[31]Charles Butler, the learned Catholic lawyer, once mentioned to Fox that he had never read the Wealth of Nations. “To tell you the truth,” said Fox, “nor I either. There is something in all these subjects which passes my comprehension; something so wide that I could never embrace them myself or find any one who did.”
[32]See Book IV. chap. vii.
[33]See Skarzinski’s Adam Smith (1878), quoted by Oncken, Economic Journal, vol. vii. p. 445.
[34]See Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, letters 62 and 72.
[35]Smith avoids the error so commonly committed in modern doctrines of international trade, of regarding a nation as a trading unit.
[36]The second case is simple and uncontroversial. If there is an excise duty upon a home product, it seems reasonable, says Smith, that an equal tax should be imposed in the shape of an import duty upon the same product imported from abroad.
[37]The author of Douglas.
[38]Written from Kirkcaldy, November 9, 1776.
[39]In the Budget of 1778 North adopted two more important recommendations: the inhabited house duty, which is still with us, and the malt tax, which was commuted for the beer duty by Mr. Gladstone in 1880. The house tax proved very productive, as taxes went in those days, its yield rising from £26,000 in 1779 to £108,000 in 1782.
[40]Sir Gray Cooper was Secretary to the Treasury.