It must not be inferred from the preceding details that we necessarily disapprove of all retaliatory duties; or that we recommend an unconditional abolition of all which we have imposed. We believe, indeed, that every one of the duties by which a foreign nation attempts partially or wholly to exclude our produce, is more injurious to herself than to us. We believe that every one of them has in a certain degree the compensating effect of rendering that nation a less formidable rival in third markets. But we believe that in every separate case we suffer from them; and, in the aggregate, suffer considerably. We have no doubt that, if there were no other resource, we should much diminish that suffering by abandoning wholly the protective system, and levying duties only for the purposes of revenue. We believe that by doing so we should increase the productiveness of our labour; we should diminish, or perhaps destroy, the rivalry of many of our competitors in third markets; and that thus, without perhaps affecting, what is perfectly unimportant, the distribution of the precious metals, we should increase our command over them.

6

But it certainly would be much better if we were not only to renounce our own follies, but to induce our neighbours to renounce theirs. There may,' says Adam Smith, and we agree with him, be policy in retaliations of this kind, when there is 'a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high 'duties complained of. The recovery of a great foreign market will generally more than compensate the transitory inconvenience of paying dearer during a short time for some kinds of goods. To judge whether such retaliations are likely to pro'duce such an effect, does not perhaps belong so much to the ' science of a legislator, whose deliberations ought to be governed by general principles, which are always the same, as to the 'skill of that insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a states'man or politician, whose councils are directed by the momen'tary fluctuations of affairs.'

But,' he adds, and here also we agree with him, that, when 'there is no probability that any such repeal can be procured, 'it seems a bad method of compensating the injury done to cer'tain classes of our people, to do another injury ourselves, not 'only to those classes, but to almost all the other classes. This 'may no doubt give encouragement to some particular class of 'workmen among ourselves, and, by excluding some of their rivals, may enable them [for a very short time] to raise their price in the home market. Those workmen, however, who

*Wealth of Nations, Book iv. cap. 11.

'suffered by our neighbour's prohibition, will not be benefited by ours. On the contrary, they, and almost all the other classes of our citizens, will thereby be obliged to pay dearer 'for certain goods. Every such law imposes a real tax upon the whole country, not in favour of that particular class of workmen who were injured by our neighbour's prohibition, 'but of some other class."

*

But, after all, the practical question for a British statesman is the policy not of retaliation but of persistence. It is not, whether by inflicting, or by threatening to inflict restrictions on the commerce of foreign nations, we should endeavour to persuade them to remove, or to relax, those which they have imposed upon ours; but whether, after having by our exactions, by our prohibitions, by our sliding scales, and by our differential duties, provoked foreign nations to retaliatory schemes, we ought or ought not to retrace our steps. The British reader of Colonel Torrens might suppose that we are the innocent victims of an Anti-Anglican conspiracy. A foreign economist would tell a different story.

We will compare the British tariff with that of a nation which is supposed to be distinguished by the exclusiveness of its commercial system, namely, with that of France. In 1841, the value of the imports of France for home consumption amounted to 804,557,931 francs; the duties on them amounted to 129,679,125 francs-being L.16, 2s. 4d. per cent. And this includes the imports from her own colonies and dependencies. It may be supposed that British commodities were unfavourably treated. The value of the commodities imported by France for home consumption in 1841, from the British islands and their European dependencies, was 101,907,874 francs; the duties on them amounted to 11,288,996 francs-being L.11, 1s. 6d. per cent. These estimates, however, require some correction; in consequence of the valuation of foreign commodities having been made in 1816 and 1817, and not subsequently revised. Since that period, many of them might have altered in value, and some of them must have fallen. If we take 10 per cent from the value of the whole bulk of the commodities imported, it will leave the French tariff not quite 18 per cent on the average value of the commodities imported for home consumption, and not quite 12} per cent on British commodities. Let us now turn to the British tariff. As the greatest part of our duties are imposed according to quantity, it is difficult to state, with accuracy, what pro

portion they bear to the value of the commodities imported. But we will endeavour to give a rough approximation.

For the ten years ending with 1840, the last included in Mr Porter's published tables, the average gross revenue of the customs amounted to L.21,941,764 a-year. If we had a return of the real value of the imports from which this revenue was derived, we could, of course, state the average ad valorem amount of our duties. But we have none. We have, however, an account of the real value of our exports. Their average annual value during these ten years was L.45,244,407. With these exports we purchased every year not only the commodities liable to duty, but also L.2,700,000 of gold and silver, which amount, as we have shown, is annually consumed in the British islands, on the wear and loss of coin and plate. After deducting the exports which went to purchase this sum of L.2,700,000, there remains an annual export of the value of L.42,544,407, with which our imports, exclusively of gold and silver, were purchased. The imports, of course, on their arrival in the British islands, were worth more than this sum; as the expenses of carriage and the importer's profit must be added. To cover these expenses and this profit, and any other inaccuracies which may have crept into our estimate, we will make the large addition of 20 per cent. On these data, the imports on which, the average annual sum of L.21,941,767 was paid for duty, were of the average annual value of L.51,053,288; making the average amount of our duties L.42, 19s. 6d. per cent on the value of the commodities imported-including, as we have done with respect to France, the imports from our own colonies and dependencies. But it may be said that we have taken into the account only the duties imposed by France, and not her prohibitions. Do we impose no virtual prohibitions? A duty of L.42, 19s. 6d. per cent is, with respect to the vast majority of commodities, as effectual a bar as the most express prohibition. Or it may be said that this was the state of things under our old tariff, and does not represent what now exists. In fact, however, the new tariff has made no material alteration. The most important articles which it has affected are corn, coffee, and timber. On corn it has practically raised the duty from 5s. 10d. per quarter, the average duty previously paid, to 8s. per quarter. Coffee and timber it has left subject to duties of nearly 150 per cent; and the amount of both is too small to lower the aggregate per centage of our duties as much as the increase of the duty on corn has raised it.

Now, when this is the state of the commercial relations between France and the British islands-when France imports for

home consumption L.4,000,000 worth of our products, at an average duty of less than 13 per cent-Colonel Torrens ventures to assert that the import duties imposed by France, limit our exports to that country to an inconsiderable extent, and to advise us, by the prompt adoption and rigid enforcement of a retaliatory system, to give the French producers a lesson on the evils of protection.†

There are few nations with whom a British negotiator must not carefully avoid all allusion to retaliation, and certainly France is not among those few. Colonel Torrens, however, goes further still. In his patriotic blindness to the conduct of his own country, he recommends us to oppose differential duties to the tariffs of Cuba and Brazil‡-countries whose staple commodities we tax at 150, 300, and 3000 per cent !

If we believed, with this writer, that, under existing circumstances, to open our ports is charlatanry, and that to reduce our duties without requiring corresponding reductions, is to 'make ourselves tributary to foreign states ;'§-' to relinquish the lever which might move them to concession, and to grant ' a bounty on the continuance of restrictions on our trade;'-if we believed this, we should feel all the apprehensions which he expresses, and more. We should tremble for the prospects of our country, if we believed that a hostile conspiracy was shutting us out from the rest of the commercial world, and that the value of our labour and our command over the precious metals were rapidly diminishing. We should despair, if we believed that restrictions still more vexatious, duties still more oppressive, and prohibitions still more numerous, were the remedy. That our situation is not without difficulty or without danger-that we cannot be extricated by any Minister who wants the knowledge of what is right, or the decision necessary to compel his ignorant or selfish followers to submit to its adoption-that the vessel is not in seas in which she can be navigated by an irresolute captain, disunited officers, and a mutinous crew; all this we believe, and indeed fear that we may have tired our readers by repeating. If we further believed that there is no course less objectionable than that which has led to the shoals and quicksands to which we have been steering-if we believed that to retreat is still more dangerous than to advance-we should endeavour to shut our eyes to the signs of approach to unavoidable ruin, and only hope that we might not be in life at the time of the catastrophe.

†The Budget, p. 67.
Ibid. p. 62.

* Letter to Sir R. Peel, p. 21.
Postscript, p. 27. § Budget, p. 61.

It is because we know that the evils which we are suffering, and the dangers which we are fearing, are self-inflicted and selfcreated because we know that they are to be remedied or averted, not by concessions to be wrung, or rather attempted to be wrung, by entreaty, or menace from foreign rivals, but simply by consenting to purchase what they are eager to sell-because we know that our industry will be re-animated when it is unfettered, and prosperous when it ceases to be misdirected, that we feel hope; it is because we know that these opinions are rapidly spreading and gaining strength throughout the nation, that we feel confidence.

ART. II.-The Life of a Travelling Physician, from his First Introduction to Practice; including Twenty Years' Wanderings through the greater part of Europe. 3 vols. 8vo. London:

1843.

6

THIS THIS is a rambling, discursive book;-the work of a clever and acute observer; but nowise remarkable for either thinking or style. It has been put together with as little pains as we ever remember to have seen exemplified in the operation of bookmaking. But it is, upon the whole, amusing; and it leads us to think favourably of the author himself. Sir George Lefevre (for so the writer is confidently named in some of the periodical publications of the day) has seen much of life-a great deal more than he chooses to communicate; and in what he has here revealed, it is not always easy to distinguish between dichtung' and 'wahrheit ;-to borrow the title of Goethe's Memoirs, which he has himself chosen by way of motto. Nothing, at any rate, can be more careless than his manner of throwing together his loose remarks on men and things; nothing more commonplace than two-thirds of the matter with which he has filled up the predestined and favourite number of three volumes. But the remaining portion consists of quaint anecdote, and descriptions of scenes and characters, such as only an intimate acquaintance with the interior of foreign life could have enabled him to delineate; joined with the shrewd judgments of a cosmopolite on the world about him. A little more knowledge of languages, we should have thought, would have done him no harm: his German is somewhat elementary; his sins against French orthography (albeit an accomplishment on which he prides himself) unpardonable; while