Royalty (income)

“ The Revenues of our Kings, for many Ages, arose out of their Crown-Lands; Taxes on the Subject were raised only for publick Exigencies. But since we have turn'd the Stream, and been so free of Revenues for Life, arising from Impositions and Taxes, we have given Occasion to our Princes to dispose of their Crown-Lands; and depend for Maintenance of their Families on such a Sort of Income, as is thought unjust and ungodly in most Parts of the World, but in Christendom: for many of the arbitrary Eastern Monarchs think so, and will not eat the Produce of such a Revenue. ”

“ By what I have always heard and read, I take the whole strength of the nation, as understood in that treaty, to be the utmost that a prince can raise annually from his subjects. If he be forced to mortgage and borrow, whether at home or abroad, it is not properly speaking his own strength, or that of the nation, but the entire substance of particular persons, which, not being able to raise out of the annual income of his kingdom, he takes upon security, and can only pay the interest. ”

“ They are now leased, and the income is a perquisite of the king, a poor piece of policy, for the chiefs from among whom a sovereign is selected are all wealthy; the present king, for instance, has an income of probably $25,000 per annum from private property of his own. ”

“ Although living upon the establishment of the king, the queen's real independent income was fifty-eight thousand pounds a year! Ought we not to ask why the princess was thus neglected and shamefully insulted?—left in debt, and in extreme perplexity of circumstances, for which the family must ever be considered mean and unjust? How was her royal highness to act in such a trying case? If she had retired to private life, her enemies would have pronounced her an improper person to retain the high station which she had formerly occupied. ”

“ In the kingdom of Great Britain, where all the ostentatious apparatus of monarchy is to be provided for, not above a fifteenth part of the annual income of the nation is appropriated to the class of expenses last mentioned ”

“ It is plain, therefore, that the wants of the crown were chiefly personal, that what we consider the chief expenses of government, justice, maintenance of public works, and military expenditure, were supported by the people themselves, without the interposition of government. The expenses of the crown would be discharged very largely from the public property or folcland reserved to the nation, and from such taxes as were rendered necessary from time to time to support the grandeur and hospitality of the king as national representative. ”

“ But your majesty ought to think of your children, who would also suffer. Pray take into consideration that the royal family would be reduced to a very small income, and that the most rigid economy could not preserve you from embarrassments. A portion of the royal estates is to be mortgaged or sold for the purpose of defraying part of the French contribution; considering the universal distress, it is very probable that the income to be derived from the other estates will not be paid at all, or very tardily. ”

“ As it is not a kingdom without subjects and government, so he is not a king without revenues.... The revenue of the Crown is the very essential part of the Crown, and he who rendeth that from the king pulleth also his crown from his head, for it cannot be separated from the crown. ”

“ And then when it is taken into account that the entire royal family have each all this humbuggery, to a less extent, it can be figured up what a very expensive thing royalty is, and how wise the American people were to bundle the whole business off the continent at the time they did.
One thousand people at salaries ranging from one hundred to ten thousand dollars a year, to take care of one rickety old woman, who is mortal the same as is the humblest of those ground into the dust by her and hers, and who has no more title to the place she occupies than a thief has to your watch. ”

“ This large portion, moreover, is at the same time the richest, for it comprises almost all the large and handsome buildings, the palaces, castles, convents, and cathedrals, and almost all the valuable movable property. ... Such is the total or partial exemption from taxation. The tax-collectors halt in their presence, because the king well knows that feudal property has the same origin as his own; if royalty is one privilege seigniory is another; the king himself is simply the most privileged among the privileged. ”

“ Further, the household owns about 3 millions sterling (face value) of bonds and shares, from which a revenue of some £250,000 is derived, so that the whole income amounts to three-quarters of a million sterling, approximately. Out of this the households of the crown prince and all the Imperial princes are supported; allowances are granted at the time of conferring titles of nobility; a long list of charities receive liberal contributions, and considerable sums are paid to encourage art and education. The emperor himself is probably one of the most frugal sovereigns that ever occupied a throne. ”

“ The royal revenues and princely preserves, are they not supported out of the sweat of the poorer classes, upon whom all the burdens of society fall at last? And why should there be royal revenues and princely preserves? Do they add anything to the wealth of a nation or the happiness of a people? ”

“ The revenue which, in any civilized monarchy, the crown derives from the crown lands, though it appears to cost nothing to individuals, in reality costs more to the society than perhaps any other equal revenue which the crown enjoys. ”

“ It completely ignores the intrinsic character of "royalties," and therefore the basis of including them in the larger category of "fixed or determinable annual or periodical gains, profits, and income," to infer that proceeds which do not meet that description but result from the use of another method of realizing economic gain from a property right that of sale rather than a license producing a recurring income are also "royalties." ”

“ There were heirs of dethroned kings; princes without portions, who were called Highness, and who had not the income of their fathers’ former chamberlains; millionaires sprung from nothing, who made a great show and who would have given half of their possessions for a single quartering of the arms of these great lords whom they affected to despise. ”

“ The fortune of but very few families could so much as compare with it, and the fortunes of individual families, especially of wealthy families, were, during the existence of a strong king, highly perilous, and often cut short; nothing could pretend to equal such an economic power but the Crown, which then was, and which remained until the victory of the aristocracy in the Civil Wars, by far the richest legal personality in Britain. ”

“ In a monarchy the providing of revenues for the king's household, and the expenditure of those revenues in the support of the household, may approximate very closely to the character of private economics, as when the chief source of revenue is the royal demesne, or to public economics when the chief source of revenue is taxation, and the king is regarded merely as a public official to be supported as other public officials are. ”

“ The Prince for the Publick Good has a Sovereign Property in every Private Person's Estate, and consequently his Riches must encrease or decrease in proportion to the Number and Riches of his Subjects. ”

“ In the European monarchies, which were founded upon the ruins of the Roman empire, both before and for some time after the establishment of what is properly called the feudal law, the great lords, with all their immediate dependents, used to serve the crown at their own expense. In the field, in the same manner as at home, they maintained themselves by their own revenue, and not by any stipend or pay which they received from the king upon that particular occasion. ”

“ A noble calculation for a Prince who had, for five years, enjoyed a civil list of twenty millions, without counting the royal residences; for a Prince who had left to France the Colony of Algiers and the ancient patrimony of the Bourbons, valued at twenty-five to thirty millions per annum!
"Sire, your loyal subjects have often thought that your royal indigence might have some needs; they are ready to club together, each according to his means, in order to make you independent of foreigners." ”

“ I hear some of my fellow-tradesmen complaining that the nobility don't pay their bills. Will they be better paid, think you, when the Duke has halved their revenues? Will the quality keep up as large households, employ as many lacqueys, set as lavish tables, wear as fine clothes, collect as many rarities, buy as many horses, give us, in short, as many opportunities of making our profit out of their pleasure? What I say is, if we're to have new taxes, don't let them fall on the very class we live by! ”

“ This is not the case with a Prince.—What he squanders is not his own, but the public money.—He knows that his pomp and splendour will be kept up, and that his subjects, not he, are to feel the inconveniencies of his prodigality. When I hear, therefore, that a King has given great sums of money to any particular person ”

“ It has always been justly held in a free country, and particularly in this, to be one of its greatest privileges, that the chief aristocracy, as far as relates to the management of its public concerns, should be an aristocracy of talent and of virtue, as well as of rank and property; which principle would be destroyed if remuneration for public services should be withheld; and the community would be deprived of all its advantages. Not only the great offices of slate, but some others of most efficiency must then be confined to men of hereditary wealth and independence ”

“ When the great men of a kingdom have exhausted their estates, in paying a regular court to the Prince, they employ the credit they have acquired with him during the time of their dissipation, to obtain marks of his favour, in order to support them in their decline. By these they are enabled to live in as much state as before. They find no difference in their situation; unless perhaps they should accidentally reflect, that the fund which produced their former opulence, was in their own possession; whereas that of their present wealth is in the hands of their master. ”

“ If that magnificent prince had not expended millions on Marli and Versailles, and tens of millions on the aggrandisement of his grandson, he would not have been compelled at last to pay servile court to low-born money-lenders, to humble himself before men on whom, in the days of his pride, he would not have vouchsafed to look, for the means of supporting even his own household. ”

“ The nobility, the great landed proprietors, the yeomanry, the lesser farmers, all the intermediate ranks who might oppose a check to the power of a tyrannical prince, are nearly annihilated. The property of these classes, but more particularly of the nobility, has been subdivided and distributed among the peasants; become their own, it has, no doubt, been much better managed, for it is their immediate interest that not an acre of waste ground should remain. They till it with their own hands, and, without any intermediate agents, they draw the profits. ”

“ The king, our lord, also is profited by those who hold positions in the service of his royal crown; for they, with the tributes, assist in the great expenses which his royal patrimony incurs for the churches, religious orders, and ministers of the evangelical teaching, and for the supplies necessary for their maintenance. ”

“ Wherever the seat of government is fixed, a considerable part of the public revenue will be expended by the prince himself, by his ministers, by the officers of justice, and by the domestics of the palace. The most wealthy of the provincials will be attracted by the powerful motives of interest and duty, of amusement and curiosity. A third and more numerous class of inhabitants will insensibly be formed, of servants, of artificers, and of merchants, who derive their subsistence from their own labour, and from the wants or luxury of the superior ranks. ”

“ The ordinary revenue by which the government had been supported before the Revolution had been partly hereditary, and had been partly drawn from taxes granted to each sovereign for life. The hereditary revenue had passed, with the crown, to William and Mary. ”

“ And upon the whole it is doubtless much better for the crown, and also for the people, to have the revenue settled upon the modern footing rather than the antient. For the crown; because it is more certain, and collected with greater ease: for the people; because they are now delivered from the feodal hardships, and other odious branches of the prerogative. ”

“ If the royal family could use their Crown lands, just as those noblemen who have received grants from sovereigns use theirs, it would be the wealthiest in England, and would have no need to come to Parliament for funds. ”

“ Money has now the rule that used to belong to rank. And the chief use of the lesser royalties seems to be to dignify wealth by associating with it. Hence the court that the rich pay to them—the eagerness to entertain them, to take them on private yachts, to amuse them with automobile trips, to promote their fortunes on the Stock Exchange, and even to give them money if they will take it. ”

“ Was any person ever weak enough to discern hierarchy, aristocracy, or monarchy, in Scotch bishops, the American Cincinnati, or Theodore king of Corsica? Wealth is indispensable to sustain both a personal aristocracy, and an aristocracy of interest. The first can never obtain this indispensable principle in the United States, except they should be subdued by an invading or a native army, and divided among its chieftains. The second may obtain it, by means of patronage, corruption, privilege, and paper stock. ”