Colonial Despatches

Mr Elliot
If the Governor & the Col. Secy are legally liable to this deduction from their Salaries the loss may be made up to them by simply instructing the Govr to pay those salaries plus the deduction on account of income tax. I presume the Marines wd be liable—supposing always the Act be confirmed.

I find that there is an Income Tax Act in Dominica, and in St Vincent; but in the latter place the Govr, the Secy & soldiers & sailors are excepted from its operation.

Sir F. Rogers
If there was an Income Tax, duly sanctioned, I do not see why Governors, or Mily or Naval persons receiving money from the Colony, should be excepted. I Scarcely ever see an Exemption from a Tax proposed, which does not seem to me highly objectionable and based on some false conception.

But the present measure is no Income Tax. It is a Tax on Salaries and Wages.

It seems to me a monstrous attack therefore on a selected Class of the Community, and wholly inadmissible, unless I have mistaken it's meaning & object. It appears to me that the act itself ought to be at once disallowed.

I agree with Mr Elliot that Civil List Salaries may be taxed [as] properly as any other salaries.

But I think that Marines should not be taxed.

I agree with Mr Elliot that salaries ought not to be exceptionally taxed. But I think it possible that this tax on salaries may be supplemental to other taxes (as e.g. a group of taxes on land trades & professions) which taken together constitute a rude kind of income tax: so that this ordce does not create an exception, but fills up a gap in the existing Law. Please examine this.

(Mr Ebden will you try to ascertain how this is.)

This is so. There is a tax of 1 per cent on the "market value" meaning I imagine the "annual" value of real property, (17 Dec 1862) and on a tax in the form of licenses on trades Lawyer, Auctioneer, Banker, Pawnbroker, &c (same date).

I think that the Govr shd be infd that all Salaries payable from Colonial Funds, whether included in the Civil List or not are properly taxable by a General Law of this kind—but that it cannot be allowed that the pay of soldiers or sailors who are paid from Imperial Funds should be so taxed, and that the Act will not be sanctioned till it is amended in this respect.

Printed copy of "An Act to impose a Tax on Salaries, and for other purposes," as per despatch.

Draft reply, Cardwell to Kennedy, No. 49, 23 September 1865.