My colleague from the Treasury desk writes beautifully about credit, and I notice that every arrangement he proposes ends with more clerks in the capital and fewer shillings on the farm. I do not think he intends this. I observe only that it keeps happening.

Let us be clear about what a duty upon imported goods actually does, as distinct from what it is said to do.

It raises the price of the manufactured article. The farmer buys manufactured articles: nails, glass, cloth, a scythe blade, the few things he cannot make in his own yard. He sells wheat, which the duty does not raise at all, since nobody lays a duty upon his own countrymen’s grain. So he sells cheap and buys dear, and the difference is collected at a wharf he has never seen, by an officer he did not choose, and forwarded to a capital he will never visit.

Meanwhile the merchant who imports the article is not injured. He adds the duty to his price and passes it along, entire, without loss. And the domestic manufacturer, who now faces no foreign competitor able to undersell him, quietly raises his own price to just beneath the foreigner’s, and pockets the difference, and calls it the encouragement of native industry. It is an encouragement. It encourages him. It is paid for by the man in the field, who was not consulted and would have declined.

I am told the revenue is necessary. Perhaps. I would ask what it is necessary for, and I would ask it every year, in public, and I would require the answer in writing. Nothing in my experience of governments suggests that a revenue, once granted, is spent on the thing it was granted for, or that a duty laid for a war is repealed when the war ends. Duties are not repealed. They are inherited.

And of the promised bounty I will say only this. A government that takes a shilling from a man in the spring and returns him ninepence of it in the autumn has not given him ninepence. It has taken threepence and purchased his gratitude with his own money, which is the cheapest thing a treasury ever buys and the only bargain in the whole arrangement.

The question is never whether a tax is convenient to collect. The question is what a people become once the collecting is easy. Make it easy enough and no one will ever again be asked; they will simply be charged, at the wharf, invisibly, and told at intervals that a foreigner paid it.