for scientific labours, must, besides paying
the heavy duty, be accompanied—as is
the rule for all machines or mechanism—by a
coloured plan, drawn to a given scale, of
every form, dimension, and detail. It is
not enough to pay ten or twenty pounds duty
on a microscope with a complete and elaborate
apparatus; but you must also send a drawing
of it, on scale, to Paris, for the criticism,
(perhaps the instruction), of French microscope
makers. If the final destination of such
instruments be Paris, these formalities may
be abridged by sending the imported articles
from the coast or the frontier to the
metropolitan custom house, under double lead
(seals) and accompanied by a permit-warrant.
But, if your machinery be not intended for
Paris, woe betide you, unless your plan
on scale is regular and acceptable. You
may plead special urgency, and may write
your heart out to the Director General.
After much delay, you will receive a polite but
flat refusal to any favour. Your mechanism
must be assimilated (the technical phrase) to
the French customs law. Were the
authorities inclined to help you (and it is only
right to say there are some good fellows
amongst them), they dare not.

Seemingly favourable and liberal exceptions
often turn out to be delusive hopes. The
protective principle is carried out rigorously.
Thus, instruments of husbandry (aratoires)
may enter by the maritime bureaux in
packages of any weight; but without the
admixture of any other kind of implement
paying differing duties. By the designation
of Instruments of Husbandry, are understood
only the simple instruments necessary for
rural industry. Wooden rakes, hay-forks, et
cetera, are treated as boisillerie, which pay
a nominal duty of four francs the hundred
kilos. As for instruments of wood and iron,
such as ploughs, extirpators, turnip-choppers,
straw-cutters, harrows, drills, and ventilators
(winnowing-machines?), they belong to
agricultural machines and mechanism; and must
down with their duty, and their drawing to
scale. Again; it sounds amiable and philo-
progenitive to let in lambs for threepence per
head. But none are admitted as lambs except
those which weigh less than sixteen pounds
French each. Still further, to prevent all
fraud such as the smuggling in of dwarf fine-
woolled Welsh muttons under the guise of
lambs—it is enacted that, when the wool of
these lambs is found to have more than four
months' growth, a duty is to be levied on the
wool, according to its kind, independently of
the duties appertaining to the animals.

A composite object—an object made up of
parts—is not always considered as one object
fiscally, if its separate parts are separately
subject to a duty of their own. Thus, wooden
clocks with a metal movement, pay two
francs each; bird-organs (being musical
instruments) pay three francs each; but a
bird-organ adapted to a wooden clock, must
pay its own private duty over and above the
right of the tariff to its dues on the clock. Therefore,
a wooden cuckoo-clock with a metal movement,
pays an import duty of five francs—to
the delectation of French cuckoo-clockmakers:
Foreign wooden-clockmakers are made to bite
the dust. The tax on musical instruments does
not, however, save the public from musical
nuisances. Portable instruments imported
or exported by travellers, for their own
personal use, are exempt from duty; in
virtue of which, barrel-organs, seraphines,
and horrible blasting German bands, roam
over the fair land of France, untaxed and
unrestrained.

The sacrifice made by the French nation
to carry out her universal protective
principle would be admirable could we believe
that she were only fulfilling a conscientious
duty, and that selfishness had no part in the
system. That she thereby sacrifices revenue,
is clear; which is a pity, because France
needs, and deserves to have, a handsome
revenue. But, for the protection of the three
hypothetical skewer-makers, for the training
of indigenous viper-catchers, the State has
to maintain an enormous establishment of
custom houses and custom house officers,
whose costliness is oppressive to contemplate.
The enormous line of frontier and coast to
be watched and guarded, extends from
Dunkerque to Brest; from Brest to Bayonne; from
Bayonne all the whole length of the Pyranees
to Perpignan; from Perpignan on the
Mediterranean coast to Antibes; from Antibes
along the Alps and the Rhine to Strasbourg;
and, from Strasbourg, along the Belgian frontier
to Dunkerque again, completing at last the
great circumscribing chain of trade fetters. All
this vast range has to be watched and guarded
with unceasing care, night and day, in fair
weather and foul, because France believes it
her mission to maintain an exclusive right of
manufacture to a score or two individuals of
a score or two trades. While, in fact, by giving
up the protection to those few individuals,
an enormous reduction and a large
increase of revenue may be effected; but then,
the protective principle in its integrity would
be abandoned; a precedent would be
established; the first of a thousand reformatory
wedges would be driven in; the tariff would
soon be split into a thousand pieces, like a
turret of glass struck by a cannon-ball.

We, who have sworn national fidelity to no
such principles, have gained in effecting a
reduction of expenditure, a vast increase of
revenue. By diminishing exaggerated duties,
by suppressing prohibitions, by simplifying
the tariff, we have sensibly augmented the sum
received by the state. The increased quantity
of merchandise paying duty has been
demonstrated by the increase of customs receipts;
while the expenses of collection, following
an inverse movement, have been reduced to
an important amount. From eighteen
hundred and thirty-one to eighteen hundred