Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/22

 protective duty it is unjust, a piece of the old monopoly, tainted with the virus of class legislation. As a revenue duty it is mischievous and absurd; mischievous as being a tax on bread—absurd as being an inefficient, bungling, wasteful bread-tax. If bread is to be taxed for revenue, let all bread yield a revenue. Let there be a bread-excise; an excise taken at every mill, on every quarter of wheat ground: easily and cheaply levied it would be, and immensely productive. But to lay a duty on importation would be to raise the price on all the bread eaten by the people, in order to extract a revenue out of that part of the people's bread only which happens to be made of foreign corn. The entire quantity of wheat consumed annually in Great Britain is, in round numbers, about twenty millions of quarters. Of these twenty millions, upwards of two millions and a half are of foreign importation. Suppose, then, an 8s. or a 5s. duty on this imported wheat, we enhance the price of all wheat, we make the consumer pay a tax on all bread—but of this enhanced price, this tax, only that portion goes into the national treasury which is paid on the two millions and a half of quarters imported:—the tax on the remaining seventeen millions and a half is pocketed by the landlords. Whether for protection, which is a robbery—or for revenue, which is a blunder—the notion of moderate fixed duty is fast taking its place with the rest of the exploded Corn-Law fallacies. The tide of conversion from monopoly sets in, not to fixed duty, but to freedom: the partisans of fixed duty are daily diminishing in number, drafted off into the ranks of total repeal—total and immediate repeal. Even the notion of a temporary duty, to prevent a farmers' panic, and work out the change from restriction to freedom gradually—even this is losing its advocates. The time for it is passed: the farmers have had their panic, and have stood it, all things considered, wonderfully well. At all recent farmers' meetings—in their own farmer newspaper, the Mark Lane Express—we find multiplying and strengthening expressions of the desire for a settlement, on whatever terms (so that it be a settlement), and of a determination to substitute skill, energy, and agricultural improve-