The Sun.
London, England, 1860-02-13 00:00:00

I #

MINES.

REPEAL OF THE PAPER DUTY.

Perhaps we ourselves are not quite so trustworthy
and impartial in our estimate of Mr. Gladstone's
really great scheme as we always strive to be. To
us it offers a boon which, although we have always
ardently desired it, and although we have often
.put in a timid claim for it, we have never felt it
quite consistent with our public position to agitate
for with persistent energy. We have always felt
that we have too great and too obvious an interest
in the abolition of the paper duties to be entitled
to put it in the foreground of all financial re-
forms, and to demand that it should be preferred
to all other imposts which press severely upon
the poor consumers. There were many things
to be said in favour of the repeal, and we have
often said them, and need not now repeat them,
for they have prevailed ; but we were always open
to the ad hominena reply that we were arguing for
our own special interests. It can never be to the
taste of any producer to be made a tax-collector
as well as a seller, and to have to add to the
natural price of his conirnodoties a sum with
which he has no concern, and from which he de-
rives no profit. The paper duties have forced upon
us the office of demanding from the public every
year, under colour of payment for this journal,
no less a sum than £50,000, no farthing of which
went to the production of the paper we sold. Our
protests against this encumbrance could never have
the weight which attaches to others made solely
upon public grounds ; and now, when we have a
Budget before us which proposes to relieve us from
this onerous office, we almost suspect our own judg-
ment when we receive it with delight. Long ago
the shackles which bound the English press were
snapped asunder, but the broken links were suffered
to remain as weights upon its free action. One by
one these also have beon removed, and now the last
falls clattering on the ground. We honestly be-
lieve it to be a great boon to the whole community,
to the poor as well as to the rich, and especially to
that new generation which is rising among u-,
better taught than their fathers are, and with
keener appetites for that intellectual food for
which they have learned to hunger. It was wisely
said by Mr. Gladstone that you may make any
article a rich man's luxury by taxing it, but that
nothing ought to be esteemed a rich man's luxury
which a poor man can enjoy, and which a reduction
of taxation will place within his reach. There
must, of course, be in all merchandise qualities to
suit every class of consumers, but the interest of
our society requirest that in this article—knowledge
—all should be consumers, and that the quality
supplied to them should be as good as may be • for
this purpose it is good that all restrictions, all in-
tellectual corn laws, should be removed.
We will assume that at least so much of this
Budget as repeals the duty upon paper is carried.
Whatever improbable contingency may occur, after
Mr. Gladstone's proposition no Chancellor of the
Exchequer will dare to ask for a duty from paper. It
becomes a matter of business, therefore, to measure
its immediate effect. No doubt, the Chinese make
paper from bamboo and from reeds, and Mr.
Gladstone proposes to make his champagne from
rhubarb, and after extracting his champagne to make
the residuum into paper. This may come to pass,
but unfortunately at the present time neither the
champagne nor the paper so made would be suited to
British taste. We can make paper out of old junk,
or wheat straw, or bamboo, but we cannot print a
newspaper upon it. Eventually we hope that this
may come. This abolition of duty will stimulate our
inventors ; but, meanwhile, we are at the mercy of
the rag merchant. Whatever substances may be uses
to supplement the supply of this article, the public
may take it as an indisputable fact that paper,
of any quality worthy to bo called paper, must de-
pend for its fibre upon rags. Here is the great
difficulty of enabling the British public to enter
into the full advantage of this sudden boon. Eng-
land does not produce rags enough.; Ireland has
her own use for hers; France, Belgium, Spain, and
Portugal all rigorously prohibit the export of the
article. Our only foreign supply comes from Italy
and Germany, and this supply is quite incommensu-
rate with the demand which is required to keep the
article at a reasonable price. We admire Mr.
Gladstone's enthusiasm. We have no objection to
his making coaches and pipes and dolls and teapots
and artificial arms, as he professes that he and his
friends are about to do, out of paper. We smile
indulgently at his romantic and Arcadian scheme
of rearing paper mills in every rural valley, whither
the villagers will flock to make the paper of their
village journal, and linger as they return in the
evening to watch the angler casting his fly over
the mill-tail. We desire the realisation of
his dream, that by means of this paper manu-
facture wages will become plentiful, and poor-
rates unknown. But this is the enthusiasm of a
recent convert, who is imagining arguments to con-
vince his hearers rather than expounding
those by which he was himself convinced. Alas!
no Tillage mills will ever ,again rise. These
were all destroyed, not by the paper duty,
but by M. Fourdrinier's paper-making ma-
chine, which rendered paper-making, like cotton-
spinning, an affair of capital and machinery and
great establishments. When handloom weaving
again becomes a flourishing trade, and the distaff
and spindle are seen in every cottage, than we shall
have again the village paper mill, and not before.
Instead of luring country gentlemen by the fond
hope of village mills and reduced poor-rates, and
instead of threatening totake from our present stock
of the raw material in order to make dolls and tea-

pots and artificial legs and arms, how much more far-
sighted would it have been in Mr. Gladstone to have
stipulated in the French Treaty for the removal of
the prohibition on the export of rags ! Belgium is
our very good friend, and might then, perhaps,
have been won over to grant us the slight favour of
allowing us to buy her surplus rags. Spain might
have paid us that £500,000 in rags—her bonds at
this moment are little more, but France was giving
little and taking much even when Mr. Gladstone
was resolving upon this abolition. She could not
have refused so small a matter as this. Would it
even now be too late to ask for this little supple-
mental benefit, without which the boon which Mr.
Gladstone has conferred will lose half its advantage ?
These, however, are but secondary considerations.
In time—perhaps not so early as the Ist of next
July, when the duty is to come off, but still in time
—these difficulties will right themselves. Eventu-
ally we do not doubt we shall obtain some substitute
foi that at present indispensable article, which is so
rare, and the supply of which is choked by so many
artificial impediments. But meanwhile we wish to
urge upon Mr. Gladstone, and upon the Paper
Duty abolitionists, that their work is not
yet accomplished, for to perfect it they should ob-
tain free trade in rags. It does not surely require
any great effort of diplomacy
is not
the absolute
Governments of Europe that it not for their in-
terest to make paper in their countries artificially
cheap. What we are now asking we ask, not for
ourselves, but for the public. We have been re-
lieved from a heavy burden, and we desire a few
Riornents to stretch our limbs and try how much
power of action we have gained by the removal.
The public, however, may rest assured that, so far
as we are concerned, they shall have the full bene-
fit of every feather's weight of the burden we shall
in next July escape ; and we intend that they them-
selves shall be forced to confess that if the balance
incline it-will be in their favour. It is enough, and
more than enough, for ourselves to be able to rejoice
in the prospect of increased public usefulness.—
'limes.