and (naming, of der, they bade me send the patient to them, and never trouble myself about the matter! It was very strange if they had been so many years in business, and could not invent one! that Doctors — course, highly-respectible practitioners,) were in the habit of sending patients there, and never looked after them!' "After having frequently seen persons wearing their 'inventions' and knowing that during the time they did so they got daily worse, it was not very likely that I should submit to have my professional judgment superseded in this cool way by that of a mere mechanic; one too who had given me no evidence that he could do what he pretended, or that he was in any way acquainted with the laws that govern the production of disease or restoration to health. Again : If it be asked why these contrivances are called absurd, I answer, because they treat the back of a human being as if it were a piece of dead matter. The great muscles of the back are not very numerous, but they are large and very powerful; and their most important use is to support and assist the back, head, and upper parts of the body in their various motions. Now, if you can conceive these muscles bound up in a strong iron case, prevented from exerting themselves, and the head and shoulders receiving that support from another quarter which it was the business of these muscles to give, you conceive the case in question; and any one, when he knows that the structure of a muscle is impaired by disuse and compression, can understand how this supporting of the one shoulder is about as bad as pressing down the other would be-how the backs of these mismanaged persons must get weaker and weaker, the parts that nature put there for the purpose of supporting them having been disabled by the very means taken to improve them. "Nor is this all; for after these machines have been worn for some time, it is with the greatest difficulty, sometimes not at all, that they can be laid aside. All the patients that I have found wearing them have assured me, that though they did not fell comfortable with them on, they yet had a degree of support from them, and felt the want of them on their being laid aside." One would at first suppose that the tailor's occupation was particularly productive of spinal disease; but when the other circumstances are equal and ordinary, our author says the case is not so: a strut is the peculiar result. "Those of them who are originally well made, and not decrepit or diseased, walk remarkably erect-so much so as to have the appearance of a strut, a kind of caricature of a walk which, upon examination, will be found to be the natural effect of the strong action of the muscles of their backs, rendered powerful, in comparison to those in front, from the position in which they usually sit, and the necessity for sustaining and pulling upwards and backwards their head and shoulders." THE MONTHLY REVIEW. FEBRUARY, 1841. ART. I. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Import Duties. With the Evidence. THE Select Committee in this instance were appointed to inquire into the several Duties levied on Imports into the United Kingdom, and how far those Duties are for Protection to similar articles the Produce or Manufacture of this Country or of the British Possessions abroad, or whether the Duties are for the purposes of Revenue alone. Among the members of the Committee, of which Mr. Hume was Chairman, were Mr. Ewart, Mr. Villiers, Mr. Labouchere, Sir Henry Parnell, and other gentlemen distinguished for their financial knowledge and general acquaintance with business; and among the witnesses examined were a number of official men, who had long served in the public offices of Trade and Customs, and under a variety of Administrations. There were also several witnesses drawn from more private or independent sources; so that the result has not merely been a vast mass of evidence (filling more than three hundred folio pages), but evidence of the most logical, conclusive, and valuable kind, upon one of the most important subjects that can be named; for it involves the mercantile prosperity of the country and its future supremacy and independence among nations; or, in other words, the wholesome and economical condition of the public revenue and the comfort of every person individually as well as socially. True, neither the announcement of the subject, nor its minute details, are likely to interest those readers who have a taste only for the literature of the circulating libraries. But be assured the theme and its particulars are such as come home to every one's door, and may ere long knock with harsher emphasis. At the same time, to any person who is capable of serious reflection, who has the sense and ability to look before him, or who takes delight in mental occupations of an enlarging, although of a severe nature, this subject will present many arresting and curious points. It shall be our endeavour, without attempting to give any close VOL. I. (1841.) No. II. M analysis or full digest of the voluminous evidence, so to indicate some of its principal features or to suggest what appear to be certain of its bearings, as will engage the attention even of the general or popular reader; in the hope of doing some service towards impressing the merits and the importance of the theme upon the public mind. We first of all copy out the Committee's Report, which, as emanating from Parliamentary authority, and supported by witnesses, many of them not only men of great experience, and of enlarged and tried views, but of officials and the servants of Government, deserves to be studiously pondered. This is the brief document referred to : "The evidence is of so valuable a character, that your Committee could hardly do justice to it in detail, unless they were to proceed, step by step, to a complete analysis, which the advanced period of the session will not allow them to do. They must, therefore, confine themselves to reporting the general impressions they have received, and submit the evidence to the serious consideration of the House; persuaded that it cannot be attentively examined without producing a strong conviction that important changes are urgently required in our Customhouse legislation. "The tarif of the United Kingdom presents neither congruity nor unity of purpose; no general principles seem to have been applied. "The schedule to the Act 3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 56, for consolidating the Customs duties, enumerates no fewer than 1,150 different rates of duty chargeable on imported articles, all other commodities paying duty as enumerated; and very few of such rates appear to have been determined by any recognised standard; and it would be difficult for any person unacquainted with the details of the tariff to estimate the probable amount of duty to which any given commodity would be found subjected. There are cases where the duties levied are simple and comprehensive; others, where they fall into details both vexatious and embarrassing. "The tariff often aims at incompatible ends: the duties are sometimes meant to be both productive of revenue and for protective objects, which are frequently inconsistent with each other: hence they sometimes operate to the complete exclusion of foreign produce, and in so far no revenue can of course be received; and sometimes, when the duty is inordinately high, the amount of revenue becomes in consequence trifling. They do not make the receipt of revenue the main consideration, but allow that primary object of fiscal regulations to be thwarted by an attempt to protect a great variety of particular interests, at the expense of the revenue and of the commercial intercourse with other countries. "Whilst the tariff has been made subordinate to many small producing interests at home, by the sacrifice of revenue in order to support these interests, the same principle of preference is largely applied, by the various discriminatory duties, to the produce of our Colonies, by which exclusive advantages are given to the Colonial interests at the expense of the Mothercountry. Your Committee would refer to the evidence respecting the articles of sugar and coffee, as examples of the operation of these protective duties. "Your Committee refer to a general account prepared by the Inspector of Imports, of the several articles imported into the United Kingdom in 1838-39, stating in separate columns the quantity imported, exported, and retained for home consumption, with the rates of duty chargeable on each, and whether in a raw state, partially manufactured, or manufactured; by which it appears that 862 articles are divided into eight schedules, which they submit to the serious consideration of the House; viz. Schedule. Totals. I. containing 349 articles, producing less than 100% each of £ 132 articles, producing from 100l. to 8,050 II. III. 45 5001. each 31,629 500,000l. each & up. 18,575,071 5,398 147 on which no duty has been received, but .... VIII. on which there has been an excess of drawback of It appears from the evidence of Mr. Porter, of the Board of Trade, that the total amount of Customs revenue received in the United Kingdom in the year ending January 1840, was 22,962,610l.; of which total amount, 17 articles, each producing more than 100,000l., produced 94 And that these 46 articles produced 98 2-5ths per cent., or ... £21,700,630 898,661 22,599,291 363,319 Showing that 190 articles, exclusive of about 80,000l. collected upon 531 other articles, and excluding 147 articles, upon which an excess of drawback of 5,3981, was allowed, produced the total revenue of £22,962,610 It will be seen the seventeen articles, affording the largest amount of Customs revenue, are articles of the first necessity and importance to the community-viz. sugar, tea, tobacco, spririts, wine, timber, corn, coffee, butter, currants, tallow, seeds, raisins, cheese, cotton wool, sheep's wool, and silk manufactures; and that the interests of the public revenue have been by no means the primary consideration in levying the import-duties, inasmuch as competing foreign produce is in some instances excluded, and in others checked by high differential duties, levied for the protection of British Colonial interests; and in many cases such differential duties do not answer the object proposed, for it appears, in the case of foreign clayed sugars, where it was obviously intended they should be excluded from the British market, that the monopoly granted to British Colonial sugars has so enormously raised the prices in our market, that they have lately come into consumption though charged with a duty of 63s. per hundred-weight, while our Plantation sugars pay only 24s. "Another inconvenience which the differential duties create is, that they offer a premium for evading the intention of the Legislature. Foreign coffees are charged 1s. 3d. per pound; Colonial coffees only 6d.; while coffees imported from the Cape of Good Hope pay 9d. Now as the cost of sending in an unusual and indirect way coffee from foreign countries to the Cape, is only from d. to 1d. per pound, very large quantities are shipped from the Brazils and Hayti to the Cape, and thence reshipped to England: the English consumer thus pays the increased duty and the difference of freight, and the foreign coffee is not excluded from the British market, though it is obviously the purpose of the law to exclude it. "Your Committee cannot refrain from impressing strongly on the attention of the House that the effect of prohibitory duties, while they are of course wholly unproductive to the revenue, is to impose an indirect tax on the consumer, often equal to the whole difference of price between the British article and the foreign article which the prohibition excludes. This fact has been strongly and emphatically urged on your Committee by several witnesses; and the enormous extent of taxation so levied cannot fail to awaken the attention of the House. On the articles of food alone, it is averred, according to the testimony laid before the Committee, that the amount taken from the consumer exceeds the amount of all the other taxes which are levied by the Government. And the witnesses concur in the opinion that the sacrifices of the community are not confined to the loss of revenue, but that they are accompanied by injurious effects on wages and capital: they diminish greatly the productive powers of the country, and limit our active trading relations. "Somewhat similar is the action of high and protective duties. These impose upon the customer a tax equal to the amount of the duties levied upon the foreign article, whilst it also increases the price of all the competing homeproduced articles to the same amount as the duty; but that increased price goes, not to the Treasury, but to the protected manufacturer. It is obvious that high protective duties check importation, and consequently are unproductive to the revenue; and experience shows that the profit to the trader, the benefit to the consumer, and the fiscal interests of the country, are all sacrificed when heavy import-duties impede the interchange of commodities with other nations. "The inquiries of your Committee have naturally led them to investigate the effects of the protective system on manufacture and labour. They find on the part of those who are connected with some of the most important of our manufactures, a conviction, and a growing conviction, that the protective system is not, on the whole, beneficial to the protected manufactures themselves. Several witnesses have expressed the utmost willingness to surren der any protection they have from the tariffs, and disclaim any benefit resulting from that protection: and your Committee, in investigating the subject as to the amount of duties levied on the plea of protection to British manufactures, have to report that the amount does not exceed half a million sterling; and some of the manufacturers, who are supposed to be most interested in retaining those duties, are quite willing they should be abolished, for the purpose of introducing a more liberal system into our commercial policy. "Your Committee gather from the evidence that has been laid before them, that while the prosperity of our own manufacturers is not to be traced to benefits |