"A Weaver. And I two francs for each yard of cloth.
"The Presiding Officer. That is understood. Our meeting will have originated the system of drawbacks, and it will be its eternal glory. What branch of manufacturing can lose hereafter, when we have two so simple means of turning losses into gains—the tariff and drawbacks. The meeting is adjourned."
Some supernatural vision must have shown me in a dream the coming appearance of the bounty (who knows if I did not suggest the thought to M. Dupin?), when some months ago I wrote the following words:
"It seems evident to me that protection, without changing its nature or effects, might take the form of a direct tax levied by the State, and distributed in indemnifying bounties to privileged manufacturers."
And after having compared protective duties with the bounty:
"I frankly avow my preference for the latter system; it seems to me more just, more economical, and more truthful. More just, because if society wishes to give gratuities to some of its members, all should contribute; more economical, because it would save much of the expense of collection, and do away with many obstacles; and, finally, more truthful, because the public could see the operation plainly, and would know what was done."
Since the opportunity is so kindly offered us, let us study this robbery by bounties. What is said of it will also apply to robbery by tariff, and as it is a little better disguised, the direct will enable us to understand the indirect, cheating. Thus the mind proceeds from the simple to the complex.
But is there no simpler variety of robbery? Certainly, there is highway robbery, and all it needs is to be legalized, or, as they say now-a-days, organized.
I once read the following in somebody's travels:
"When we reached the Kingdom of A—— we found all industrial pursuits suffering. Agriculture groaned, manufactures complained, commerce murmured, the navy growled, and the government did not know whom to listen to. At first it thought of taxing all the discontented, and of dividing among them the proceeds of these taxes after having taken its share; which would have been like the method of managing lotteries in our dear Spain. There are a thousand of you; the State takes a dollar from each one, cunningly steals two hundred and fifty, and then divides up seven hundred and fifty, in greater or smaller sums, among the players. The worthy Hidalgo, who has received three-quarters of a dollar, forgetting that he has spent a whole one, is wild with joy, and runs to spend his shillings at the tavern. Something like this once happened in France. Barbarous as the country of A—— was, however, the government did not trust the stupidity of the inhabitants enough to make them accept such singular protection, and hence this was what it devised: