I have read the King’s column. I will not answer its tone, which answers itself. I will answer its arithmetic, because the arithmetic is doing harm.

A duty laid upon goods at the wharf is paid by the man who buys the goods at the counter. It is not paid by the foreigner. It has never been paid by the foreigner. The merchant abroad sets his price, the duty is added to it, and the sum of the two is what the buyer hands over. Any man who has ever bought a barrel of anything knows this, and I would rather say it plainly and be thought blunt than dress it up and be thought agreeable.

Having said what the duty is, I will say what I believe about it, and here I expect to lose some of you.

A government that cannot raise a revenue cannot pay an army, and an army that is not paid does not remain an army for very long. I have watched men stand in snow without shoes because the treasury that clothed them was a hope rather than a fund. I will not pretend that was noble. It was a failure, and it was mine as much as anyone’s, and I have no intention of arranging the conditions for it a second time.

So a revenue must be had. Of the ways of raising one, a duty upon imported goods is the least intolerable I have found. It is collected at a few ports rather than at every door. It requires no officer to enter a man’s house and count his windows. It falls upon what a man chooses to buy rather than upon what he already owns. These are real advantages and I do not think they are small.

It is also true that the duty falls alike upon all, in the sense that the same shilling is added to the same yard of cloth whoever walks in to buy it. I have heard this offered as a defence and I have offered it myself. I am no longer entirely certain it is one, and I would be glad to be argued with on the point.

What I will not do is what the column above mine does: take a burden, hand it to the people who must carry it, and tell them a foreigner is carrying it. If we are going to ask something of the country, we are obliged to say out loud what we are asking. A free people can bear a great deal. It cannot bear being lied to about what it is bearing, and it should not be asked to.