Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/431

 paid duty opened a door for the commission of every species of fraud."

Nevertheless, when Sir Robert Walpole, in 1733, first introduced his famous Excise Scheme, requiring all importations of tobacco and wine to be deposited in public warehouses until the duty had been paid, there were the loudest clamours against a measure meant, not merely for the security of the revenue, but for the benefit and convenience of the merchants, who, however, scouted his proposal. Indeed, those of them who had availed themselves of the facilities afforded by the existing system for defrauding the revenue resisted the measure by every means in their power, exasperating the people to a state of the wildest fury against it.

No valid or ostensible reasons were then assigned for their determined opposition, nor were any arguments worthy of record brought forward against the proposed Bill. "We shall be ruined," alike exclaimed the merchant and the shipowner; while the parliamentary opponents of the government, taking up the cry, ultimately obliged Sir Robert, who "narrowly escaped falling a sacrifice to the ungovernable rage of the mob which beset the avenues to the House of Commons," to abandon the Bill. So endurable were the impressions made by the violent opposition to Walpole's scheme, and so strong the force of prejudice, that this most valuable measure lay dormant for more than sixty years, and even then might not have become law had the necessity of establishing docks with bonding warehouses attached to them not been brought prominently under public notice by Mr.