they rise in the iron-scale of being,—from the
primitive ore to the finished razor,—must
cause anxious days and sleepless nights to
the inspectors appointed to ascertain what's
what. Iron wire is considered to be iron
wire only when it has a diameter of less than
seven millimetres. Iron having seven
millimetres or more of diameter, is iron in bars.
White metallic strings for instruments, made
of iron wire, must pay the duty on wire-
drawn iron when rolled into rings or
couronnes. Those rolled on bobbins are
subject, on entrance, to a duty of from seventy
to seventy-six francs the hundred kilos. When
declaration is made of the importation of
metallic strings not rolled on bobbins, they must
be subjected to the duty leviable on the wire-
drawn material of which they are composed;
that is to say, to the duty on iron wire or
steel wire, as the case may be. Query:
When is steel wire, steel wire? And when
is a pianoforte string, a pianoforte string?
Also, when is a needle a needle, if the question
be not impertinent? Sewing-needles,
four centimètres or less in length, pay eight
francs the single kilo weight; between four
and five centimètres in length, five francs;
longer than five centimetres, two francs.
According to a recent tariffication, the length
of needles alone, not their quality, determines
the duty to apply to them; saving, nevertheless,
what concerns packing-needles, mattress-needles,
and sail-sewing needles, (called carrelets),
which remain ranged amongst the Tools
of pure steel.

Ploughshares are exposed to like doubts,
difficulties, and ambiguities. Curling-irons,
and irons for ironing and gauffring, pay fifty
francs the hundred kilos. Plane-irons, a
hundred and forty. Old iron causes no little
anxiety to the authorities, particularly that
which is fished up from the sea. In order to
smooth the thorny question, the Director-
General of Customs addressed, from Paris,
last August twelvemonth, a circular to the
chiefs at the sea-port towns, to the effect that
anchors and cables recovered, by French
draggers, from the bottom of the ports and
roadsteads of the empire, are admitted to
consumption by the payment of an entrance
duty of one franc per hundred kilogrammes.
The act of dragging must be certified in an
authentic manner by the navy agents. While
admitting to this favourable régime, not only
anchors, but also cables, the eye of the Law
only recognises the fragments of cables which
hang to the anchors dragged from the bottom
of the sea.

The Department of War and the Department
of the Marine enter into a childish
correspondence on this little matter. They
explained that it would be useful to extend
to anchors and cables dragged in the ports
and roads of Algeria and in those of the
French colonies, the favourable régime
enjoyed by anchors and cables fished up in
the ports and roads of the mother country.
It is acknowledged, in fact, that in the
colonies, as formerly in the mother-country,
the compulsion either to re-export the
anchors dragged, or to fulfil the ordinary
claims of the Tarif, was a serious obstacle to
the act of dredging; the results not being
sufficiently remunerative. Consequently, his
Excellency the Minister of Finances decided
that in the colonies, Algeria, and French
Guiana, anchors and cables dragged in the
conditions proscribed by the law, should be
admitted at a duty of one franc the hundred
kilos, exactly as if they were the result of
a dragging operated in the ports and roads of
the mother-country. When these anchors,
instead of being consumed in the colonies,
are directed to one of the ports of France,
they enjoy the favourable régime, on the
condition that the act of dragging be testified by
the certificates of the local chiefs of the naval
service. A profane looker-on might deem all
this favour, and this certifying to be an
entertaining example of much ado about
nothing. Pounds'-worth of time, pen, paper,
and ink, are spent about the admission of a
few shillings'- worth of old iron; which, after
all, is only allowed to be utilised because it
becomes a dangerous nuisance by remaining
where it was. 'Tis sweet to trifle now and
then, even with the links of iron cables.

The principle on which the French Tarif is
based, the key to all its apparent eccentricities,
is, protection, at all costs, to National
Production, and excitement, by all means, of
National Industry. If the soil of France is
capable of producing any given material,
were it even so humble as skewer-wood, and
were three men only willing to earn their
livelihood by converting that material into
butchers' skewers, those three men are to be
protected from foreign competition by the
whole stud and staff of the French douanes;
because they are the producers of an
indigenous manufacture. The same of excitement
to industry: the tax upon vipers
appears to us ridiculous; but it is only the
carrying out of a principle. Its meaning and
intention are, that, supposing a demand for
viper-flesh and viper-fat to exist, it is better
to rear up a race of native viper-catchers, to
catch vipers in the national forests, where
there are plenty to be caught, than to
let in foreign-caught vipers, whose capture
had furnished employment and wages to
stranger hands.

When direct means are insufficient to work
out the principle, let indirect means be added
to them. For the protection of a little knot
of scientific-instrument makers, a duty of
from thirty to forty per cent. is not
enough, in the eyes of the protected, to
obtain an absolute protection. Therefore,
the importation of their wares must be
hampered with additional impediments. All
optical instruments; all instruments employed
in astronomy, navigation, mathematics, natural
philosophy, and, generally, all that are necessary