The Sun.
London, England, 1861-03-06 00:00:00

THE HOP DUTY.

The hop duty is almost our only remaining bit
of financial romance. Our taxation is so carefully
weeded of injustice, it is made so uniform, so con-
stant, and so equally adjusted to the bearing power,
that there is no more poetry about it than about a
railroad or a Thames steamer. But the hop duty
is as fickle and as volatile as the flower itself upon
which it is collected. It so jumps up and down, it
so aggravates dearth and overwhelms plenty, and
it falls so capriciously on the various qualities of
the crop, that in one form or other it is always a
visitation enough to make a story. When there is
nothing else to complain of, you may at any time
go into Kent and get up a hop grievance. Indeed,
if any young legislator wants to get his hand in,
we advise him to take a house in Kent, invest a
few thousands in hop grounds, hop poles, hop kilns,
and manures, and by next session he will have
that first requisite of eloquence, something to talk
about. If he has not the " flea" he will have the
" fly ;" if not the " fly," he will have the "louse ;"
if not the " louse," he will have the Chancellor of
the Exchequer. If his crop is not too little it will
be too large. Something or other there will be
amiss with it. This year, in addition to all other
calamities, the hopgrower has Mr. John Bright
and the paper duty to contend with. The mem-
ber for Birmingham is of opinion that the house is
more pledged in favour of paper than in favour
of hops, and that a cheap press is more neces-
sary than a cheap and wholesome bitter in a
glass of beer. So he calls on the men of Kent to
show themselves better friends of literature
than they were in former days. He proposes
to strike a compact with them. " Help me to libe-
rate paper, and I will help you to free the hop."
The partnership is not so new. There is an affinity
between flavour and style between bracing tonic
and healthy sentiment. Whether Mr. Bright's own
bitter corresponds to the hop, or to some of its
poisonous substitutes, it is not for us to say ; but if
the grape inspires the lyric and the epic, malt and
hop are the stimulus of good English common sense
and English courage and endurance.
We wish we could believe the case was quite as
clear as some of these gentlemen make it out. But
nobody need plant a hop unless he pleases, and the
immense cost of the cultivation is itself a reason
against it, if it were a matter of reason, and not a
mere madness. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer
3 observes, all the evils and misfortunes of the hop
5 growers, the competition, and the dreadful vicissi-
-3
5 tudes to which they are exposed, are wholly inde-
-3 pendent of taxation. If one could suppose the busi-
-9
3 ness to be more regular and more certainly remu-
a nerative there would only be a still greater influx
4 of speculators. In spite of the numerous die-
_
couragements alleged, amounting, it is said, to the
ruin of the whole trade, there is a yearly addition of
3 land to the hop districts; and speculators still rush
4
3 in to run the many risks of blanks for the sake of
5 an occasional prize. Hop growing may be a very
poor trade in the long run ; so also is gold digging;
but if gold digging were more regular and more
remunerative there would soon be more gold-diggers
to divide the spoil. So, too, there would soon be
more hop growers. Thus the bane of the cultivation
is not in the tax, nor in the competition, nor in
anything within the compass of a Government ; it
is in the cupidity of mankind, and their
craving for royal roads to opulence. They grow
the hop as they take up the dice box, or go on the
Stock Exchange, or try any other form of gambling.
It used to be demonstrated that, on the whole,
more money was lost than won in the whale fishery,
but the full ships were better remembered than the
empty, and there never was a want of whalers till
coal gas and some other rivals reduced the value of
the prizes themselves. So we doubt whether the
trade would be more profitable if the duty were
removed. The yearly total of £200,000 does indeed
seem a very large sum to be gained from a few
comparatively small districts, and frem the culti-
vation of_ one creeper ; but the remission, after
resting for a while in the pockets of the brewers,
would soon be divided among the multitudinous
public, and the growers themselves would simply
receive less money. They will probably tell us
that much more beer will be drunk, or that our
beer will be more bitter in future.
All the complaints of inequality, uncertainty, and
other forms of oppressiveness are matters of detail,
the like of which will be found more or less in all
kinds of taxation. It will not be disputed, how-
ever, that the hop duty falls, like the malt tax,
eventually on the consumer, and that every time
the beer drinker is conscious of the invigorating
bitter in his glass he pays a small bat calculable
quota to the revenue. Is he a man to be taxed,
and is it a thing to be taxed? On these points there
can be no doubt. Beer is no more a necessary of life
than wine or tea, or any other ordinary stimulant.
Many people may and do dispense with them
altogether, or use them very charily. But so long
as the malt pays duty, the same reason applies
to the other ingredient, unless it be neutralised by
special considerations. With the prospect of a
shilling income tax not only now, but in perpe-
tuity, on incomes above, but not under £lOO, it is
proper to demur to the removal of the hop duty,
which is very likely to stand or fall with the duty
on malt. The comparison between the hop duty
and the income tax is one of more practical import
than Mr. Bright's between the hop and paper
duty. The two latter do not really come into any
kind of antagonism ; but it is quite evident that if
we go on reducing the taxes on consumption we
are fixing the yoke of the income tax on our
shoulders and on those of our children's children.
There has lately been a good deal said about little
taxes, and the great British mind has accepted the
axiom in favour of one or two big taxes instead of
a good many little ones. But the superiority of one
large tax is as imaginary as if a man should insist
on one or two large trees in his garden, one large
meal a day, one or two huge pieces of furniture in
his rooms, one or two very attached friends, or one
or two regular outings, instead of a good many
mouthfuls of fresh air. If half a dozen small
taxes will yield as much as one big one, without
much additional cost of collection, they are vir-
tually as good. Of course, it is pleasant to see a
tax go—it looks so like getting onwards to our pro-
missed millenium—but taxation only changes form
at present, and it has not changed its form much
for the better so far. Whether the house will re-
new its efforts to abolish the paper duty or not this
session, we trust it will not remove any duty yields
ing a respectable amount on the speculation that
England will bear a shilling income tax.—Times.