Page:On the economy of machinery and manufactures - Babbage - 1846.djvu/380

346 to 40 per cent. was the rate of insurance on exporting prohibited machinery from England, and that the larger the quantity the less was the per-centage demanded. From evidence given in the Report of the Watch and Clock-makers' Committee, in 1817, it appears that persons were constantly in the habit of receiving in France watches, lace, silks, and other articles of value easily portable, and delivering them in England at ten per cent. on their estimated worth, in which sum the cost of transport and the risk of smuggling were included.

(420.) The process employed in manufacturing often depends upon the mode in which a tax is levied on the materials, or on the article produced. Watch-glasses are made in England by workmen who purchase from the glass-house globes of five or six inches in diameter, out of which, by means of a piece of red-hot tobacco pipe, guided round a pattern watch-glass placed on the globe, they crack five others: these are afterwards ground and smoothed on the edges. In the Tyrol the rough watch-glasses are supplied at once from the glass-house; the workman, applying a thick ring of cold glass to each globe as soon as it is blown, causes a piece, of the size of a watch-glass, to be cracked out. The remaining portion of the globe is immediately broken, and returns to the melting pot. This process could not be adopted in England with the same economy, because the whole of the glass taken out of the pot is subject to the excise duty.

(421.) The objections thus stated as incidental to particular modes of taxation are not raised with a view to the removal of those particular taxes;