The British and Foreign Review (Volume 4); Or, European Quarterly Journal (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Article III. British Customs Duties. Arranged by J. D. Hume, Esq. London: 1833. With the Alterations made up to the close of the last Session of Parliament, 1836. French Tariff"; published officially, as modified by Royal Ordinances. July 1836. Russian Official Tariff. St. Petersburgh, 1835. Austrian Official Tariff, as modified by the Imperial Ordinance of July 1836. Official Tariff of the Germanic Union. Berlin, 1886. The expedients adopted by various governments to raise the money required to maintain courts and defray the expenditure of states; together with the consequent taxes laid on industry, and the restrictions imposed on commerce, in order either to give a false, though specious, protection to particular branches of production, or to uphold royal, corporate, or individual monopolies, form subjects of curious, though not frequent, inquiry. And yet the examination and exposure of them afford the best instruction for the people in respect to the manner in which they are taxed, and the sagest lessons to those legislators who are entrusted with the government of a nation. The bigoted conservatives of ancient abuses, special privileges, and legislative absurdities, contend, that England has become the most powerful and wealthy country on earth under a protective system of trade. We admit this, -- changing the term to restrictive system, and always excepting the state of the labouring population of the United Kingdom, who are certainly in a less easy condition, in respect to securing, or possessing regularly, the means of living, than the working classes, in general, of Germany, Austria-Proper, France, and Belgium. But we are far from admitting that the commercial system so falsely called protective, has been in any respect the cause of the extraord...