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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 58

Dialogue

Dialogue.

A. T. Henry, raised as you have been on the Pacific Slope, ergo, from local associations a free trader, ambitious of fame, with respectable intellectual parts, fair education, a facile pen and easy, graceful style, why do you not, like Henry C. Carey, of the Pennsylvania side, who has made a name for himself as the apostle of protectionism, distinguish yourself in the public advocacy of your free-trade principles?

H. G. Cui Bono? What the Secession War twenty years ago was undertaken for and failed in, is not likely to be accomplished by anything that I could write. All the literature of the Cobden Club would have no more effect upon Massachusetts manufacturers than the adventures of Baron Munchausen.

A. T. Then eschew the literature of the Cobden Club, and get at your object indirectly.

H. G. How?

A. T. What is the object ?

H. G. To abolish Customs duties.

A. T. Is hanging the only way of killing a dog? To whom do the Customs duties go, and for what purpose?

H. G. To Government, for its maintenance.

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A. T. Well, if all taxation were rendered needless, there would be no excuse for collecting Customs duties, and straight you have free trade established without any mention of the subject.

H. G. But you cannot do without Government.

A. T. Granted, but you might make Government so abundantly wealthy, as to leave no excuse for taxation.

H. G. How?

A. T. By a swinging impost on land. In the lively times, nearly a hundred years ago, when I was gloriously busy in France with the revolution, I had amongst my protégés a fellow named Quesnay. If you look up his writings you will come upon a notion which secured him some notoriety until things grew too hot for theorizing; it was that all taxes should be abolished except an impôt unique upon land, so that landowners should bear the whole cost of government and a surplus to boot. They are neither producers, manufacturers, exporters, nor importers who are the folks with whom you are concerned.

H. G. But the modus operandi?

A. T. Simple enough, a mere legislative act. John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer advocate the assumption of the ownership of land by the State, and the compensation of the owners so dispossessed.

H. G. That would not work; the amount of compensation would be so enormous. It could only be effected by an immense loan, to pay interest on which general taxation would still be necessary, and free trade indefinitely postponed.

A. T. Then pay no compensation.

H. G. But that would be confiscation, the bare proposal of which would be yelled at as unjust and iniquitous.

A. T. Headlong again, like a bull at a gate. Don't make the bare proposal; cover up its bareness with three or four hundred pages of a neatly, methodically, and gracefully compiled philosophical treatise, the bigger in reason the better, because it will the more effectually bother your adversaries to follow you, and tempt them to waste their energy in combating details, which are of no more importance than is the "patter" with which a thimble-rigger distracts the attention of his observers from his fingering, palming, and placing the pea, whilst seemingly only engaged in shuffling the thimbles. Like him, too, in treating of the science you have page 5 taken in hand, say political economy, you will shuffle about with fitting "patter,"—land, labour, wages, capital, interest, &c.; they give room for any amount of hocus pocus, and having arranged them to your purpose, you will triumphantly discover under the thimble Land Ownership, and the name Rest, the pea which whilst so remaining is the root of all evil, but which by mere transference to coverture of the thimble, State Ownership of Land, will at once germinate into the golden age which poets have sung, and high-raised seers have told in metaphor; the glorious vision which has always haunted man with gleams of fitful splendour; what he saw whose eyes at Patmos were closed in a trance; the culmination of Christianity; the city of God on earth with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl; the reign of the Prince of Peace.

Make only a slight and incidental reference to your real object, free trade in America; deal rather with the social condition of England and the British people; and to give Homeric personal interest to the theme, select some prominent Englishman as your special example. Being a citizen of the great American Republic, you will of course choose a nobleman, probably a duke, with, it may be, even a secondary bête noir as low down as a marquis. Don't forget about the city of God upon earth, the culmination of Christianity, and so forth, with some other apposite Scripture references quoted "like a very cunning clerk." It will have upon some a soothing, lubricating effect, so that you will, so to speak, absorb and assimilate them. Above all be careful to proclaim yourself in set terms a devotee, a very incarnation of justice, or as some Cockney admirer may title you, a very Harry Stides George, so that when you have led up to and must out with the confiscation proposal, it will be becoming in so awfully, quite too entirely learned, just, good, and Scripture-quoting a philosopher to declare that to confiscate the ownership of their lands is an act of not justice merely but of actual mercy to the owners, whom you will take special pains to blacken and brand with infamy as nefarious robbers, deserving of, and, if they grumble, likely to fall in for much harsher treatment.

H. G. Well, but, I say, that will be rough on some of the poor beggars. That duke whom you suggest I should single out, for instance, came by his property innocently enough from his page 6 forefathers, however they may have got it; and then, think of some poor widow, with her fatherless children, to whom the place her husband left her at his death is her whole income and means of support for herself and them; or the labourer who, preparing to marry and make a home for himself, has paid part of his wages week by week to get a bit of land and build a cottage on it; or that old shopkeeper, who stuck to business so long, and pinched and spared till he could buy two or three little tenements to give him an income, and a bit of a villa just out of town to end his days comfortably in;—surely it won't honestly do to say that this man's or the labourer's little estate is not the produce of his toil, nor that old, hard-worked lawyer's, nor the merchant's, nor that weather-beaten ship captain's neither. And then again, some of this land has been actually given away and devoted to charity, and there's Parnell's estate at Avoca, which the Irish Land League have begged the world through to get the money to pay off the mortgages of and give to him clear. And crowds of others have bought their land direct from the State, and paid the Government the highest price it would fetch at public auction. I say, you know, to call these nefarious robbers and all that is really coming it a trifle strong.

A. T. "Won't honestly do?" That is sweetly simple; would do honour to Verdant Green. What have you to do with honesty? You have your ambition, have you not? Let them have it hot, I tell you; and, what's more, pitch into Herbert Spencer roundly for his namby-pambyness in proposing compensation; it will show that, great gun as he is among the Britishers, you are a cut above him in boldness and originality. You will not induce the world to follow your lead, but that's of no consequence; what does matter is, that you will at once become talked about, you will have done your best to fulfill Jack Falstaff's injunction: "Rob me the Exchequer, Hal, and mind thou does it with clean hands." And the more you're criticised the more your book will sell; the English will swallow any bunkum if cleverly spiced, and, with a handsome sum in your pocket, you will be gratified with transatlantic fame to the topmost bent of your vanity. Therefore, take my tip, write a book, and out-Herbert Herbert with Social Ex-Statics.

H. G. Thanks, old friend. Here's to the work, and the title shall be "Progress and Poverty."