REVIEWS
| Published date | 01 December 1943 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1943.tb02883.x |
| Date | 01 December 1943 |
REVIEWS
245
Now that the anti-social nature of legal evasion of taxation
is
generally
recognised,
it
is suggested that
a
bold Chancellor would not have much
difficulty in getting through Parliament an all-embracing provision
applicable to Income Tax somewhat on the same lines
as
in
Section
35.
Finance Act, 194:. which applied to transactions whose purpose was
to
avoid Excess Profits Tax; the provisions should leave matters
at
large
to the Appeal Commissioners to disregard all the complicated manDeuvres
adopted to evade taxation and also, perhapson the lines of Clause
23
of
the Finance Bill, 1943, to fix the liability to pay tax on those who actually
benefited from the transactions
in
question.
In
conclusion, it must
be
stressed that
a
stronger sense of their duty to the community
on
the part
of those legal and accountancy g6ntlemen who specialize in
“
legal evasion
”
would,
as
the Lord Chancellor hinted, not be amiss.
A.
FARNSWORTH.
REVIEWS
PUBLIC
ASSISTANCE.
VoL
1.
American
principles
and
Policies.
By
EDITH
ABBOTT. University of Chicago Press.
1940.
$4.50.
xviii
This
is
one of the University
of
Chicago Social Service
Series,
edited
by the Faculty of the School of Social Service Administration,
of
which
Professor Abbott
is
Dean. Of its nine hundred
pages,
some seven hundred
are devoted to select documents arranged in five parts, to each
of
which
the Editor has written an extensive introduction surveying the
main
trends in the development
of
public assistance administration and policy
in America, exclusive
of
work relief and the new forms of public aid which
have developed since the Social Security Act became e5ective, treatment
of which topics is left to Volume
11.
The work
is
published
with
the
primary object of providing
a
text for the use of social workers generaUy
and for use in social service schools in particular; and for that purpcse
the documents selected are stated to
be
those “not easily available
for
the class-room.” Many of them are of more than
special
interest; for
example, the message of Governor Roosevelt
(p.
533)
pointing
out the
duty
of
the State to provide relief and containing
an
answer to the question,
‘I
What is the State?
”
To English lawyers
as
such, however, this work will
be
of little‘interest,
for
as
long ago
as
1821 an American court was able to accept counsel’s
submission that the Elizabethan poor law
“is
essentially different from
ours,” the court adding that decisions
on
that statute “shed
no
light
on
the construction of
our
own law.” Indeed, Professor Abbott does
not
appear to have intended this
book
for lawyers
at
all; in which case, it
might
be
suggested that many of the legal technicalities might with
advantage be omitted-for example in Case
7
on
p. 116 and
is
Case
5
on p. 329. The former Eeems an unnecessarily complicated method
of
teaching
a
class the quite simple principle that provision
of
relief
is
a
“positive governmental duty.” For the same reason, it could
he
said
that some of the author’s phrases are
loo
erudite (and perhaps
superfluous)
;
for example, when the social worker has been informed that
a
statute
extends liability to brothers and sisters, it is unnecessary to add, “that
+
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