Strip the wig off this business and look at it.

A tax is a hand in a pocket. That is all it is. Every other description of it is decoration, and the decoration is supplied by the people whose hand it is.

What distinguishes the duty now laid upon imported goods from a plain, honest tax is not its size. It is that you cannot see it. It is not written on a paper and handed to you at your door by a man you can look at. It is folded into the price of cloth before the cloth reaches the shop, so that when you pay it you do not know you have paid it, and when you complain of the price you complain of the shopkeeper, who did not lay it, and who is standing there in front of you, and who is therefore blamed for the whole of it.

This is not an accident. It is the entire merit of the arrangement, from the point of view of the man who made it. A tax you can see is a tax you can be angry about, and anger is countable, and countable anger has been known to change governments. A tax you cannot see raises the same money and produces no anger at all, only a vague sense that things cost more than they did and that this is somehow the nature of things. It is not the nature of things. It is a decision, made in a room, by named persons, who are hoping you will call it weather.

Now they tell us the foreigner pays it. I want to be careful here, because there are two possibilities and only one of them is charitable. Either the men who say this do not understand how a price is arrived at, in which case they are not competent to lay a duty. Or they understand perfectly and are saying it anyway, in which case they are not honest enough to lay one. I have no third suggestion. I have looked for one.

And they promise a bounty. Money back. A gift, out of the goodness of a treasury. Friends, they cannot give you a gift. They have nothing that did not come out of your pocket in the first instance, less the cost of the journey, less the wages of the men who carried it, less whatever adheres to the sides of the barrel on the way. A government handing you your own money and calling it generosity is a pickpocket returning your watch and expecting to be thanked for the trouble he took carrying it.

Say what the thing is. Lay the tax if the tax is needed. But lay it where a man can see it, in his own language, with a name on it. A free people can consent to a burden. It cannot consent to one it has not been told about, and what is obtained without consent has another name entirely, and we fought about it quite recently.