which builds a house, cultivates a farm, or navigates a ship. There is no good reason, beyond convenience, in collecting the revenue, why the whole load of federal taxation should fall upon that comparatively small portion of American industry, which happens to pass through the custom-house, while the whole immense residue is exempted. On the contrary, the gross inequality of taxation, both individual and sectional, it necessarily engenders, is an objection that ought to be fatal to the whole system, in a country of equal benefits, and equal burdens.
The canons of taxation by impost, as laid down by Sir Henry Parnell, are the following:
1. All foreign articles, which consist of materials for the operations of industry, to be free.
2. All foreign articles, which are necessaries of life, to be free.
3. None but those foreign articles which are luxuries, to be made subject to duty.
To these details there are strong objections. They embody a departure from his own principles. In them is recognized the right of government to intermeddle with the interests, and occupations of its citizens, and the moment the principle of protection, and the prerogative to regulate are conceded, monopolies, restrictions, and unwise legislation will rapidly pour in. There should be no manner of discrimination. If the government must support itself by this system of taxation, let it be by a tariff of ten per cent. ad valorem duties upon every thing brought into the country, regardless of what it consists, where it was made, or to what use it is destined. The idea of taxing luxuries especially should be wholly exploded. It is but a remnant of that scheme of sumptuary laws always found so impracticable, and now so universally abandoned. Besides the difficulty of discriminating between luxuries and necessaries, and the other objections to such a tax stated by Adam Smith, in the United States the abolition of the law of primogeniture, and the quick subdivision and rotation of property, make luxuries in the ancient, or European sense of the term, almost unknown. The inhabitant, whether rich or poor, of a free country, has a right to spend his money as he pleases, either unproductively, or reproductively; either on necessaries, or luxuries; and government should leave the matter for morality and religion alone to regulate.
With these qualifications we agree, that the tariff's proposed
