (see The Picket Line for ).
Other ways to show support are to accompany resisters as they go to prison, to visit them or correspond with them while they are inside, and to be there to meet them when they are released.
Today I’ll give some examples of these ways of showing support for imprisoned tax resisters.
Sylvia Hardy
Accompanying resisters to prison
When elderly council tax rebel Sylvia Hardy was threatened with jail in , her supporters organized a convoy of cars to accompany her to the jail as a show of support.
In , Annuity Tax resisters in Edinburgh, Scotland, would go to prison in a parade of protesters.
One description of such a procession read:
[H]e was marched off to the Calton Jail, accompanied by the usual hasty muster of people carrying flags and poles, having placards on which were a variety of devices and inscriptions…
His daughter, a fine young woman, in a fit of heroic indignation which overmastered her grief and the natural timidity of her sex, seized one of the flags, and would have walked before her father to prison with the crowd, but was prevented by him and the interference of the humane bystanders.
When Kate Harvey went to prison for her resistance as part of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, fellow-resisters Charlotte Despard and Mary Anderson accompanied her to the prison gates.
When Elizabeth Knight was imprisoned on similar charges, she was accompanied to Holloway by resisters Florence Underwood and Isabel Tippett.
Visiting resisters in prison
Thomas Story, an English Quaker who was visiting the American colonies, was able to help two Quakers from Rhode Island who were in prison for not paying a militia exemption tax after having been drafted and refusing to fight.
Story helped them hold a Quaker meeting in the prison itself, and also (having some legal experience) tried to assist them in court.
When Zerah Colburn Whipple was imprisoned for failing to pay a war tax in , it was a comfort to him to have friends on the outside trying to get in.
He wrote: “Our friend John J. Copp, proved himself a true friend indeed.
Knowing that I would be lonely in the jail, he visited me every day after he learned that I was there, and when the keeper refused him admission, he demanded it as his right to visit his client, and claimed the right to see me alone too, which was granted.”
The Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign helped to organize prison visits to people who had been imprisoned in the Poll Tax rebellion.
Corresponding with imprisoned resisters
I’ve done a lot of volunteer work with the Prison Literature Project in Berkeley, California.
Most of the letters we get are from prisoners requesting books — which makes sense, because that’s the sort of letter we explicitly ask for.
But a pretty hefty percentage of the letters we get are just expressing gratitude for the books and letters we previously sent — heartfelt, often heartbreaking gratitude, especially since many of the prisoners are of limited means and can barely afford to put a stamp on a letter.
This impresses on me how meaningful it is for people behind bars to get letters from friends outside.
The Anarchist Black Cross of New York City held a letter-writing evening for imprisoned war tax resister Carlos Steward in .
Brian Wright was the first person thrown in prison for Poll Tax resistance, during the rebellion in the United Kingdom, in .
While there he received over 800 cards and letters from supporters.
The Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign made it a policy to ensure that at least one personal letter per prisoner per week came from someone in the campaign.
When Kate Harvey had barricaded herself in her own home to try to defeat government attempts to seize her property for taxes, a supporter sent her a poem to keep her mood up:
Good luck, my friend, I wish to thee,
In thy brave fight ’gainst tyranny.
Bracken Hill Siege will bring good cheer
To those who hold our Freedom dear,
And fight the good fight far and near.
And when oppression is out-done,
And Liberty, at last, is won,
When women civic rights possess,
They’ll think, I hope, with thankfulness,
Of those who bore the battle’s stress.
When a Colorado doctor was jailed for refusing to pay federal income taxes that fund weapons of mass destruction, it was reported that “[l]etters of approval have been pouring in to Dr. Evans, and since he is only allowed to write very few, his mother in Philadelphia has taken up the task of acknowledging them, sending at the same time a typewritten sheet explaining the affair in detail.”
Welcoming resisters back from prison
The campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax organized a march to Brixton Prison, which held most of the resisters then in custody.
Police attacked the march and arrested 135 people.
“That evening,” says campaign volunteer Danny Burns, “volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome those who were released on bail.”
This served not only to show solidarity, but also to make the arrested people aware of the legal support available to them and to encourage them to cooperate in their defense.
When Constance Andrews of the Women’s Tax Resistance League was released after having been jailed for a week for failure to pay a dog license tax, “a very large crowd — described in the local press as ‘an immense gathering’ — collected outside the prison to cheer Miss Andrews on her release.”
A procession with suffrage banners walked along with Andrews as she walked from the prison to a reception held in her honor.
When Mark Wilks was released from prison for failure to pay his wife’s income tax in , the Women’s Tax Resistance League held a reception for the Wilkses, saying that “not only do they wish to do honour to those who have made such a brave stand for tax resistance, but to use the occasion, as one of many others, to keep before the public mind the necessity for the alteration of the laws.”
Katsuki James Otsuka served a 120-day sentence for refusing to pay war taxes to the U.S. government (and then refusing to pay the fine he was given for his initial refusal) in .
A group of supporters demonstrated outside the prison at the time of his anticipated release, though “four carloads of state police” broke up the demonstration at one point, smashing a picket sign that read “You did right in refusing to pay taxes for A-bombs.”
During the white supremacist rebellion against the Reconstruction state government in Louisiana a man named Edward Booth was imprisoned for 24 hours for refusing to pay a license tax.
[I]t was agreed among his immediate personal friends, the members of the tax resisting association and their sympathizers, to make a grand demonstration, at the hour of his release, and escort him to his place of business, to show their sympathies, and in what approbation he was held for having become the object of an oppression, in the defence of his personal rights.
Before the hour of his release, a large concourse of people assembled before the doors of the prison, to hail the deliverance of the prisoner, and the anteroom was thronged with friends anxious to proffer the hand of sympathy and condolence. …
Mr. Booth filed out of the room and stepped into a carriage in waiting, amid rousing cheers and a stirring air from the band.
The carriage led off, followed by the band and the large concourse of people, who gradually fell into an orderly line of twos, to the number of about 400.
The marchers hung an effigy of the Reconstruction governor from a lamp post while loudly cheering.
When the procession reached Booth’s place of business, he gave a speech thanking the crowd for their support and urging them to renew their resistance.
William Tait, editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, was imprisoned for refusing to pay the Annuity Tax in that city, which went to support the official church, of which Tait was not a member.
After four days, he was released.
The Scotsman covered the story:
[Tait] stepped into the open carriage, drawn by four horses, which stood on the street…
At this moment, one of the gentlemen in the carriage, waving his hat, proposed three cheers for the King, and three cheers for Mr. Tait, — both of which propositions were most enthusiastically carried into effect.
The procession was then about to move off, when, much against the will of Mr. Tait and the Committee, the crowd took the horses from the carriage, and with ropes drew it along the route of procession…
As the procession marched along, it was joined by several other trades, who had been late in getting ready; and seldom have we seen such a dense mass of individuals as Prince’s Street presented on this occasion.
In the procession alone, there were not fewer than 8,000 individuals; and we are sure that the spectators were more than thrice as numerous.
Mr. Tait was frequently cheered as he passed along, — and never, but on the occasion of the Reform Bill, was a more unanimous feeling witnessed than on that which brought the people together yesterday afternoon.
There are many ways to support tax resisters when they are targeted by the
police or courts, including:
Today I’ll finish off this series by mentioning some other examples of ways
sympathizers, supporters, and organized campaigns have responded to the arrest,
trial, or imprisonment of tax resisters.
Mass action in response to arrests
When elderly pensioner Sylvia Hardy was imprisoned for refusing to
continue to pay her ever-rising council tax, supporters started a daily
vigil outside Exeter Cathedral to bring attention to her plight. “Judging
from the passers-by,” one said, “most people are fully aware of what’s
happened to her and we’ve had a lot of sympathy and interest.”
When Australian miners refused to pay a license tax in
, they resolved that if any one of them
were arrested: “it should be reported to the [tax resistance] committee by
the nearest observer; they would immediately call a monster meeting, and
the whole of the people would deliver themselves into custody.”
In , Australian miners were at it again,
this time resisting the income tax. They voted on a resolution that said,
in part, that upon “any member being sent to prison for refusing to pay,
that all unionists be called on immediately to stop work, and refuse to
recommence until such member is released, or the garnished money is
refunded.”
In Beidenfleth, Germany, between the World Wars, farmers were unable to
keep up with their tax payments, and decided to strike rather than see
themselves further impoverished. When fifty-seven were indicted for
interfering with a tax seizure, hundreds of others who either had been
involved with that action (or who wished they could have been), demanded
to be tried alongside them:
[A] fever seemed to grip the countryside. From far and wide the peasants
poured into Itzehoe, where the case was to be tried, with wild cries of
self-accusation. The public prosecutor could not walk down the streets
without being at once mobbed by powerful, earnest men begging him to
lift the heavy weight of guilt from their shoulders and to restore their
inner peace of mind by issuing a writ against them.
Honor prisoners
While people were desperately trying to get themselves indicted for tax
resistance in Beidenfleth, those who succeeded were honored:
The Beidenfleth Heifer Case developed into a regular popular festival.
Maidenly hands strung garlands about the necks of those enviable
peasants who had achieved the honour of receiving a writ.
I’ve mentioned before the badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance
League to those who had gone to prison in the course of the campaign, and
how those so awarded were given the place of honor at campaign events
(see The Picket
Line for ).
It was also common for the League to throw luncheons or other such events
to honor imprisoned resisters upon their release.
The annuity tax resisters in Edinburgh, Scotland, honored one imprisoned
resister with “a piece of plate for his conduct on this occasion.” Another
time, they passed the hat for contributions, which, when the money was
given to resister Thomas Russell, he said: “We shall give it to the
Annuity Tax League, to enable them to carry out their operations in the
abolishment of the tax.”
A plaque on the Cass County, Missouri courthouse building honors the five
county judges who were imprisoned for contempt for refusing to order the
county to collect taxes to pay off fraudulent railroad bonds
.
Formal shows of support
When John Brown Smith, a lone Christian anarchist tax resister who was
imprisoned for tax resistance for about a year
, a convention of
“Liberalists” in Boston passed a resolution in support of Smith’s stand,
saying: “That in suffering eight months’ imprisonment in the orthodox
Republican hell of Northampton, rather than pay his taxes, John Brown Smith
has shown discerning wisdom and invincible courage, which place him high
among the world’s benefactors, and disclose a practical way to vanquish
sanguinary forces without shedding innocent or vicious blood.”
One of the Cass County judges who went to jail for refusing to obey a
higher court order to impose taxes on the county to pay for fraudulent
railroad bonds, was elected to the state legislature by the citizens of
the county while he was in prison.
When war tax resister Zerah C. Whipple was in jail for his stand, the
Connecticut State Peace Society passed a series of resolutions in support.
For example: “Resolved: That it is a great, previous, and sanctifying
privilege of us all, to feel that in his bonds we are bound with him, and
to pour our heart’s holiest sympathies into his cup of trial.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations would pass
resolutions in support of imprisoned resisters, send telegrams of
congratulation to resisters who were being jailed for the cause, and hold
meetings to especially commemorate and support their stand.
Petition the government for leniency
When a number of young Quaker men were imprisoned for failure to pay a
militia exemption tax in , David Cooper
followed them to jail, and met with the officers who were holding them
captive. He wrote:
I had much conversation with them; they appeared very moderate, but were
very earnest for me to pay the fine, and not suffer our sons to be
committed to prison. I told them they were aware that our religious
principles forbade it; the young men were in their possession, and I had
no desire to persuade them to deviate from what they believed their duty
as officers required; but only wished them to use their power in a
manner that would afford peace hereafter. It was a matter of conscience;
they ought therefore to be very tender, and not use rigor. If they were
committed I saw no end. They could never pay the fines without wounding
their own minds, nor could their friends do it for them. They appeared
friendly, and the young men being under the Sheriff’s care, he directed
them to go home, and meet him at Woodbury at an appointed day. He
afterwards sent them word they need give themselves no further trouble
till he called for them. So the matter rested.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League would write letters of inquiry to
government officials whenever one of them was imprisoned. For instance,
when Kate Harvey was jailed, Charlotte Despard wrote to her representative
in Parliament to point out the discrepancy between her cruel sentence and
the wrist-slaps given to men for similar offenses. “I cannot believe,
sir,” she wrote, “that you will permit this injustice to be done. … Mrs.
Harvey is one whose time, service and money are given to the rescue of
little destitute children, and to the help of those not so fortunately
placed as herself. While such injustices as these are permitted by the
authorities, can you wonder that women are in revolt?” League member Marie
Lawson started what she called a “snowball” protest — a sort of chain
letter that sympathizers were supposed to send to their friends that
included a postcard-sized petition they could send to various government
figures.
When American war tax resister Maurice McCracken was imprisoned, supporters
sent a telegram to President Eisenbower, asking him to release the
prisoner (they got a vague, noncommittal reply).
Somewhat related to this is that when the American Revolution broke out,
one item on the agenda of the revolutionaries from North Carolina was the
legal rehabilitation of the tax rebels who had been convicted at the end
of the Regulator movement of
.
Tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns have at times made use of barricades, blockades, and occupations to keep tax collectors at bay.
Here are some examples:
There were a number of prominent “sieges” in the tax resistance campaign that accompanied the British women’s suffrage movement.
Dora Montefiore barred the arched doorway to her home against the bailiffs in and held out for six weeks before the bailiffs broke through,
…addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.
WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.”
After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”
The “Siege of Montefiore” was a publicity coup for the movement, and served as a useful rallying point for activists.
On the little terrace of the front garden hung during the whole time of the siege a red banner with the letters painted in white: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.”
Kate Harvey barricaded her home in and it took seven months for the authorities to crowbar their way in and seize her dining room furniture to auction for back taxes.
The following year they needed battering rams to break her barricade.
The Women’s Freedom League reported, of her first barricade:
Passers-by read the bold declaration that she refuses to be taxed by a Government that refuses her representation because she is a woman.
Her continued resistance has aroused keen interest in the London and Provincial Press, and afforded excellent “copy” for numerous illustrated papers.
and of the second:
An ingenious plan of protection had been devised and carried out, and the King’s officers wrestled with the fortifications for two hours before an entry was effected by means of a battering-ram!
A newspaper article gives more details:
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
When the tax collector and bailiff came to seize goods from Isabella Harrison,
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
… The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
On an earlier occasion, Harrison had barricaded herself inside her home.
Supporters brought her food and supplies by means of a basket she lowered from a window by a rope.
There is at least one report of similar barricades in the American women’s suffrage movement.
Lillie Devereaux Blake addressed a New York Women’s Suffrage Society meeting in , and
…narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
War tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner refused to leave their home when it was seized by the U.S. government in , defying a federal court order.
When Kehler is arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court, a dozen affinity groups maintained a round-the-clock occupation of the home through .
During the Dublin water charge strike:
People were told how to block up their stopcocks to make it difficult for their water to be cut off.
Empty bean tins and a little bit of cement were the necessary ingredients.
In a group of French syndicalists and unemployed workers rallied at the home of “two of their comrades who refused to pay the income tax” and successfully deterred the police and bailiffs from appearing.
During the Fries Rebellion, officials tried to arrest Henry Shankwyler, but were foiled by a crowd of fifty supporters, who “went in advance of the officers, and, reaching the house before them,” intimidated the marshal into withdrawing without his prey.
“Some said if he were taken out of his house they would fight as long as they had a drop of blood in their bodies.
… Seeing that nothing further could be accomplished there, the officers took their leave.
As they left the house the people set up a shout and hurrahed for ‘Liberty.’ ”
Irish “Blue Shirts” held a rally in County Cork to protest government property seizures against tax resisters, and “[w]hile the conference was sitting, County Cork farmers felled trees in the roads, cut telephone wires and made other efforts to prevent further seizure of cattle for unpaid annuities.”
At one point “police fired upon a crowd attempting to prevent the forced sale of cattle seized for non-payment of taxes,” killing one.
Una Ridley, an English council tax resister, told a reporter in :
…how the couple had managed to foil efforts by bailiffs to remove property.
“So long as you make yourself secure, close all the downstairs windows and all the upstairs ones too, the bailiffs cannot make an entry,” she said.
In Samoa in , officials tried to arrest Tamasese, the head of the Mau movement, for tax refusal:
…a party of civil police attempted to arrest Tamasese at Apia, but were prevented by crowds of Mau supporters, who obstructed the police and managed to get him away in a car.
On , at Vaimoso village, another attempt was made by a party of civil police at his home.
On that occasion the police were covered by a party of 30 men from the cruisers.
Resistance was again made, and the police and the naval party, to avoid bloodshed, retired. further attempt to make an arrest was made at the home of Tamasese at Vaimoso on .
The party of six military police was stoned by women and others, and it retired.
Barricades were used successfully in the battle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
In one early case:
Over 300 people turned up outside [Jeannette McGuin’s] house.
Banners were hung out of the window saying “God Help the Sheriffs.”
The sheriffs didn’t show up and Jeannette McGuin never heard another word from them.
In some others:
[I]n Edinburgh over 300 people filled a central high street to prevent a poinding… 200 activists guarded flats in the Grass Market area… and 150 people guarded 11 flats in Stockbridge and Comely Bank.
In another:
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
Jackie Moyers of the Mayfield/Newtongrange Anti-Poll Tax Union reported:
The very first poinding which was supposed to have been taking place was in a small village called Pathead…
The back of eight o’clock everybody started coming up, they actually started running a relay service, a shuttle service with cars going to collect people, and I’d say by about half-past nine to ten o’clock we had 110 people standing in the garden.
It was a beautiful day, it was like everybody was sunbathing, having a day out; we stood about there, everybody singing songs, we had the records on, a couple of them had a wee drink, things like that, waiting on the sheriff officers coming…
The sheriff officers turned up, got on the phone and, lo and behold, a police car turned up… So the police came up and asked us if the sheriff officers could get in and I said, “Well, I’m telling you, under no circumstances whatsoever are we allowing any sheriff officers into anybody’s house to carry out a poinding.”
…So the sheriff officers turned around to the police, and says “I want him arrested, because he’s organising this,” and the police says, “well, we can’t do a thing.”
And everyone in the garden, I says to them, well, “They want me arrested.”
They says, “Well, if you’re getting arrested then all of us are getting arrested.”
And by this time, the local coalman had come up the road in his lorry, stopped his lorry and blocked the street.
The two guys at the back jumped off, and the coalman who was driving the lorry, they jumped over the fence and joined us.
The local council workers, who were doing the windows at the time, downed their tools and got in the garden and supported us.
It’s worse than jungle drums, because the local baker heard it, he came around with his baker’s van and started dishing out cakes to us.
The sheriff officers were getting quite panicky by this time.
The police got in their car and left the sheriff officers.
I told them again.
I said, “You’d better get going.
It’s a waste of your time.
We know you’re not going to get in, so there’s nothing else you can do.”
… They tried to get in for five or ten minutes and by this time the crowd were getting quite hostile, and I says, “I think you’d better go to your car while you’ve still got four wheels and you’re still able to walk.”
At Bishops Lydeard, people “divided up into small groups, and blockaded every road into the village.”
Barricades were constructed and every vehicle which tried to enter was stopped and asked its business.
… In the end, the bailiffs didn’t come near the place.
Poll tax resisters also sometimes occupied or blockaded the offices of sheriffs and bailiffs.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, blockades were used to obstruct the movement of constables when they were seeking to arrest resisters, and barricades were used to prevent property seizure.
Here are excerpts from one government investigation of the Annuity Tax disturbances:
…I saw sledge hammers and other instruments there to open the premises and get at the goods, but after labouring for half an hour or more they could not effect an entrance.
Q: Was that because Mr. Dun used some of the metal in which he was a dealer to barricade his premises?
A: Yes; tons of metal were put up against the back door, and it was impossible for them to get in.
Mr. Dunn had barricaded the door of the room where the poinded effects were, so that an entrance could not be had… I found that the room where the poinded goods were was filled up to above the centre of the room with boxes filled with plates of iron of immense weight.
We were told that the poinded goods were lying beneath those, and that we might get at them as we could.
I sent for labourers, and had the whole of those boxes removed into the front shop until I got access, after great trouble, to the sheets of brass, which were the poinded articles.
These were then declared by the sheriff officers to be of a different description, and inferior to what they had previously poinded; they refused to take them; and the only articles they recognised were some coils of copper wire; those they took to the police office, and those were all that were obtained on that occasion.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, farmers famously barricaded their homes with their cattle inside to protect them from seizure.
When the attachment operations began, minute instructions were issued to meet every situation.
In the beginning only those who had received notices were to greet the attachment parties with closed doors.
Then whole villages were turned into blackholes, and people who could not put up with the terrible strain involved were humourously asked to undertake a pilgrimage.
When it was found that in spite of the greatest precautions, the Pathans managed to carry away carts, break into enclosures and unhinge closed doors, the Sardar [resistance commander] said: “Pull your carts to pieces.
Keep the body in one place, wheels in another, and shafts in a third place; make your hedges extra strong with thorns and bushes; and fortify the doors in such a way that they might not be able to open them except by breaking them open with axes.
Exhaust them thoroughly.”
In order to save their beloved cattle 80,000 men, women, children with these cattle have locked themselves up in small and insanitary houses for over three months.
As I passed through villages, silent, empty and deserted with sentinels posted at different ends, I saw women peeping through the barred windows to see whether it was the arrival of the japti [attachment] officer and on being reassured the doors being opened I was taken inside and I saw the darkness, the stench, the filth; and the men, women and children who had herded for months in the same room with their beloved cattle — miserable, lacerated, grown whitish by disease — and as I heard their determination to remain in that condition for months rather than abandon their cattle to the tender mercies of the japti officer I could not help thinking that the imagination which conceived the dire japti methods, the severity which had enforced them and the policy which had sanctioned them were difficult to be found outside the pages of a history of medieval times.
In Alwar, India, in , blockades were used against tax collectors:
Thousands of armed Hindu Moslem [sic] peasants of splendid physique with fighting spirit are concentrating in an area of 22 square miles to repel the State tax gatherers.
The roads by which the lorries have been bringing troops have been made impassable.
The paths are blocked by huge boulders…
“Early one morning in Karl North (Rochester, N.Y.) was alerted by neighbors that the IRS had seized his car and was about to have it towed for $11.29 in unpaid telephone tax.
Without time to grab his car key, Karl rushed out of the house and lay down under the car.
This disconcerted the IRS enough that when they stopped everything to call the police, he ran back into the house, got the key, rushed back out, and drove the car off.”
Landholders in Tasmania launched a tax strike in , and when the police came with distress warrants, “Householders padlocked their gateways, and mastiffs were chained at the approaches.”
The tax resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in assembled a force to prevent the jailing of one of their comrades who had refused to pay a fine.
The Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone began when a king named Bai Bureh assembled an armed group which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that a later government investigator labeled “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities.”
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
In , drivers parked their cars in the middle of the streets in downtown Paris, blocking all traffic for 45 minutes at mid-day to protest a fuel tax.
Property seizures were also used by the British women’s suffrage movement as opportunities to hold protest rallies or for propaganda.
Here are some examples from the news of the time:
“Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.”
“Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.”
“A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L. By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.”
Tax resisters frequently face the criticism of being freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them.
This rhetorical attack paints the tax resisters as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.
One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging flamboyant giveaways of their resisted taxes — both to make it clear that the resister does not have only selfish motives for resisting, and to demonstrate that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (and to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).
Redirection is also a way of forging or strengthening ties with the recipient groups, and of making them aware of tax resistance as an option.
Today I will briefly describe some of the many examples of tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns that have used this technique, and the many variations they have come up with.
Julia “Butterfly” Hill in redirected more than $150,000 of federal taxes that she owed that year, and made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:
I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going.
And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes.
I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.”
They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.
Antor Odu Ndep, executive director of Common Ground Health Clinic, accepts redirected taxes during a War Tax Boycott granting ceremony.
NWTRCC
organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in .
It encouraged people to resist as a group, and as part of their resistance, to redirect any refused taxes to one of two groups: one that concentrated on providing health assistance in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the other that provides assistance for Iraq War refugees.
The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference at which oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 were given to spokespeople for these campaigns.
The People’s Life Fund, associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, accepts redirected taxes from resisters.
If the IRS successfully seizes money from the resisters, the resisters can reclaim their donations to the Fund.
Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends.
Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony.
Usually the grants are small — $500 or $1000 — but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and for news of war tax resistance to spread in the local activist community.
This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups.
A family in Vermont figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: “They refused to pay 50% of their tax liability and redirected it to Plan International’s Childreach program.
Childreach has a fund drive for a project to help children in Nepal and Ghana, and has received a challenge grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
This means that the $211.69 that the WTR family has redirected will result in a $423.38 matching contribution from the U.S. government!”
In , several hundred Spanish war tax resisters redirected over €85,000 to the group “La’Onf,” which was organizing and educating about nonviolent conflict resolution techniques in Iraq.
The Mennonite Central Committee has established a “turning toward peace” fund especially designed for people who want to redirect their tax dollars from the government to more constructive projects — for example, education for children in Afghanistan.
War tax resisters Paul and Addie Snyder made a point of saying “we believe in paying taxes” as they explained in that they wouldn’t be paying those taxes to the federal government, but instead would be giving the money directly to rural poverty projects nearby.
In several hundred American Quaker war tax resisters paid their tax dollars to a Catholic soup kitchen in Philadelphia.
The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, writing as “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote a letter to the editor of a suffragist paper suggesting that women “should contribute the sum she owes to the Government to a National Fund of her own choosing, and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Charlotte Despard, for example, “said she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from their redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who would be ineligible for government financial aid because of refusal to register for the draft.
Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a defense committee that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial.
In , 70 war tax resisters went to the phone company offices in Boston to pay their bills minus the federal excise tax.
They then collected this refused tax ($142 worth) by passing an army helmet around, and donated it to the United Farm Workers to help them set up a clinic in California.
Also , the Cornell branch of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam did a similar phone company office protest and collection of redirected phone taxes, donating the money to a local Early Childhood Development program.
In , war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time — by handing them out to passers by.
“I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said.
“Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: “One year they converted their war tax debt into five-dollar bills, which they gave to individuals waiting in line at the city unemployment office.
They included a letter with each donation telling why they were doing this, and they notified media beforehand.
Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR, and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
In a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”
And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here:
When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in , she threw a fundraising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money — not to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”
A tactic that I’ve encountered on many occasions in my research into tax resistance campaigns is that of disrupting government auctions of goods, particularly those of seized from tax resisters.
Here are several examples that show the variety of ways campaigns have accomplished this:
Religious nonconformists in the United Kingdom
Education Act-related resistance
Some disruption of auctions took place during the tax resistance in protest of the provisions of the Education Act that provided taxpayer money for sectarian education .
The Westminster Gazette reported:
There was some feeling displayed at a sale of the goods of Passive Resisters at Colchester yesterday, the Rev. T. Batty, a Baptist minister, and the Rev. Pierrepont Edwards, locally, known as “the fighting parson,” entering into discussion in the auction room, but being stopped by the auctioneer, who said he did his work during the week and he hoped they did theirs on Sundays.
At Long Eaton the goods of twenty-three Passive Resisters were sold amid demonstrations of hostility to the auctioneer.
A boy was arrested for throwing a bag of flour.
The New York Times reported that “Auctioneers frequently decline to sell goods upon which distraints have been levied.” And the San Francisco Chronicle noted:
Difficulty is experienced everywhere in getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.
In Leominster, a ram and some ewe lambs, the property of a resistant named Charles Grundy, were seized and put up at auction, as follows: Ram, Joe Chamberlain; ewes, Lady Balfour, Mrs. Bishop, Lady Cecil, Mrs. Canterbury and so on through the list of those who made themselves conspicuous in forcing the bill through Parliament.
The auctioneer was entitled to a fee under the law of 10 shillings and 6 pence, which he promptly turned over to Mr. Grundy, having during the sale expressed the strongest sympathy for the tax-resisters.
Most of the auction sales are converted into political meetings in which the tax and those responsible for it are roundly denounced.
Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance
Auction disruptions were commonplace in the Annuity Tax resistance campaign in Edinburgh.
By law the distraint auctions (“roupings”) had to be held at the Mercat Cross — the town square, essentially — which made it easy to gather a crowd; or sometimes in the homes of the resisters. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine reported of one of the Mercat Cross roupings:
If any of our readers know that scene, let them imagine, after the resistance was tolerably well organized, an unfortunate auctioneer arriving at the Cross about noon, with a cart loaded with furniture for sale.
Latterly the passive hubbub rose as if by magic.
Bells sounded, bagpipes brayed, the Fiery Cross passed down the closses, and through the High Street and Cowgate; and men, women, and children, rushed from all points towards the scene of Passive Resistance.
The tax had grinded the faces of the poor, and the poor were, no doubt, the bitterest in indignation.
Irish, Highlanders, Lowlanders, were united by the bond of a common suffering.
Respectable shopkeepers might be seen coming in haste from the Bridges; Irish traders flew from St. Mary’s Wynd; brokers from the Cowgate; all pressing round the miserable auctioneer; yelling, hooting, perhaps cursing, certainly saying anything but what was affectionate or respectful of the clergy.
And here were the black placards tossing above the heads of the angry multitude — ROUPING FOR STIPEND!
This notice was of itself enough to deter any one from purchasing; though we will say it for the good spirit of the people, that both the Scotch and Irish brokers disdained to take bargains of their suffering neighbours’ goods.
Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend.
What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?
The people lodged the placards and flags in shops about the Cross, so that not a moment was lost in having their machinery in full operation, and scouts were ever ready to spread the intelligence if any symptoms of a sale were discovered.
Sheriff Clerk Kenmure Maitland appeared before a committee that was investigating the resistance campaign.
He mentioned that “Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer for sheriff’s sales, was so much inconvenienced and intimidated that he refused to take any more of those sales.”
Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?
A: He was very much inconvenienced on that
occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer
by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any
customer who was of that party.
Q: It was not from any fear of personal violence?
A: That might have had a good deal to do with it.
Q: Was Mr. Whitten the only auctioneer who declined?
A: No. After Mr. Whitten’s refusal I applied to
Mr. Hogg, whose services I should have been glad to have obtained, and he
said he would let me know the next day if he would undertake to act as
auctioneer; he wrote to me the next day saying, that, after consideration
with his friends, he declined to act.
Q: Any other?
A: I do not remember asking any others. The rates
of remuneration for acting as auctioneer at sheriffs’ sales are so low that
men having a better class of business will not act. I had to look about among
not first-class auctioneers, and I found that I would have some difficulty in
getting a man whom I could depend upon, for I had reason to believe that
influence would be used to induce the auctioneer to fail me at the last
moment.
It was difficult for the authorities to get any help at all, either from auctioneers, furniture dealers, or carters.
The government had to purchase (and fortify) their own cart because they were unable to rent one for such use.
Here is an example of an auction of a resister’s goods held at the resister’s
home, as described in the testimony of Thomas Menzies:
A: I saw a large number of the most respectable citizens assembled in the house, and a large number outside awaiting the arrival of the officers who came in a cab, and the indignation was very strong when they got into the house, so much so that a feeling was entertained by some that there was danger to the life of Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer, and that he might be thrown out of the window, because there were such threats, but others soothed down the feeling.
Q: There was no overt act or breach of the peace?
A: No.
The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another, and they went away round by a back street, rather than go by the direct way.
Q: Did Mr. Whitten, from his experience on that occasion, refuse ever to come to another sale as auctioneer?
A: He refused to act again, he gave up his
position.
He then described a second such auction:
A: The house was densely packed; it was impossible for me to get entrance; the stair was densely packed to the third and second flats; when the policemen came with the officers, they could not force their way up, except with great difficulty.
The consequence was, that nearly the whole of the rail of the upper storey gave way to the great danger both of the officers and the public, and one young man I saw thrown over the heads of the crowd to the great danger of being precipitated three storeys down.
Then the parties came out of the house, with their clothes dishevelled and severely handled; and the officer on that occasion will tell you that he was very severely dealt with indeed, and Mr. Sheriff Gordon was sent for, so much alarm being felt; but by the time the Sheriff arrived things were considerably subdued.
Sheriff Clerk Maitland also described this auction:
I found a considerable crowd outside; and on going up to the premises on the top flat, I found that I could not get entrance to the house; the house was packed with people, who on our approach kept hooting and shouting out, and jeering us; and, as far as I could see, the shutters were shut and the windows draped in black, and all the rooms crowded with people.
I said that it was necessary to carry out the sale, and they told me to come in, if I dare.
On another occasion, as he tells it, the auction seemed to go smoothly at first, but the buyers didn’t get what they hoped for:
At Mr. McLaren’s sale everything was conducted in an orderly way as far as the sale was concerned.
We got in, and only a limited number were allowed to go in; but after the officials and the police had gone, there was a certain amount of disturbance.
Certain goods were knocked down to the poinding creditors, consisting of an old sofa and an old sideboard, and Mr. McLaren said, “Let those things go to the clergy.” Those were the only things which had to be taken away.
There was no vehicle ready to carry them away.
Mr. McLaren said that he would not keep them.
After the police departed, he turned them out in the street, when they were taken possession of by the crowd of idlers, and made a bonfire of.
A summary of the effect of all of this disruption reads:
So strong was the feeling of hostility, that the town council were unable to procure the services of any auctioneer to sell the effects of those who conscientiously objected to pay the clerical portion of the police taxes, and they were consequently forced to make a special arrangement with a sheriff’s officer, by which, to induce him to undertake the disagreeable task, they provided him for two years with an auctioneer’s license from the police funds.
In , it was found necessary to enter into another arrangement with the officer, by which the council had to pay him 12½ percent, on all arrears, including the police, prison, and registration rates, as well as the clerical tax; and he receives this per-centage whether the sums are recovered by himself or paid direct to the police collector, and that over and above all the expenses he recovers from the recusants.
But this is not all; the council were unable to hire a cart or vehicle from any of the citizens, and it was found necessary to purchase a lorry, and to provide all the necessary apparatus and assistance for enforcing payment of the arrears.
All this machinery, which owes its existence entirely to the Clerico-Police Act, involves a wasteful expenditure of city funds, induces a chronic state of irritation in the minds of the citizens, and is felt to be a gross violation of the principles of civil and religious liberty.
The Tithe War
William John Fitzpatrick wrote of the auctions during the Tithe War:
[T]he parson’s first step was to put the cattle up to auction in the presence of a regiment of English soldiery; but it almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it.
The same observation applies to the crops.
Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser.
Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction.
But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.
The Sentinel wrote of one auction:
Yesterday being the day on which the sheriff announced that, if no bidders could be obtained for the cattle, he would have the property returned to Mr. Germain, immense crowds were collected from the neighbouring counties — upwards of 20,000 men.
The County Kildare men, amounting to about 7000, entered, led by Jonas Duckett, Esq., in the most regular and orderly manner.
This body was preceded by a band of music, and had several banners on which were “Kilkea and Moone, Independence for ever,” “No Church Tax,” “No Tithe,” “Liberty,” &c. The whole body followed six carts, which were prepared in the English style — each drawn by two horses.
The rear was brought up by several respectable landholders of Kildare.
The barrack-gates were thrown open, and different detachments of infantry took their stations right and left, while the cavalry, after performing sundry evolutions, occupied the passes leading to the place of sale.
The cattle were ordered out, when the sheriff, as on the former day, put them up for sale; but no one could be found to bid for the cattle, upon which he announced his intention of returning them to Mr. Germain.
The news was instantly conveyed, like electricity, throughout the entire meeting, when the huzzas of the people surpassed anything we ever witnessed.
The cattle were instantly liberated and given up to Mr. Germain.
At this period a company of grenadiers arrived, in double-quick time, after travelling from Castlecomer, both officers and men fatigued and covered with dust.
Thus terminated this extraordinary contest between the Church and the people, the latter having obtained, by their steadiness, a complete victory.
The cattle will be given to the poor of the sundry districts.
Similar examples were reported in the foreign press:
Cork. — A most extraordinary scene has been exhibited in this city.
Some cows seized for tithes were brought to a public place for sale, escorted by a squadron of lancers, and followed by thousands of infuriated people.
All the garrison, cavalry and infantry, under the command of Sir George Bingham, were called out.
The cattle were set up at three pounds for each, no bidder; two pounds, no bidder; one pound, no bidder; in short, the auctioneer descended to three shillings for each cow, but no purchaser appeared.
This scene lasted for above an hour, when there being no chance of making sale of the cattle, it was proposed to adjourn the auction; but, as we are informed, the General in command of the military expressed an unwillingness to have the troops subjected to a repetition of the harassing duty thus imposed on them.
After a short delay, it was, at the interference and remonstrance of several gentlemen, both of town and country, agreed upon that the cattle should be given up to the people, subject to certain private arrangements.
We never witnessed such a scene; thousands of country people jumping with exulted feelings at the result, wielding their shillelaghs, and exhibiting all the other symptoms of exuberant joy characteristic of the buoyancy of Irish feeling.
At Carlow a triumphant resistance to the laws, similar to that which occurred
at Cork, has been exhibited in the presence of the authorities and the
military. Some cattle had been seized for tithe, and a public sale announced,
when a large body of men, stated at 50,000, marched to the place appointed,
and, of course, under the influence of such terror, none were found to bid
for the cattle. The sale was adjourned from day to day, for seven days, and
upon each day the same organised bands entered the town, and rendered the
attempt to sell the cattle, in pursuance of the law, abortive. At last the
cattle are given up to the mob, crowned with laurels, and driven home with an
escort of 10,000 men.
In a somewhat later case, a Catholic priest in Blarney by the name of Peyton refused to pay his income tax on the grounds that the law treated him in an inferior way to his Protestant counterparts.
His horse was seized and sold at auction, where “the multitude assembled hissed, hooted, hustled, and otherwise impeded the proceedings.”
There was precedent for this. During the Tithe War period and thereafter, the
authorities had to go to extraordinary lengths to auction off seized goods. As
one account put it:
In Ireland we pay — the whole people of the empire pay — troops who march up from the country to Dublin, fifty or sixty miles, as escorts of the parson-pounded pigs and cattle, which passive resistance prevents from being sold or bought at home; and we also maintain barracks in that country which not only lodge the parsons’ military guards, but afford, of late, convenient resting-places in their journey to the poor people’s cattle, whom the soldiers are driving to sale; and which would otherwise be rescued on the road.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain were particularly adept in disrupting tax auctions and in making them opportunities for propaganda and protest.
Here are several examples, largely as reported in the movement newsletter called The Vote:
“On a sale was held… of
jewellery seized in distraint for income-tax… Members of the
W.F.L.
and Mrs. [Edith] How Martyn
(Hon.
Sec.) assembled to
protest against the proceedings, and the usual policeman kept a dreary
vigil at the open door. The day had been specially chosen by the
authorities, who wished to prevent a demonstration…”
“The sale of Mrs. Cleeves’ dog-cart took place at the Bush Hotel, Sketty,
on afternoon. The
W.F.L.
held their protest meeting outside — much to the discomfort of the
auctioneer, who declared the impossibility of ‘drowning the voice
outside.’ ”
“Notwithstanding the mud and odoriferous atmosphere of the back streets
off Drury-lane, quite a large number of members of the Tax Resisters’
League, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Women’s Social and Political
Union, met outside Bulloch’s Sale Rooms shortly after
to protest against the sale of Miss Bertha Brewster’s goods, which had
been seized because of her refusal to pay her Imperial taxes. Before the
sale took place, Mrs. Gatty, as chairman, explained to at least a hundred
people the reasons of Miss Brewster’s refusal to pay her taxes and the
importance of the constitutional principle that taxation without
representation is tyranny, which this refusal stood for. Miss Leonora
Tyson proposed the resolution protesting against the injustice of this
sale, and it was seconded by Miss F[lorence]. A. Underwood, and supported
by Miss Brackenbury. The resolution was carried with only two
dissentients, and these dissentients were women!”
“The goods seized were sold at the public auction room. Before selling
them the auctioneer allowed Mrs. How Martyn to make a short explanatory
speech, and he himself added that it was an unpleasant duty he had to
perform.”
“A scene which was probably never equalled in the whole of its history
took place at the Oxenham Auction Rooms, Oxford-street, on
. About a fortnight before
the bailiffs had entered Mrs. Despard’s residence in Nine Elms and seized
goods which they valued at £15. Our President, for some years past, as is
well known, has refused to pay her income-tax and inhabited house duty on
the grounds that taxation and representation should go together; and this
is the third time her goods have been seized for distraint. It was not
until the day before — — that Mrs. Despard was informed of the time and place where
her furniture was to be sold. In spite of this short notice — which we
learn on good authority to be illegal — a large crowd composed not only of
our own members but also of women and men from various Suffrage societies
gathered together at the place specified in the notice. ¶ When ‘Lot
325’ was called Mrs. Despard mounted a chair, and said, ‘I rise to
protest, in the strongest, in the most emphatic way of which I am capable,
against these iniquities, which are perpetually being perpetrated in the
name of the law. I should like to say I have served my country in various
capacities, but I am shut out altogether from citizenship. I think special
obloquy has been put upon me in this matter. It was well known that I
should not run away and that I should not take my goods away, but the
authorities sent a man in possession. He remained in the house — a
household of women — at night. I only heard
of this sale, and from a man
who knows that of which he is speaking, I know that this sale is illegal.
I now claim the law — the law that is supposed to be for women as well as
men.’ ”
“[A] most successful protest against taxation without representation was
made by Mrs. Muir, of Broadstairs, whose goods were sold at the Auction
Rooms, 120, High-street, Margate. The protest was conducted by Mrs.
[Emily] Juson Kerr; and Miss Ethel Fennings, of the W.F.L.,
went down to speak. The auctioneer, Mr. Holness, was most courteous, and
not only allowed Mrs. Muir to explain in a few words why she resisted
taxation, but also gave permission to hold meeting in his rooms after the
sale was over.”
“One of the most successful and effective Suffrage demonstrations ever
held in St. Leonards was that arranged jointly by the Women’s Tax
Resistance League and the Hastings and St. Leonards Women’s Suffrage
Propaganda League, on ,
on the occasion of the sale of some family silver which had been seized at
the residence of Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison for non-payment of
Inhabited House Duty. Certainly the most striking feature of this protest
was the fact that members of all societies in Hastings,
St. Leonards, Bexhill and
Winchelsea united in their effort to render the protest representative of
all shades of Suffrage opinion. Flags, banners, pennons and regalia of
many societies were seen in the procession.… The hearty response from the
men to Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes’s call for ‘three cheers for Mrs.
Darent Harrison’ at the close of the proceedings in the auction room, came
as a surprise to the Suffragists themselves.”
“On , the last item on
the catalogue of Messrs. Whiteley’s weekly sale in Westbourne-grove was
household silver seized in distraint for King’s taxes from Miss Gertrude
Eaton, of Kensington. Miss Eaton is a lady very well known in the musical
world and interested in social reforms, and
hon. secretary of the
Prison Reform Committee. Miss Eaton said a few dignified words of protest
in the auction room, and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson explained to the
large crowd of bidders the reason why tax-paying women, believing as they
do that taxation without representation is tyranny, feel that they cannot,
by remaining inactive, any longer subscribe to it. A procession then
formed up and a protest meeting was held…”
“At the offices of the collector of Government taxes, Westborough, on
a silver cream jug and sugar
basin were sold. These were the property of
Dr. Marion McKenzie, who
had refused payment of taxes to support her claim on behalf of women’s
suffrage. A party of suffragettes marched to the collector’s office, which
proved far too small to accommodate them all. Mr. Parnell said he regretted
personally having the duty to perform. He believed that ultimately the
women would get the vote. They had the municipal vote and he maintained
that women who paid rates and taxes should be allowed to vote. (Applause.)
But that was his own personal view. He would have been delighted not to
have had that process, but he had endeavoured to keep the costs down.
Dr. Marion McKenzie thanked
Mr. Parnell for the courtesy shown them. A protest meeting was afterwards
held on St. Nicholas
Cliff.”
“Mrs. [Anne] Cobden-Sanderson, representing the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, was, by courtesy of the auctioneer, allowed to explain the reason
of the protest. Judging by the applause with which her remarks were
received, most of those present were in sympathy.”
“The auctioneer was entirely in sympathy with the protest, and explained
the circumstances under which the sale took place. He courteously allowed
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson and Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr to put clearly
the women’s point of view; Miss Raleigh made a warm appeal for true
freedom. A procession was formed and an open-air meeting subsequently
held.”
“The auctioneer, who is in sympathy with the suffragists, refused to take
commission.”
“[A] crowd of Suffragists of all shades of opinion assembled at Hawking’s
Sale Rooms, Lisson-grove, Marylebone, to support Dr. Frances Ede and Dr.
Amy Sheppard, whose goods were to be sold by public auction for tax
resistance. By the courtesy of the auctioneer, Mr. Hawking, speeches were
allowed, and Dr. Ede
emphasized her conscientious objection to supporting taxation without
representation; she said that women like herself and her partner felt that
they must make this logical and dignified protest, but as it caused very
considerable inconvenience and sacrifice to professional women, she
trusted that the grave injustice would speedily be remedied. Three cheers
were given for the doctors, and a procession with banners marched to
Marble Arch, where a brief meeting was held in Hyde Park, at which the
usual resolution was passed unanimously.”
“An interesting sequel to the seizure of Mrs. Tollemache’s goods last
week, and the ejection of the bailiff from her residence, Batheaston
Villa, Bath, was the sale held , at the White Hart Hotel. To cover a tax of only £15 and
costs, goods were seized to the value of about £80, and it was at once
decided by the Women’s Tax Resistance League and Mrs. Tollemache’s friends
that such conduct on the part of the authorities must be circumvented and
exposed. The goods were on view the morning of the sale, and as there was
much valuable old china, silver, and furniture, the dealers were early on
the spot, and buzzing like flies around the articles they greatly desired
to possess. The first two pieces put up were, fortunately, quite
inviting; £19 being bid for a chest of drawers worth about
50s. and £3 for an
ordinary leather-top table, the requisite amount was realised, and the
auctioneer was obliged to withdraw the remaining lots much to the disgust
of the assembled dealers. Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, in her speech at
the protest meeting, which followed the sale, explained to these irate
gentlemen that women never took such steps unless compelled to do so, and
that if the tax collector had seized a legitimate amount of goods to
satisfy his claim, Mrs. Tollemache would willingly have allowed them to
go.”
“Under the auspices of the Tax Resistance League and the Women’s Freedom
League a protest meeting was held at Great Marlow on
, on the occasion of the sale
of plate and jewellery belonging to Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, the
well-known artist, and to Miss Hayes, daughter of Admiral Hayes. Their
property had been seized for the non-payment of Imperial taxes, and
through the courtesy of the tax-collector every facility was afforded to
the protesters to explain their action.”
“At the sale of a silver salver belonging to
Dr. Winifred Patch, of
Highbury, Steen’s Auction Rooms, Drayton Park, were crowded on
by members of the Women’s Freedom
League, the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and other Suffrage societies.
The auctioneer refused to allow the usual five minutes for explanation
before the sale, but Miss Alison Neilans, of the Women’s Freedom League,
was well supported and cheered when she insisted on making clear the
reasons why Dr. Patch for
several years has refused to pay taxes while deprived of a vote. A
procession was then formed, and marched to Highbury Corner, where a large
open-air meeting was presided over by Mrs. [Marianne] Clarendon Hyde, of
the Women’s Freedom League, and addressed by Mrs. Merrivale Mayer.”
“Practically every day sees a sale and protest somewhere, and the banners
of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, frequently supported by Suffrage
Societies, are becoming familiar in town and country. At the protest
meetings which follow all sales the reason why is explained to large
numbers of people who would not attend a suffrage meeting. Auctioneers are
becoming sympathetic even so far as to speak in support of the women’s
protest against a law which demands their money, but gives them no voice
in the way in which it is spent.”
“The sale was conducted, laughably enough, under the auspices of the
Women’s Freedom League and the Women’s Tax Resistance League; for, on
obtaining entrance to the hall, Miss Anderson and Mrs. Fisher bedecked it
with all the insignia of suffrage protest. The rostrum was spread with our
flag proclaiming the inauguration of Tax Resistance by the W.F.L.;
above the auctioneer’s head hung Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard’s embroidered
silk banner, with its challenge “Dare to be Free”; on every side the
green, white and gold of the
W.F.L.
was accompanied by the brown and black of the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, with its cheery ‘No Vote, no Tax’ injunctions and its John Hampden
maxims; while in the front rows, besides Miss Anderson, the heroine of the
day, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Fisher, were seen the inspiring figures of our
President and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, vice-president of the
W.T.R.L.”
“…all Women’s Freedom League members who know anything of the way in which
the sister society organises these matters should attend the sale in the
certainty of enjoying a really telling demonstration…”
“From early in the day Mrs. Huntsman and a noble band of sandwich-women
had paraded the town announcing the sale and distributing leaflets. In the
afternoon a contingent of the Tax Resistance League arrived with the John
Hampden banner and the brown and black pennons and flags. These marched
through the town and market square before entering the hall in which the
sale and meeting were to be held, and which was decorated with the flags
and colours of the Women’s Freedom League. Mr. Croome, the King’s officer,
conducted the sale in person, the goods sold being a quantity of table
silver, a silver toilette set, and one or two other articles. The prices
fetched were trifling, Mrs. Harvey desiring that no one should buy the
goods in for her.”
“Miss Andrews asked the auctioneer if she might explain the reason for the
sale of the waggon, and, having received the necessary permission was able
to give an address on tax resistance, and to show how it is one of the
weapons employed by the Freedom League to secure the enfranchisement of
women. Then came the sale — but beforehand the auctioneer said he had not
been aware he was to sell ‘distressed’ goods, and he very much objected to
doing so.… The meeting and the auctioneer together made the assembly chary
of bidding, and the waggon was not sold, which was a great triumph for the
tax-resisters.… Miss Trott and Miss Bobby helped to advertise the meeting
by carrying placards round the crowded market.”
“There was a crowded audience, and the auctioneer opened the proceedings
by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he
attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his
capacity as tax collector. After the sale a public meeting was held… At
the close of the meeting many questions were asked, new members joined the
League…”
The authorities tried to auction off Kate Harvey’s goods on-site, at her
home, rather than in a public hall, so that they might avoid
demonstrations of that sort. “On
morning a band of Suffragist
men carried placards through the streets of Bromley, on which was the
device, ‘I personally protest against the sale of a woman’s goods to pay
taxes over which she has no control,’ and long before
, the time fixed for the
sale, from North, South, East and West, people came streaming into the
little town of Bromley, and made their way towards ‘Brackenhill.’
Punctually at the
tax-collector and his deputy mounted the table in the dining-room, and the
former, more in sorrow than in anger, began to explain to the crowd
assembled that this was a genuine sale! Mrs. Harvey at once protested
against the sale taking place. Simply and solely because she was a woman,
although she was a mother, a business woman, and a tax-payer, she had no
voice in saying how the taxes collected from her should be spent. The tax
collector suffered this speech in silence, but he could judge by the
cheers it received that there were many ardent sympathisers with Mrs.
Harvey in her protest. He tried to proceed, but one after another the men
present loudly urged that no one there should bid for the goods. The
tax-collector feebly said this wasn’t a political meeting, but a genuine
sale! ‘One penny for your goods then!’ was the derisive answer. ‘One
penny — one penny!’ was the continued cry from both inside and outside
‘Brackenhill.’ Then men protested that the tax-collector was not a genuine
auctioneer; he had no hammer, no list of goods to be sold was hung up in
the room. There was no catalogue, nothing to show bidders what was to be
sold and what wasn’t. The men also objected to the presence of the
tax-collector’s deputy. ‘Tell him to get down!’ they shouted. ‘The sale
shan’t proceed till he does,’ they yelled. ‘Get down! Get down:’ they
sang. But the tax-collector felt safer by the support of this deputy.
‘He’s afraid of his own clerk,’ they jeered. Again the tax-collector asked
for bids. ‘One penny! One penny!’ was the deafening response. The din
increased every moment and pandemonium reigned supreme. During a temporary
lull the tax-collector said a sideboard had been sold for nine guineas.
Angry cries from angry men greeted this announcement. ‘Illegal sale!’ ‘He
shan’t take it home!’ ‘The whole thing’s illegal!’ ‘You shan’t sell
anything else!’ and The Daily Herald Leaguers,
members of the Men’s Political Union, and of other men’s societies,
proceeded to make more noise than twenty brass bands. Darkness was quickly
settling in; the tax-collector looked helpless, and his deputy smiled
wearily. ‘Talk about a comic opera — it’s better than Gilbert and Sullivan
could manage,’ roared an enthusiast. ‘My word, you look sick, guv’nor!
Give it up, man!’ Then everyone shouted against the other until the
tax-collector said he closed the sale, remarking plaintively that he had
lost £7 over the job! Ironical cheers greeted this news, with ‘Serve you
right for stealing a woman’s goods!’ He turned his back on his tormentors,
and sat down in a chair on the table to think things over. The protesters
sat on the sideboard informing all and sundry that if anyone wanted to
take away the sideboard he should take them with it! With the exit of the
tax-collector, his deputy and the bailiff, things gradually grew quieter,
and later on Mrs. Harvey entertained her supporters to tea at the Bell
Hotel. But the curious thing is, a man paid nine guineas for the sideboard
to the tax-collector. Mrs. Harvey owed him more than £17, and Mrs. Harvey
is still in possession of the sideboard!”
“The assistant auctioneer, to whom it fell to conduct the sale, was most
unfriendly, and refused to allow any speaking during the sale; but Miss
Boyle was able to shout through a window at his back, just over his
shoulder, an announcement that the goods were seized because Miss Cummins
refused to submit to taxation without representation, after which quite a
number of people who were attending the sale came out to listen to the
speeches.”
“The auctioneer was very sympathetic, and allowed Miss [Anna] Munro to
make a short speech before the waggon was sold. He then spoke a few
friendly words for the Woman’s Movement. After the sale a meeting was
held, and Mrs. Tippett and Miss Munro were listened to with evident
interest by a large number of men. The Vote and
other Suffrage literature was sold.”
“A joint demonstration of the Tax Resisters’ League and militant
suffragettes, held here [Hastings]
as a protest against the sale of
the belongings of those who refused to pay taxes, was broken up by a mob.
The women were roughly handled and half smothered with soot. Their banners
were smashed. The police finally succeeded in getting the women into a
blacksmith’s shop, where they held the mob at bay until the arrival of
reinforcements. The women were then escorted to a railway station.”
“The auction sale of the Duchess of Bedford’s silver cup proved, perhaps,
the best advertisement the Women’s Tax Resistance League ever had. It was
made the occasion for widespread propaganda. The newspapers gave columns
of space to the event, while at the big mass meeting, held outside the
auction room…”
“When a member is to be sold up a number of her comrades accompany her to
the auction-room. The auctioneer is usually friendly and stays the
proceedings until some one of the league has mounted the table and
explained to the crowd what it all means. Here are the banners, and the
room full of women carrying them, and it does not take long to impress
upon the mind of the people who have come to attend the sale that here is
a body of women willing to sacrifice their property for the principle for
which John Hampden went to prison — that taxation without representation
is tyranny. … The women remain at these auctions until the property of the
offender is disposed of. The kindly auctioneer puts the property seized
from the suffragists early on his list, or lets them know when it will be
called.”
American war tax resisters
There have been a few celebrated auction sales in the American war tax resistance movement.
Some of them have been met with protests or used as occasions for outreach and propaganda, but others have been more actively interfered with.
When Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home was seized, for example, there were
“months of continuous picketing and leafletting” before the sale. Then:
The day began with a silent vigil initiated by the local Quaker group.
While the bids were being read inside the building, guerrilla theatre took place out on the sidewalk.
At one point the Federal building was auctioned (offers ranging from 25¢ to 2 bottle caps).
Several supporters present at the proceedings inside made brief statements about the unjust nature of the whole ordeal.
Waldo the Clown was also there, face painted sadly, opening envelopes along with the IRS person.
As the official read the bids and the names of the bidders, Waldo searched his envelopes and revealed their contents: a flower, a unicorn, some toilet paper, which he handed to different office people.
Marion Bromley also spoke as the bids were opened, reiterating that the seizure was based on fraudulent assumptions, and that therefore the property could not be rightfully sold.
The protests, odd as they were, eventually paid off, as the IRS had in the interim been caught improperly pursuing political dissidents, and as a result it decided to reverse the sale of the Bromley home and give up on that particular fight.
When Paul and Addie Snyder’s home was auctioned off for back taxes, it was
reported that “many bids of $1 or less were made.”
Making a bid of pennies for farm property being foreclosed for failure to meet mortgages was a common tactic among angry farmers during the Depression.
If their bids succeeded, the property was returned to its owner and the mortgage torn up.
In some such cases, entire farms plus their livestock, equipment and home furnishings sold for as little as $2.
When George Willoughby’s car was seized and sold by the IRS,
Friends, brandishing balloons, party horns, cookies and lemonade, invaded the IRS office in Chester and bought the car back for $900.
The Rebecca rioters
On a couple of occasions the Rebeccaites prevented auctions, though not of goods seized for tax debts but for ordinary debts.
Here are two examples from Henry Tobit Evans’s book on the Rebecca phenomenon:
A distress for rent was levied on the goods of a man named Lloyd… and a bailiff of the name of Rees kept possession of the goods.
Previous to the day of sale, Rebecca and a great number of her daughters paid him a visit, horsewhipped him well, and kept him in safe custody until the furniture was entirely cleared from the house.
When Rees was freed, he found nothing but an empty house, Rebecca and her followers having departed.
Two bailiffs were there in possession of the goods and chattels under execution… Having entered the house by bursting open the door, Rebecca ran upstairs, followed by some of her daughters.
She ordered the bailiffs, who were in bed at the time, to be up and going in five minutes, or to prepare for a good drubbing.
The bailiffs promptly obeyed, but were driven forth by a bodyguard of the rioters, who escorted them some distance, pushing and driving the poor men in front of them.
At last they were allowed to depart to their homes on a sincere promise of not returning.
Reform Act agitation
During the tax resistance that accompanied the drive to pass the Reform Act in the in the United Kingdom, hundreds of people signed pledges in which they declared that “they will not purchase the goods of their townsmen not represented in Parliament which may be seized for the non-payment of taxes, imposed by any House of Commons as at present constituted.”
The True Sun asserted that
The tax-gatherer… might seize for them, but the brokers assured the inhabitants that they would neither seize any goods for such taxes, nor would they purchase goods so seized.
Yesterday afternoon, Mr Philips, a broker, in the Broadway, Westminster, exhibited the following placard at the door of his shop:— “Take notice, that the proprietor of this shop will not distrain for the house and window duties, nor will he purchase any goods that are seized for the said taxes; neither will any of those oppressive taxes be paid for this house in future.” A similar notice was also exhibited at a broker’s shop in York Street, Westminster.
Another newspaper account said:
A sale by auction of goods taken in distress for assessed taxes was announced to take place at Ashton Tavern on , at Birmingham.
From forty to fifty persons attended, including some brokers, but no one could be found except the poor woman from whose husband the goods had been seized, and the auctioneer himself.
A man came when the sale was nearly over, who was perfectly ignorant of the circumstances under which it took place, and bid for one of the last lots; he soon received an intimation, however, from the company that he had better desist, which be accordingly did.
After the sale was over nearly the whole of the persons present surrounded this man, and lectured him severely upon his conduct, and it was only by his solemnly declaring to them that he had bid in perfect ignorance of the nature of the sale that he was suffered to escape without some more substantial proof of their displeasure.
Railroad bond shenanigans
There was an epidemic of fraud in the United States in in which citizens of local jurisdictions were convinced to vote to sell bonds to pay for the Railroad to come to town.
The railroad never arrived, but the citizens then were on the hook to tax themselves to pay off the bonds.
Many said “hell no,” but by then the bonds had been sold to people who were not necessarily involved in the original swindle but had just bought them as investments.
In the course of the tax resistance campaigns associated with these railroad
bond boondoggles, auction disruption was resorted to on some occasions. Here
are some examples:
St. Clair [Missouri]’s taxpayers joined the movement in to repudiate the debts, but the county’s new leaders wanted to repay the investors.
Afraid to try taxing the residents, they decided to raise the interest by staging a huge livestock auction in , the proceeds to pay off the railroad bond interest.
On auction day, however, “no one seemed to want to buy” any animals.
To bondholders the “great shock” of the auction’s failure proved the depth of local resistance to railroad taxes.
Another attempt was made the other day to sell farm property in the town of Greenwood, Steuben county [New York], on account of a tax levied for the town bonding in aid of railroads, and another failure has followed.
The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks.
We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.” The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.
The White League in Louisiana
In Reconstruction-era Louisiana, white supremacist tax resisters disrupted a tax auction.
There was a mob of fifty or sixty armed men came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all.
Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector.
The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices.
I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed.
I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.
Mr. [Valsin A.?] Fournet came with eight or ten.
When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him.
The deputy then shoved him down.
As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.
…very few people attended tax-sales [typically], because the white people were organized to prevent tax-collection, and pledged themselves not to buy any property at tax-sales, and the property was generally bought by the State.
Miscellaneous
The First Boer War broke out in the aftermath of the successfully resisted
auction of a tax resister’s waggon. Paul Kruger wrote of the incident:
The first sign of the approaching storm was the incident that happened at the forced sale of Field Cornet Bezuidenhout’s waggon, on which a distress had been levied.
The British Government had begun to collect taxes and to take proceedings against those who refused to pay them.
Among these was Piet Bezuidenhout, who lived in the Potchefstroom District.
This refusal to pay taxes was one of the methods of passive resistance which were now employed towards the British Government.
Hitherto, many of the burghers had paid their taxes, declaring that they were only yielding to force.
But, when this was explained by the English politicians as though the population were contented and peacefully paying their taxes, some asked for a receipt showing that they were only paying under protest and others refused to pay at all.
The Government then levied a distress on Bezuidenhout’s waggon and sent it to public action at Potchefstroom.
Piet Cronjé, who became so well known in the last war, appeared at the auction with a number of armed Boers, who flung the bailiff from the waggon and drew the waggon itself back in triumph to Bezuidenhout’s farm.
When the U.S.
government seized Valentine Byler’s horse because of the Amish man’s
conscientious objection to paying into the social security system, no
other Amish would bid at the auction.
Between the Wars in Germany, the government had a hard time conducting
auctions of the goods of tax resisters. Ernst von Salomon writes:
Everywhere bailiff’s orders were being disobeyed.… Compulsory sales could not be held: when the young peasants of the riding club appeared at the scene of the auction on their horses and with music, nobody seemed willing to make a bid.
The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants.
One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.
Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher disrupted a Bureau of Land
Management auction by making winning bids on everything that he
had no intention of honoring.
During the Poujadist disruptions in France, “They also took to spiking
forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the
price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure. Thus a tax
delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents. At an auction
the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third
of a cent.”
in roughly the same region
of France:
It was in the south where the wine growers refuse to pay taxes to the government.
A farmer had had half a dozen rabbits sent him by a friend; he refused to pay duty on them, whereupon they control or local customs tried to sell the six “original” rabbits and their offspring at auction.
The inhabitants have now boycotted the auction sales so that the local officials must feed the rabbits till the case is settled by the courts.
In York, Pennsylvania in , a group
“surrounded the crier and forbid any person purchasing when the property
which had been seized was offered for sale. A cow which had been in the
hands of the collector was driven away by the rioters.”
In the Dutch West Indies in “The
household effects of a physician who refused to pay the tax were offered
for sale at auction today by the Government. Although the building in
which the sale was held was crowded, there were no bids and the articles
were not sold.”
In Tasmania, in , “Large quantities of
goods were seized, and lodged in the Commissariat Store [but] Lawless mobs
paraded the streets, tore down fences, and, arming themselves with rails
and batons, smashed windows and doors.… The fence round the Commissariat
Store was torn down…”
During the Bardoli tax strike, “There were meetings in talukas contiguous
to Bardoli, not only in British territory, but also in the Baroda
territory, for expression of sympathy with the Satyagrahis and calling
upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the
authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by bidding for any
forfeited property that may be put to auction by the authorities.”
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
Special mention must be made of one of the many Suffrage Societies which sprang into existence during the decade before the outbreak of war.
With the Freedom League originated the idea that in view of the dictum that taxation and representation must go together, a logical protest on the part of voteless women would be to decline to pay Imperial taxes until they should have a share in electing Members of the Imperial Parliament.
From onwards, Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard had adopted this form of protest, with notable results.
In the following year, some of her goods were seized, but difficulties occurred, as one auctioneer after another refused to have anything to do with selling them.
When one was finally found, the sale was attended by a large number of Mrs. Despard’s followers, who succeeded in holding up the proceedings until requested by her to desist.
When her piece of plate was at last put up for sale, the bidding was very brisk, and the article was eventually knocked down to a certain Mr. Luxembourg for double its estimated value.
This gentleman insisted on returning it to Mrs. Despard, who accepted it on behalf of the Women’s Freedom League, among whose archives, suitably inscribed in memory of the occasion, it holds an honoured place.
In subsequent years, various devices were adopted with the object of compelling Mrs. Despard’s submission.
Thus she, for whom prison had no terrors, was threatened with imprisonment in default of payment; she was summoned before the High Court, when, in her absence, judgment was pronounced against her.
On only two other occasions, however, was distraint levied.
, a separate society, with the above title, was formed, with Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes as secretary, for experience showed that a special knowledge of the technicalities of the law was necessary, and special machinery had to be set up.
Those who addressed themselves to this business were rewarded by the discovery of curious anomalies and irregularities of the law where women were concerned.
Thus, for instance, it was revealed that whereas married women are not personally liable to taxation (the Income Tax Act of never having been brought into line with the Married Women’s Property Acts), nevertheless payment of taxes was illegally exacted of them whenever possible.
With the assistance of the expert advice of Mrs. [Ethel] Ayres Purdie and others, many cases of injustice and overcharges were exposed and circumvented, Somerset House officials being mercilessly worried.
Imprisonments for Non-Payment of Taxes
It was in , that the first imprisonments in connection with this particular form of protest took place.
Miss [Constance] Andrews of Ipswich was sent to prison for a week for refusing to pay her dog’s tax, and about the same time, Mrs. [Emma] Sproson of Wolverhampton served a similar sentence for the same offence.
The latter was, however, rearrested, and sentenced this time to five weeks’ imprisonment, being placed in the Third Division in Stafford Gaol.
She thereupon entered on the hunger strike, and on the personal responsibility of the Governor, without instructions from the Home Office, she was transferred to the First Division, where she completed her sentence.
Imprisonments in various parts of the country thereafter took place with some frequency, but whenever possible this extreme course appears to have been avoided, and resisters’ goods were seized and sold by public auction, the officials reserving the right of adopting whichever course they deemed most suitable.
By this means, auctioneers’ sale rooms, country market-places, corners of busy thoroughfares, and all manner of unlikely spots, became the scene of protests and demonstrations.
Miss Housman’s Imprisonment
The case which excited the most interest was that of Miss Clemence Housman, sister of the well-known author, who, having stoutly declined to pay the trifling sum of 4s. 6d. (which by dint of writs, High Court Procedure, etc., in due course mounted up to over £6), and not having goods which could be seized, was arrested by the Sheriff’s Officer, and conveyed to Holloway, there to be detained until she paid.
A storm of protest arose, meetings being held at Mr. Housman’s residence in Kensington, outside Holloway Gaol, and in Hyde Park on .
After a week’s incarceration, Miss Housman, who had been singularly well treated in the First Division, was unconditionally released, and on inquiring of the Solicitor of Inland Revenue how she stood in the matter, she was informed that it was closed by her arrest and subsequent release.
By way of celebrating victories such as these, the League held a John Hampden dinner at the Hotel Cecil in , when some 250 guests assembled and listened to speeches from prominent Suffragists of both sexes, when we may be sure that the moral of the story of John Hampden was duly pointed, and many a modern parallel was quoted.
A novel feature of the evening’s proceedings was the appearance of a toast mistress, in the person of Mrs. Arncliffe Sennett.
Mr. Mark Wilks’ Imprisonment
In an incident occurred which illustrated both the anomalous position which married women occupy under the law and also the impossibility of enforcing the law where consent is withheld.
Dr. Elisabeth Wilks, being one of those who held with the Liberal dictum that taxation and representation should go together, had for some years past refused to pay her Imperial taxes, and on two occasions a distraint had been executed on her goods, and they had been sold by public auction.
Then it struck her that her “privileged” position under the law would afford her protection from further annoyance of this kind, and being a married woman, she referred the officials to her husband.
When application was made to the latter for his wife’s income tax return, he told the harassed officials that he did not possess the required information, nor did he know how to procure it.
After some delays and negotiations, the Treasury kindly undertook to make the assessment itself, charging Mr. Wilks at the unearned rate, though Mrs. Wilks was well known to be a medical woman, whose income was derived from her practice.
After over two years of correspondence and threats of imprisonment, since Mr. Wilks sturdily refused to produce the sum demanded, he was arrested on and conveyed to Brixton Gaol, there to be detained until he paid.
Still he remained obdurate, while friends outside busied themselves on his behalf.
Protests poured into the Treasury offices, Members of Parliament were inundated with the like, deputations waited on everybody concerned, and public meetings on the subject were held in great number.
The result was that, at the end of a fortnight, Mr. Wilks was once more a free man.
Other Tax-Resisters
Legislators had recently provided women with additional reasons for refusing to pay taxes.
In the National Insurance Act became the law of the land, and defects in that Act as far as it concerned women, which were pointed out at the time, have become more and more apparent every year that the Act has been in force.
Some few modifications were made in their favour, but they had no effective means of expressing their views.
Again, by means of a Resolution, which occupied a few hours of discussion on , Members of Parliament voted themselves a salary of £400 a year, and only one member, Mr. Walter McLaren, raised his voice to protest against the fresh injustice which this proposal inflicted on women, who were not only subject to legislation in the framing of which they had no voice, but were further called upon to pay those who thus legislated for them…
The Revenue authorities did not repeat the experiment of arresting any women resisters on whom it was not possible to levy distraint, with the result that the Women’s Tax-Resistance League claimed to have a growing list of members who paid no taxes, and who, in spite of repeated threats of imprisonment, were still at large.
Distraint for non-payment was, however, frequent, with the result that up and down the country, and as far north as Arbroath, the gospel of tax-resistance was carried, and secured many adherents, including members of the enfranchised portion of the community, some of whom, in their official capacities, gave public support to the rebels.
Many auctioneers of the better class refused to sell the goods of tax-resisters, and it is on record that one who had done so sent his fee as a donation to the League.
Two members of the League, Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison of St. Leonard’s and Mrs. [Kate] Harvey of Bromley, barricaded themselves in their houses, and succeeded in keeping the officials who came to make the distraint at bay, the former for a period of several weeks, and the latter for a period of no less than eight months.
In both cases, an entry was eventually made by force, but much public sympathy was evinced in both cases, and crowded meetings of protest were held in the largest local halls available.
It is interesting to record that on , a statue was unveiled in the market-place of Aylesbury to the memory of John Hampden, who in the time of Charles Ⅰ. had refused the ship money which that monarch had illegally levied on his subjects.
The sum involved was the trifling one of 20s., but, rather than pay it, John Hampden suffered himself to be imprisoned.
He was subsequently released without a stain upon his character, and a statue to this rebel stands in no less hallowed a spot than the House of Commons, of which assembly he was a Member.
An application on the part of the Women’s Tax-Resistance League of the twentieth century to be officially represented at the unveiling by Lord Rothschild of the statue erected to his memory in Aylesbury was met with a refusal.
That the spirit which animated this seventeenth-century fighter was not, however, dead was evident when, at the conclusion of the official ceremony, a little procession of tax-resisters, supported by men sympathizers, approached the statue and silently laid a wreath at its foot…
Tax Resistance
Throughout tax resisters continued to defy the revenue officials, with varying results.
Among those who resisted paying their taxes for the first time may be mentioned [Mary Russell] the Duchess of Bedford, Miss Beatrice Harraden, Mrs. Flora Annie Steele, and Miss [Ethel] Sargant, the last-named of whom presided over a section of the British Association later in the year, being the first woman to fill such a position.
Mrs. Harvey successfully withstood another siege in connection with her inhabited house duty, and her goods, when eventually seized, failed to realize the sum required by some £8, for the uproar created in the auction-room by sympathizers was so great that the auctioneer abandoned his task.
Mrs. Harvey also refused to take out a licence for her gardener (by name Asquith), or to stamp his Insurance card.
For these two offences she was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, in default of a fine, but was released at the end of one month, in a very weak condition of health, which was in no way attributable to her own “misconduct.”
There were many other cases of resistance to the Insurance Act, it being an open secret that the Freedom League did not insure its employees.
Captain Gonne, who refused to pay his taxes as a protest against the treatment to which women were being subjected, was also arrested, but was released within a few hours, the reason being, so it was claimed, that in arresting him the revenue officials had been guilty of a serious technical blunder.
Several other resisters besides Mrs. Harvey barricaded their houses against the tax collector, and at Hastings the demonstration arranged in connection with the sale of Mrs. Darent Harrison’s goods led to an organized riot, the result being that the local Suffrage Club brought an action against the Corporation for damage done, which they won.
Undeterred by warnings that it would be impossible to hold a public meeting in Hastings in support of tax resistance, the League nevertheless determined to do so, and, as a matter of fact, everything passed off in a quiet and orderly manner, Lady Brassey being in the chair.
In subsequent years, this policy of open and constitutional rebellion on tax resistance lines has been maintained by Mrs. Darent Harrison.
Last month the statute of limitations erased another year of my taxes.
For the tax year, my 1040 form showed that I owed $1,203 in federal taxes.
I didn’t pay, of course, and the IRS has been nagging me about that ever since.
But now it’s too late for them, as ten years have expired as they failed to collect.
I celebrated by sending a check for $1,203 to our local food bank program.
(Coincidentally, on the same day I sent the check, I got my $1,200 stimulus check from the U.S. Treasury.
I’m not sure how to interpret that, cosmically-like, except that it seemed to rhyme like poetry.)
Governments spend a lot of time and energy—and enlist a host of political scientists and pundits and other such clergy—to try to convince their subjects that paying taxes is not only mandatory, but that it’s honorable, dignified, and even charitable, while failure to pay taxes is underhanded, shady, and selfish.
Governments and other critics of tax resistance are quick to deploy this already-available propaganda lexicon in their counterattacks. They criticize tax resisters as freeloaders who enjoy the benefits of organized society without cooperating in the taxes necessary to fund them—as self-interested, anti-social tax evaders.
One way resisters have countered this attack is by staging giveaways of their resisted taxes. This makes it clear that the resisters do not have merely selfish motives for resisting, and also demonstrates that the money is being spent for the benefit of society (to a greater extent than if the money had been filtered through the government first).
This sort of tax redirection also can forge or strengthen ties between the resisters and the recipients, and can make more people aware of tax resistance as an option.
War tax resisters
This tactic is put to particularly good use by the contemporary war tax resistance movement. Here are some examples:
When Julia “Butterfly” Hill refused to pay more than $150,000 in taxes to the U.S. government in , she made a point of saying “I ‘redirect’ my taxes rather than ‘resisting’ my taxes”:
I actually take the money that the IRS says goes to them and I give it to the places where our taxes should be going. And in my letter to the IRS I said: “I’m not refusing to pay my taxes. I’m actually paying them but I’m paying them where they belong because you refuse to do so.” They are not directing our money where it should be going, they are being horrific stewards of that money.
NWTRCC organized what it called the “War Tax Boycott” in . It encouraged war tax resisters across the country to coordinate by redirecting their refused taxes to either of two groups: one that provided healthcare in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and one that helped Iraq War refugees. The campaign kept track of how much money had been redirected over the course of the boycott, and then held a press conference to give oversized checks adding up to about $325,000 to spokespeople for these campaigns.
The People’s Life Fund is associated with the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and holds redirected taxes from resisters. If the IRS successfully seizes money from a resister, that resister can reclaim his or her deposits to the Fund. Otherwise, the money remains there and earns interest and dividends. Every year the group pools these returns on investment and gives them away to local charitable organizations in a granting ceremony. Usually these grants are modest—$500 or $1,000 each—but they give them to a dozen or more groups, which makes their granting ceremonies a good way for local charities to network with each other and helps the word about war tax resistance spread in the local activist community. This same model, or one similar to it, is followed by a number of regional redirection funds associated with war tax resistance groups in the United States.
A war tax resistance group in Iowa used the proceeds from its redirection fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been banned from applying for government financial aid because of their refusal to register for the draft. Another, in Pennsylvania, made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of draft resisters who were on trial. These actions helped to forge or sustain ties between the war tax resistance movement and anti-conscription activists and gave war tax resistance a higher profile in the larger anti-war movement.
One family figured out a way to get extra mileage out of their redirection: In they redirected their refused federal taxes to a charitable program called “Childreach.” That year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal government agency, had promised to match private donations to Childreach two-to-one from its budget, so the family’s $211.69 in redirected taxes had the effect of pulling an additional $423.38 from the U.S. government for a good cause.
war tax resister Bill Ramsey redirects $1,000 to charity in a granting ceremony
In , war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.”
John and Pat Schwiebert did something similar: They redirected their taxes by handing out five-dollar bills to people standing in line at the unemployment office. Along with the bills, they handed out letters in which they explained their redirection action. To amplify the public relations impact, they notified the media of their plans ahead of time. “Their actions garnered them an interview on NPR,” according to one report, “and they received letters and cards from around the world.”
In a group of war tax resisters in New York redirected their war taxes as nickels that they handed out to people waiting at the bus stops on lines where fare hikes were being proposed, saying “this is where our tax dollars should be going.”
Arthur Evans felt that if redirecting your war taxes to charity was a good idea, redirecting twice your war taxes to charity must be twice as good. In he wrote to the IRS to tell them “I am sending double the amount I am not paying for war to Quaker House at the United Nations for transmission to the United Nations Organization for its technical assistance program.”
In the early 1970s, farmers who were resisting the expansion of a military base onto their land in Larzac, France, found common cause with war tax resisters. Thousands of war tax resisters there redirected their war taxes to help fund the Larzac struggle.
And here’s something kind of similar that doesn’t fit into any of my other categories, so I’ll toss it in here: When the IRS seized back taxes from war tax resister Mary Regan’s retirement account in , she threw a fund-raising party to try to raise an equivalent amount of money—but not in order to reimburse her, but to give away to charities like “the Boston Women’s Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, a homeless shelter for youth, and the peace movement in Israel.”
British women’s suffrage movement
The Women’s Tax Resistance League largely suspended its campaign during World War Ⅰ, but one woman, signing her letter “A Persistent Tax Resister” wrote to the editor of a suffragist paper to suggest that women should redirect their taxes from the government to a privately-run war relief charity “and should send her donation as ‘Taxes withheld from the Government by a voteless woman.’ ” Suffrage activist Charlotte Despard reported that “she had offered to give voluntarily the amount demanded of her by Revenue authorities to any war charity, but her offer had not been accepted.”
Social Security foe
In , Howard Pennington, unwilling to pay an $81 social security tax “for waste by socialistic dreamers,” instead sent that money directly to George Robinett. Robinett was a 72-year-old retiree whose social security had been abruptly cut off for three months, costing him $210, because during one month he had earned 62 cents above the $50 maximum monthly earnings for a social security recipient.
