technical subtleties, or to prevent their turning professional readiness to purposes of fraud, the end would be obtained with much greater certainty by such a reform of the proceedings, as would render them intelligible, of easy application, and unfit to conceal the stratagems of dishonesty.

Further means might be adopted to relieve the client from the consequences of incapacity or breach of duty by attorneys. They might be required, before admission, to give the security of responsible persons, or of a sum of money lodged in safe hands, to answer any damages accruing from want of skill, or abandonment of professional duty. The objections to this scheme may be anticipated, although their force may not be felt. Much might be said of an honourable profession being closed to indigent merit; but it will be remembered, that indigent excellence is excluded from all pursuits of trade requiring capital. It might be urged that a stigma was cast on the practitioners of the law, although throughout the public offices of the country, and in every species of private employment, men of honour and delicacy are required to furnish security, like the one proposed, for a faithful discharge of their trusts. It might be contended, that additional expenses were thrown upon the administration of the law, but we are confident that the public would cheerfully bear the increased burden, if accompanied by an improvement in the integrity and capacity of their legal advisers.

On the other hand, we would throw open the practice of the attorney, or law agent, to every one who felt himself competent to transact that branch of business. We would abolish the long apprenticeships that are so frequently spent in idleness, and profligacy, and all other formal regulations, of which the spirit, if not the letter, is always infringed, and which, therefore, create a mischievous feeling of confidence in the public. We would preserve the recently-revived examination, but would make its agency subservient to the ascertainment of the candidates' past, conduct, general education and acquirements only. By these means, we are of opinion, that individuals possessing peculiar aptitude for the practice of an attorney-an aptitude that does not betray itself till an age more mature than that at which apprenticeship in the

ordinary sense of the term begins-would enter the profession to the exclusion of incompetent practitioners, and that clients would have the advantage of increased skill and diligence in attorneys, with augmented security against their want of probity.

ARTICLE IX.

Report from the Select Committee on Timber Duties, together with the Minutes of Evidence. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 14th August, 1835.

We are about to examine a most grievous instance of the protective or bounty system. The Report of a Committee of the House of Commons has, once more, brought under the notice of the public, the colonial monopoly of the timber trade and it will be our endeavour, with the aid of that Report, to analyze, dissect, and expound the character and operation of that monopoly, in such manner as shalì qualify our readers to form for themselves a clear and just opinion upon its merits.

In order to do this with the more effect, our course will be, -first: to give a description of the peculiar features of this monopoly, by which it is distinguishable from all others, and to exhibit an account of the cost of it to the country and next-to investigate, separately, the cases of the two great parties or interests-the colonists and the ship-owners-for whose emolument this country is called upon to make those sacrifices of its revenue, of its commerce, and of its necessaries and comforts, which we shall describe.

The advocates of every case of bounty, or of protectiveduty-which is only bounty in another form-always profess to intend the public good. They stoutly disavow, as in decency they must, all attempt to serve particular parties at the expense of the country; and they insist, that whatever that apparent expense may be, which is the first consequence of the bounty, it is money, which will soon be amply repaid through the secondary beneficial effects of the scheme. They assure us, that if the fostering hand of the State be extended to

support the particular object of industry, in its infant efforts, either for origination or extension, it will afterwards go alone, and will thenceforth become, and permanently remain, one of the staple, profitable employments of the country. As a caution to these eager caterers of national prosperity, it is not too much to demand of them the admission, that, in calling for such assistance to some new, or hitherto unsuccessful, occupation, they may, possibly, be mistaken in this prospect of its quality that it may happen that it shall prove to be not so well adapted, as they imagine, to the local or personal faculties of the country-and that, even under the assumption that their confidence in our ability to attain to the excellence they promise in the favourite trade be well founded, they might still be desired to leave the industrious part of the community to determine for themselves the best sources of profitable employment, and, what is of nearly equal importance, the best times for engaging in them.

Still it must be admitted, that in almost all the cases of bounty, or protection, the prospect of ultimate self-support, insisted upon by their first promoters, has been rationally probable, or at least possible. There may, no doubt, be cases wherein the forced application of skill and industry may prove to be competent to the task of removing or overcoming, in time, the original causes of the higher cost:-but there must also be cases in which the cause of that higher cost is of such a nature that it can never cease to operate.

If, with this distinction kept in mind, we examine the protection of the "Timber Duties," it will stand exposed to view before us, the most overbearing, the most wasteful, the most useless, and the most hopeless of any that has ever been extended to any branch of industry. A plantation of sugar, in Jamaica, enjoys a physical equality with a rival plantation in Cuba. A farm in Essex has even a physical advantage over a farm in Poland. The spindle of the silk throwster and the shuttle of the weaver will obey the laws of rotatory or projectile force in England as well as in Italy or in France. But no power of man, no lapse of time, can equalise, for our use, the position of a forest on the Ottawa with that of a forest in Norway or Sweden.

When the protecting duty was first imposed, in 1810, upon

European timber, there was not the pretence, or even the affectation of the pretence, of the commencement of a trade calculated to be permanent, and holding out the prospect of ultimate benefit as the compensation for a temporary sacrifice. It was not even considered to be a temporary sacrifice, but an immediate benefit. The mischief intended to be cured, was the matter which possessed the quality of temporariness. It was an expedient adopted under the pressure of a present difficulty, arising out of the peculiar occurrences of a state of war; and the encouraging of ships to go to Canada for timber, when it could not be got in the Baltic, was as much a war measure as the chartering of a fleet of transports to carry out or bring home a body of troops. All that was temporary about the measure, was its immediate utility; all that was prospective, pointed to its discontinuance. In short, its necessity was one of those evils of war, for the removal of which, men pray for the return of peace; and the arbitrary continuance of the evil without the necessity, after peace, for so many years, is an act of great cruelty on the suffering people, and not a whit more irrational than it would have been, to have gone on hiring transports, and sending them round the world, though they had no troops to carry.

In the years 1820 and 1821, committees of both the Lords and the Commons reported that no pledge for permanence or long duration was held out; and it was truly said by a witness (Q. 18) before the late committee," that the country 66 was not to be doomed to dear timber for ever, because of the Copenhagen expedition.”

66

The great grievance of this monopoly is, the heavy cost of it upon the pockets of the people, without the compensating result of a commensurate increase of the revenue. The present duty upon a load of timber imported from the north of Europe is £.2. 158. Od. At the commencement of the war it was only 6s. 8d. This is an enormous increase of tax upon an article of first necessity: but as the whole amount of this sum, as far as it is received, goes to the national exchequer, and, pro tanto, precludes the necessity of some other tax, the consumer may be brought to pay it with cheerfulness. The justice, however, of this high duty assumes a very doubtful

character in his mind, when he finds that if he purchase of course at the same price-a load of timber imported from Canada, only 10s. of his money, instead of 55s., which he equally pays, goes to the public revenue; and that the 45s. is nothing else than a perquisite he is compelled to give to certain individuals. He naturally inquires how it can be, that those individuals can establish such a right over his money: and is so far from finding in the origin of the charge any trace of such a right, that he discovers in its history the fact, that his benefit as a consumer under temporary difficulties, and not the benefit of the producer, was intended by the

measure.

“Q. 132.—Are you not aware, from your official knowledge and experience, that the legislature, up to the present period, has always considered this great question as not merely a question of revenue, but as a mixed question, in which the revenue of the country, the colonial policy of the country, and the navigation of the country, have formed important ingredients?—I conceive there are few subjects on which the policy of the country has undergone more change than in regard to timber; the old policy, which I have before adverted to, was that of supplying the country with timber at the lowest possible rate, and having only a nominal duty upon it. Then the Revenue System was brought in, and all the duties imposed were decidedly for purposes of revenue. Then at another period the obtaining a supply of timber for consumption was allowed to supersede every other consideration; and, now, the measure intended for that purpose only, is turned against the consumer, whom alone it was meant to serve, and converted into a protective system for shipping and colonies, unnatural to both."

The same witness is then asked (Q. 133), whether, in 1820 and 1821, it was not treated as a mixed question of revenue, colonial policy, and shipping? and he admits that it was so: but he also points out, that the committees of those years expected, from the measure they proposed, and which was adopted, a very different appropriation, to those three interests, of the benefits of the timber trade than that which has occurred. According to their intentions the revenue and the Baltic trade should have had larger shares.

The protecting duty had been 65s.; but still those committees, who treated the magnitude of the colonial imports as an evil, attributed what they deemed the excess, partly to some temporary circumstances, and not entirely to the magnitude of the protection. In recommending a reduction of the protection to 45s., while they expected the cessation of those circumstances to co-operate with the reduction, they