Moved onward by a power divine?
THE NEW YORK CUSTOM HOUSE.
BY COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
One day I said to the Factotum of the Collector of Customs in New York, “I must do up the Custom House in a magazine article of three thousand five hundred words; how much time shall I need to give to the collection of data here?”
Factotum smiled compassionately on me and said: “About three months!”
In this granite building on Wall Street, with its tall Ionic columns, is transacted a business greater than all the industries of the United States combined half a hundred years ago. The merchandise that was inspected, weighed, counted, measured, valued, catalogued here last year was valued at—count the figures!—$857,430,637. The catalogue includes over three thousand articles, many of which you never heard of and would not even recognize the names thereof. Each of these articles has its particular rate of duty, some having two or three different ones. These have to be calculated specifically on every package by quantity, or if the duty be ad valorem, the value of the article has to be first determined and the duty then calculated on the quantity of goods of that class. These estimates and adjustments form the most intricate and delicate business known to civilization. We sometimes think things are plain and easy to administer upon, but the whole range of metaphysics and abstract thought is not more perplexing and doubtful than this mere business matter of levying and collecting the duties on goods passing the custom house.
I remember of hearing a debate in the Senate of the United States upon a proposed amendment to the tariff laws. The bill had been prepared and revised in a committee of Senators most experienced and acute in such matters, and it had been hammered over in long days of debate. Some one now asked what would be the exact duty collectible under this bill on the class of merchandise to which it related, and not a man in the Senate could tell. Last winter, when it was proposed in the House of Representatives to cut down the duties twenty per cent. all around (“horizontal reduction”), it was demonstrated by experts that the measure would work such confusion that it could not be executed.