The Sun.
London, England, 1860-03-12 00:00:00

THE TIMBER DUTIES.

The following letter has been addressed by the
Chancellor of the Exchequer to Mr. Thos. M'Avity,
Mayor of the city of St. John, New Brunswick, in
reply to one received from him on the subject of the
equalisation of the timber duties:—

"Downing-street, March 6, 1860.
" Sir,—l feel some difficulty in replying to your
letter of the 3d, which I received yesterday after-
noon on returning to town.
"In that letter you ' protest,' as well as
remon-
strate, against any change in the duties levied in
this country, and paid by the English people, upon
wood from the colonies and from foreign countries
respectively, until the inhabitants of New Bruns-
wick shall have had an opportunity of stating their
views upon the subject.
"Were I to examine your language critically I
could not admit your title, even individually, to
protest against any legislation which Parliament
may think it right to adopt for the equalisation of
the duties on foreign and colonial wood. And when
you desire to remonstrate on behalf of the inhabi-
tants of a colony,' I must observe that such remon-
strances ought to be addressed to the Secretary of
State for the Colonies, who would exercise his dis-
cretion as to bringing them before the Minister of
Finance.

"As, however, you are about to quit England
without delay, I waive all regard to these consi-
derations, and I must beg leave to apprise you
that I am aware of no circumstance or argument
which could have led any person interested in the
colonial timber trade, and exercising ordinary pru-
dence, to reckon on the permanence of a law which
charges differential duties upon timber the produce
of foreign countries.
" At the former periods when those differential
duties have been reduced, I am aware of no pledge
that has been given that in this particutar case
any duty of any kind should be permanently main-
tained. If no such expectation could be formed
from a distinct pledge of the British Government,
still less could it be founded on the general policy
and legislation of this country.
" The legislation has for a long series of years
been founded upon the policy of abating, and then
destroying, or of destroying at once, differential
duties ; it was applied with great stringency to
some case of colonial produce, even under peculiar
circumstances ; it was applied in the case of wood
from British North America with much more cau-
tion, and by degrees so slow that the wonder is,
not that Parliament should now decline, without a
dissentient voice, to sanction the continuance of the
differential duties, but rather that it should, for so
long a time, have permitted them to continue.
" You describe this change as destructive of the
trade and of the property of the colonists. If so,
it can only be so because the differential duty exacts
from the people of England, who provide for the
military and naval defence of New Brunswick at
their own charge, an artificial price for its produce ;
and the demand for the permanent maintenance of
that artificial price would thus be a demand, in
effect, for the permanent payment of a tribute from
the mother country, not indeed to the colony at
large, but to a portion of its inhabitants
" I am not, however, prepared to admit that the
change deserves the character which you give it.
" The predictions of ruin which you and some
others now tender to the Gevernment are not new.
They have many times been repeated, and were
much more loudly uttered in 1842 than they now are,
by much more numerous witnesses, not less informed
of the circumstances, and with not less unques-
tionable good faith. Yet the result has been of a
character totally opposite to what was anticipated;
and the very statements which are now sent in to
deprecate the present change are based upon alle-
gations of facts with reference to the present state
of the colony that themselves bear witness to the
fallacy of their sinister prophecies.
" To place the colonies in any respect ender the
pressure of legal inequality would be repugnant to
every feeling of the British Government. To give
them the benefit, of freedom in trade has been their
early and anxious desire ; but they cannot decline
to make proposals upon a proper opportunity,
which will at length extend these benefits to others
and among them to the people of England.
" As this letter, with your own, touches on a
ms tter of publiQ interest, it might perhaps be eon-