convinced that in maintaining this great surplus and in paying this
high taxation she would be doing herself great harm. She is not
performing a great duty, but perpetrating a great injustice. She is
injuring posterity by crippling and displacing industry, far more
than she is aiding it by reducing the taxes it will have to pay. In
the first place, the maintenance of the present high taxation
compels the retention of many taxes which are contrary to the maxims
of free-trade. Enormous customs duties are necessary, and it would
be all but impossible to impose equal excise duties even if the
Americans desired it. In consequence, besides what the Americans pay
to the Government, they are paying a great deal to some of their own
citizens, and so are rearing a set of industries which never ought
to have existed, which are bad speculations at present because other
industries would have paid better, and which may cause a great loss
out of pocket hereafter when the debt is paid off and the fostering
tax withdrawn. Then probably industry will return to its natural
channel, the artificial trade will be first depressed, then
discontinued, and the fixed capital employed in the trade will all
be depreciated and much of it be worthless. Secondly, all taxes on
trade and manufacture are injurious in various ways to them. You
cannot put on a great series of such duties without cramping trade
in a hundred ways and without diminishing their productiveness
exceedingly. America is now working in heavy fetters, and it would
probably be better for her to lighten those fetters even though a
generation or two should have to pay rather higher taxes. Those
generations would really benefit, because they would be so much
richer that the slightly increased cost of government would never be
perceived. At any rate, under a Parliamentary government this
doctrine would have been incessantly inculcated; a whole party would
have made it their business to preach it, would have made incessant