The Evening Star. MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1871.

Evening Star, Volume IX, Issue 2541, 10 April 1871, Page 2

The Evening Star. MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1871.

The experience of other countries of the effects of certain systems adopted for the development of national industry, is one means by which any phange of legislation should be determined, But this is nob a safe test

unless it accords with sound principles of legislation. Peculiar circumstances may sometimes favor the idea that a certain course of action has led to beneficial results, when closer investigation and more accurate information may tend to shew that it lias either had a retarding effect, or none whatever, in producing them. During the last few sessions of Parliament, in the Provincial Council, and at the hustings during the last election, the question ot free trade and protection to native industry, as it is erroneously termed, occasionally cropped up. In one instance, there is no doubt whatever the straightforward honesty of a candidate, in declaring himself a free trader, lost him his election, and tended mainly to the return of another whose more clastic principles enabled him to promise to support protective measures. It is very singular that men cannot see clearly who are the best friends of a community, and still more singular that educated men can be found who persist in. putting forward as a cause or a consequent, or an illustration favorable to a political theory, that which has in every case practically disproved its truth. New Zealand’s necessities very early rendered a large revenue necessary, and her statesmen adopted the time-honored course of raising it by heavy duties on imports. Nobody ever seems to have imagined any other plan. Nobody appears now to think that it is possible to devise one more just and equitable. Very few to this day question the right and wrong of such a system, nor ask whether or not it bears unequally upon different classes of men. It does not enter into a workman’s mind that by this mode of taxation he pays ten, twenty, thirty, fifty per _ cent, move taxes in proportion to his income than his richer neighbor. Yet such is the truth j and so it will be acknowledged when sounder information is more extensively diffused, and all classes of the community are bent on devising fair and equitable measures for national benefit. The fact is, when a teaspoonfnl of sugar is put into the cup, or a nobbier of whisky is paid for, no fiscal questions enter a consumer’s mind ns to how much of the value of it goes in duties. He does not see the spirit of the Custom House officer or exciseman, that watched jealously over the passage of the sugar or whisky from the port to the retail dealer’s shop or hotel, and took care that the mite of import duty upon it should bo paid before it became available for human wants. "Whether people believe it or not, the system will one day have to be altered. It will become to be acknowledged that the rough-and-tumble calculation that the people of New Zealand are taxed five or six pounds per head, implies that the working man, with a wife and a family of four or five children, is paying out of two or three pounds a week between twenty and thirty pounds a year to the revenue, and a man with a thousand a year, with an equal family, is paying very little more. It is the nature of long-continued habit to enable men to wear a yoke patiently, even when they are conscious that it galls. But the oddest effect of indirect duties is to lead people to like them, Not content with the yoke they have to hear, they seek to add to its burden; and, in addition to having to pay dearly for goods imported, they want to pay dearly for what they themselves grow and manufacture. In this delusion they have been encouraged by the example of the United States, Victoria, and New South Wales. It has been a favorite argument with every native industry protector to imagine that he was about to do a great stroke for the benefit of his country. He argues in this wise ; The more a man gets for the produce of his labor, the richer he becomes .* if by levying a duty on imported goods the price of home-pro-duced articles is raised, the richer the country will become. This is very specious—but unfortunately not true ; simply because passing a note or two from one person to another adds nothing to the wealth of a country. It does not increase the quantity of money. It is only giving to A. what belonged to B.; and if A. is richer, B. is so much poorer. Our Provincial Council passed a resolution last session that it was expedient to lay a duty on agricultural produce. Emanating from the clodocracy we do not wonder at it, nor at the arguments by which it was carried. But one struck us as being the very acme of impudence, and carried with it its own condemnation. It was argued that such a duty was right, because by that means the colonists of the North Island would be made to reimburse to the South some of the money expended in their favor. Translated faithfully, the language was this : By levying a duty on grain, the price will bo raised, and the fanners of Otago and Canterbury and Southland will benefit. We suppose on the principle that the three tailors in Tooley street designated themselves “ We, the “people of England,'’ the clodocvats

are the “ South Island,” and the twenty thousand people in Dunedin, and the miners on the goldfields, and the artisans and the tradesmen, who like the people in the North would have to pay an extra price, have no part nor lot in the matter. But the system is breaking down everywhere. Its result is found to be the same wherever it is tried. In the language of the Special Commissioner of the United States, the “ increased cost of “ a given product of industry ” necessitates “ the employment of a largely increased capital," neutralises the influence of improved machinery, diminishes exports, and restricts home consumption. The United States, New 8011 th Wales, and Victoria have found this out. Their prosperity, instead of increasing, has diminished : trade has declined, wages have fallen, and the very industries proposed to be fostered have been injured. New South W ales is attempting to retrace its steps, the United States is wavering, the people in Victoria are beginning to doubt. New Zealand statesmen can no longer point to them as examples to follow. The applicability of protection to a newly-settled country has been proved a pernicious fallacy; and should New Zealand statesmen extend the system, as proposed, for the benefit of the Southern farmers, not only will the world witness the folly of taxing onehalf of the colonists for the sake of another, but every other class in the South Island for the sake of its farmers.