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Inquiry Into the Taxation and Commercial Policy of Great Britain
Inquiry Into the Taxation and Commercial Policy of Great Britain Author:David Buchanan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: have resulted from increasing the demand for the manufactured commodity? The injurious measure contended for was, however, happily resisted, never, it ia to be t... more »rusted, to be brought forward again; and the trade of wool, by being thrown open to the world, has been placed on a far surer foundation than if it had been made to rest on the narrow and insecure basis of monopoly and restrictions."1 CHAPTER IV. OF TAXES ON MANUFACTURED ARTICLES. Effect of these taxes.—Injurious to the manufacturer; to the improvement of art and industry.—Chief articles on which imposed. Taxation, however necessary and however well regulated, still imposes many inconveniencies, and in its excess, is injurious to revenue as well as to trade. But it occasions greater evils when it is laid on the manufactures of the country than on articles of foreign growth. In the one case, it merely restrains the consumption of such articles, and the intercoursewith the countries in which they are produced, which is no doubt an evil; but internal taxes lay under thraldom the industry of the country : they impose, for the security of the revenue, complicated restraints, necessarily strict and arbitrary, and often capricious; the least deviation from which, even through inadvertence, exposes the offender to heavy penalties; while the Revenue officers, in enforcing this code of petty tyranny, must have access at all times, by night as well as by day, to every part of the manufacturer's work. It may be easily conceived how injuriously such restrictions must interfere with those manufactures which depend on chemical agencies; how the spirit of invention must be checked by acts of Parliament regulating the work in all its most delicate processes,—when they shall begin, and when they shall end ; and, as in the case o...« less