The General asked to be argued with. I have never been invited to argue with a General before, and I find I have been saving something up.

He says the duty falls alike upon all, and that he is no longer entirely certain this is a defence. I can settle his uncertainty. It is not.

The same shilling is indeed added to the same yard of cloth. That much is true and I will not quarrel with it. But a shilling is not a fixed thing. A shilling is a different object depending on whose hand it leaves, and any man who has stood at a counter with a fixed number of them knows it, and any man who has not is at liberty to keep explaining shillings to me.

Here is the whole of my argument, and it is short, because I file this between one piece of work and the next.

The gentleman with a cellar buys his flour by the barrel, in the autumn, before the duty is announced, at the low price, and he has it. When the duty comes he is annoyed. He mentions it at dinner. He calls it a burden, and it is one, in the sense that a stone in a well-made boot is a burden. He is carrying it. He will arrive.

I buy my flour by the pound, on a Tuesday, because I have not got a cellar and I have not got the money in the autumn to fill one if I had. The duty reaches me on the Tuesday, in full, in the only quantity I am able to buy, at the only moment I am able to buy it. I do not mention it at dinner. It is the dinner. It is the part of the dinner that is now not there.

So the duty is equal in the way that a toll is equal: it costs a man on horseback and a man on foot precisely the same, and only one of them notices he has crossed a bridge.

Now to the bounty, the promised return of coin, of which we have heard a great deal and seen none. I will believe in it when it arrives, and I will tell you now what will have happened when it does. It will be reckoned by what a man spent, and the man who spent most will be handed most, and he will be the man who never felt the duty in the first place. The money will go out from the treasury and it will find its way, by whatever route, back into the cellars it came from. It will pass my door. It will not stop.

I do not say the country needs no revenue. The General has stood in the snow and I have not, and I will take his word about the shoes. I say only this: when you are deciding what the country can bear, you are not deciding what you can bear, and the two have never once been the same number. Ask the man who buys by the pound. He is not hard to find. He is the one still at the counter, doing the arithmetic, after the rest of you have gone in to dinner.