A. Our only business is to mind our own interest; besides, the State may easily procure, by means of a land-tax, what it may lose by the clandestine exportation: and we are so far from expecting that Smuggling should turn out to our advantage, that we petition it may be made a capital offence, and prohibited under pain of mutilation, the galleys, or at least the entire ruin of the smuggler.
Q. But the law will either succeed, or fail in its effect. If the law succeed, will you not be the author of that diminution of the products, which the low price you intend to set upon those products must unavoidably occasion? And if the law fail in its effect, do you not uselessly deprive the State, 1st, of the produce of the smuggler’s labour, whom you hope to see hanged, or at best, mutilated; and, 2dly, of the produce of that labour which would have been performed by that army, partly composed of rogues, partly of idle fellows, now to be set upon the watch to detect and apprehend the smuggler, keep him in close confinement, and lead him finally to the gallows, or to the galleys?—Who is to pay those rogues and idle fellows?
A. The State, to be sure.
Q. What are the essential parts of the State?
A. Industry that goes in search of money, and Agriculture in as much as she feeds Industry at the cheapest rate.
Agriculture, impoverished by your prohibitory law, will then lose, not only what she should get by being at liberty to export, but also what she must find to assist you in procuring her impoverishment, by paying the land-tax necessary to pay those very rogues and idle fellows, whose business it is to destroy her only remaining resource against your cupidity—smuggling.
Prohibitory Laws against, or excessive Duties imposed upon Importation.
Q. Why do you petition against the liberty of importing such or such another article?
A. Because we manufacture it, and wish to sell it dearer to the national consumers.