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CHAPTER VIII.

DUTIES ON TIMBER.

"I beg to remind the house of the memorable dictum of Mr. Deacon Hume-we have abundance of untaxed coal, abundance of untaxed iron, we only want abundance of untaxed wood, in order to be provided cheaply with the three great primary raw materials of employment and of necessary consumption."-SIR ROBERT PEEL, 1842.

"THE full merits of this very important question," says the author of the "Progress of the Nation,"*" may be learned by consulting the evidence given before the Select Committee of 1835, and also from an article in the fourth number of the British and Foreign Quarterly Review,' written by one of the most intelligent witnesses examined on the occasion." That witness, as will be anticipated, was the subject of this volume. There was but one other article, Mr. Hume was accustomed to say, to which he would sooner give perfect freedom from duty than wood. Next to food and clothing, he ranked the materials of human habitations. Timber is not indigenous in England. Our woods and forests fail to produce it in necessary abundance, and we are to a great degree dependent upon foreign countries for the amount which we require. The

* G. R. Porter, Esq., F.R.S.

subject had been often discussed in Parliament; but on the 1st of June, 1835, another Select Committee was appointed to take into consideration the duties upon this article, and to report their observations to the House. The Committee met for the first time upon the 11th of the same month. Mr. Deacon Hume was the first witness examined. The limits of this volume, no less than the nature of the work, prevent our giving even an analysis of his valuable evidence. The following essay, in which the subject is treated in a very interesting manner, and with reference also to the entire body of evidence adduced before the Select Committee, was intended to find its way into quarters where blue-books are unread and commonly unknown. The privacy of the article without a name enabled the author to quote, as unostentatiously as he could desire, passages from his own evidence,* in support of his views. The essay is one of the ablest, as well as one of the most valuable, of his productions.

TIMBER DUTIES-THE COLONIES. †

We are about to examine a most grievous instance of the protective or bounty system. The Report of a Committee of the House of Commons has, once more, brought under the notice of the public, the colonial monopoly of the timber trade and it will be our endeavour, with the aid of that Report, to analyze, dissect, and expound the character and

*These passages we shall indicate by the initials J. D. H.

† Report from the Select Committee on Timber Duties, together with the minutes of evidence, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 11th of August, 1835.

operation of that monopoly, in such manner as shall qualify our readers to form for themselves a clear and just opinion upon its merits.

In order to do this with the more effect, our course will be, -first to give a description of the peculiar features of this monopoly, by which it is distinguishable from all others, and to exhibit an account of the cost of it to the country and next to investigate, separately, the cases of the two great parties or interests-the colonists and the ship-owners-for whose emolument this country is called upon to make those sacrifices of its revenue, of its commerce, and of its necessaries and comfort, which we shall describe.

The advocates of every case of bounty, or of protective duty-which is only bounty in another form-always profess to intend the public good. They stoutly disavow, as in decency they must, all attempt to serve particular parties at the expense of the country; and they insist, that whatever that apparent expense may be, which is the first consequence of the bounty, it is money which will soon be amply repaid through the secondary beneficial effects of the scheme. They assure us, that if the fostering hand of the State be extended to support the particular object of industry, in its infant efforts, either for origination or extension, it will afterwards go alone, and will thenceforth become and permanently remain, one of the staple, profitable employments of the country. As a caution to these eager caterers of national prosperity, it is not too much to demand of them the admission, that, in calling for such assistance to some new, or hitherto unsuccessful, occupation, they may, possibly, be mistaken in this prospect of its quality—that it may happen that it shall prove to be not so well adapted as they imagine, to the local or personal faculties of the country-and that, even under the assumption that their confidence in our ability to attain to the excellence they promise in the favourite trade to be well founded, they might still be desired to leave the industrious part of the community to determine for themselves the best sources of

profitable employment, and, what is of nearly equal importance, the best times for engaging in them.

Still it must be admitted, that in almost all the cases of bounty, or protection, the prospect of ultimate self-support, insisted upon by their first promoters, has been rationally probable, or at least possible. There may, no doubt, be cases wherein the forced application of skill and industry may prove to be competent to the task of removing or overcoming, in time, the original causes of the higher cost :—but there must also be cases in which the cause of that higher cost is of such a nature that it can never cease to operate.

If, with this distinction kept in mind, we examine the protection of the "Timber Duties," it will stand exposed to view before us, the most overbearing, the most wasteful, the most useless, and the most hopeless of any that has ever been extended to any branch of industry. A plantation of sugar, in Jamaica, enjoys a physical equality with a rival plantation in Cuba. A farm in Essex has even a physical advantage over a farm in Poland. The spindle of the silk throwster and the shuttle of the weaver will obey the laws of rotatory or projectile force in England as well as in Italy or in France. But no power of man, no lapse of time, can equalise, for our use, the position of a forest on the Ottawa with that of a forest in Norway or Sweden.

When the protecting duty was first imposed, in 1810, upon European timber, there was not the pretence, or even the affectation of the pretence, of the commencement of a trade calculated to be permanent, and holding out the prospect of ultimate benefit as the compensation for a temporary sacrifice. It was not even considered to be a temporary sacrifice, but an immediate benefit. The mischief intended to be cured, was the matter which possessed the quality of temporariness. It was an expedient adopted under the pressure of a present difficulty, arising out of the peculiar occurrences of a state of war; and the encouraging of ships to go to Canada for timber, when it could not be got in the Baltic, was as much a war

measure as the charter of a fleet of transports to carry out or bring home a body of troops. All that was temporary about the measure, was its immediate utility; all that was prospective, pointed to its discontinuance. In short, its necessity was one of those evils of war, for the removal of which, men pray for the return of peace; and the arbitrary continuance of the evil without the necessity, after peace, for so many years, is an act of great cruelty on the suffering people, and not a whit more irrational than it would have been, to have gone on hiring transports, and sending them round the world, though they had no troops to carry.

In the years 1820 and 1821, committees of both the Lords and the Commons reported that no pledge for permanence or long duration was held out; and it was truly said by a witness (Q. 18) before the late committee, "that the country was not to be doomed to dear timber for ever, because of the 'Copenhagen expedition.'"*

The great grievance of this monopoly is, the heavy cost of it upon the pockets of the people, without the compensating result of a commensurate increase of the revenue. The present duty upon a load of timber imported from the north of Europe is 27. 15s. Od. At the commencement of the war it was only 6s. 8d. This is an enormous increase of tax upon an article of first necessity: but as the whole amount of this sum, as far as it is received, goes to the national exchequer, and, pro tanto, precludes the necessity of some other tax, the consumer may be brought to pay it with cheerfulness. The justice, however, of this high duty assumes a very doubtful character in his mind, when he finds that if he purchase, of course at the same price, a load of timber imported from Canada, only 10s. of his money, instead of 55s., which he equally pays, goes to the public revenue; and that the 45s. is nothing else than a perquisite he is compelled to give to certain individuals. He naturally inquires how it can be, that those individuals can establish such a right over his money: * J. D. H.