The Sun.
London, England, 1844-05-22 00:00:00

CUSTOM HOUSE FRAUDS,

It is a growing fashion, we believe, of late years
among our medical practitioners, to discourage the
practice of bleeding. This once popular treatment is
now, so to speak, abandoned, except in extreme cases
of topical inflammation, whether produced by external
violence, or inward disorganization, or an habitual
tendency of the blood to congestion. But the two
Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, with the Hall
of Apothecaries, to hoot, may settle what canons of
doctrine they please, in full " senatus " assembled,
with all the revived solemnities of Mr. PETER
BORTIIWICK'S threatened convocation of another
learned profession ; there is, we tell them, one patient
in the world, the most important on their books, toe,.
who WILL be blooded ! This is no other than the

portly Joust BULL himself. lie will always insist on
his customary indulgence of a little phlebotomy, as
his more southern friends of Italy or Spain demand,
after noontide, the luxury of their habitual siesta.
Only, in Mr. BULL'S case, the practitioner must take
care that he " breathe a vein," not in the patient's
arm, but in the breeches pocket. It has long been
imagined, and that burly patient is brought at last to
be of the opinion himself, that he is in incessant
danger from plethoric repletion in that region. In
1825-6, one of his political doctors (then ROBINSON,
now Rirost), announced to the world that this
interesting personage was so excessively full of
political health (i. e. money), that the only
reasonable cause for apprehension about him
arose from this redundancy.; that it was the pecu-
liarity of his (civil) constitution to " form " fresh
capital, as fast as he got rid of that which was in him.
All Europe was astounded at this phenomenon of an
unimpoverishable capitalist ; and France sent over
some of her distinguished savans (the Baron CHARLES
Duran among the number) to contemplate and report
upon whatever might be most notable in the physio-
logy and aspect of a gentleman subject to so capri-
cious and diffusive a malady. To be sure there was
no end of "visiting' physicians then ! From all
parts of the Old World and of the New, he was pre-
scribed for—bled," depleted, ransacked; rummaged,
blistered—almost done for. It was very near prov-
ing one of those cases in which people are " killed
with kindness." They would not leave him ;—they
would not let him look, even, into his own case, or
worry himself with over-scrupulous inquiries into
theirs. By the application of a foreign electuary,
called indifferently " Loans " and "Mining Ven-
tures," they soon expelled from him two-thirds, as
it was thought, of his whole bulk in superabundant
capital. Then, home-reared leeches, in the shape of
Joint-Stock and Bubble Company shares, were
plentifully applied ; and at last the patient, fearful of
sinking under so many and such violent remedies,
from Mexico, and Guatemala, and Madrid—Lisbon
and Berlin St. Potersburgh and Rio Janeiro
Bogota da Fe and Amsterdam —to say no-
thing of the nausea occasioned by endless
nostrums of asphaltum, caoutchouc, corrosive sub-
limate, and all the modern ingredients of
our street pavements, and roadways, and anti-rot me-
dicated woodwork ; the patient, we say, became fear-
fully exasperated. Some of his advisers he kicked
down stairs; others he crushed to death, by once
touching them; and, it is difficult to say where the
mischief of this re-action, on his part, would have
ended, had it not occurred to Dr. PEEL and his friends
to dose him with their new currency drug, and gold
pill. These immediately paralysed his faculties and
prostrated his strength to a degree which brought on
a " crisis," still remembered as " THE" panic. Yet
the strength of JOHN BULL'S constitution (or pockets)
has triumphed over all these trials and disasters; and,
with ordinary fair play—a little more vigilance in his
superior, and a little more honesty in his subordinate '
servants—it might yet do so. But he is, unhappily,
still persuaded, in the first place, to endure the con-
stant exhibition of Dr. PEEL'S Digitalis, or " Gold-
touch ;" which, given on the pretext of keeping him
free from over excitement, and keeping down the
buoyancy of his action, is slowly, but certainly, like
the narcotic poison of " BELLADONNA," sapping his
vital powers, and predisposing them to decay. In the
second place he is still practised upon by those who
profusely " bleed" him—while he sleeps. These
" practitioners," the most clandestine of their order,
are they who concoct " Custom-house frauds." The
secret of these processes has been, hitherto, but par-
tially discovered; and no system of watching, so
efficient as to ensure the detection of such intruders,
and prevent them from further exhausting their victim
during his slumbers, has yet been devised. The first of
these mischiefs we have already, on former occasions,
minutely described. The second, we are reminded of,
by a paragraph in a newspaper of Sunday last which,
without probably intending to do so, demonstrates
very clearly how little of beneficial result can be
looked for from the means now in course of adoption
for the prevention of future malpractices of the de-
scription alluded to.
It appears that the Commissioners of Customs
suppose themselves to be now wide awake !
They are not going to slumber over frauds,
and collusions, and peculations, by which, if
we may judge from the jump which the Customs
duties have taken, within the year since the cry of
" thieves " has been hotly kept up at the great house
in Thames-street,—the pockets of poor Mr. BULL have
been drained of from 1,000,0001. to 2,000,000/. per
annum, instead of the 480,0001., or other modest
sum, which, a little while since, the Commissioners
congratulated the public on being at any rate the
" be-all and the end-all " of the nefarious robberies
that had then been " blown upon." No. The Commis-
sioners, " with the approval of the Treasury," have
created two new officers with " a new style and
title !" (Prodigious invention, and rare guarantee !)
These are " Inspectors-General of the waterside and
warehousing departments." To the number of landing
surveyors who have been so negligent heretofore, are
to be added three colleagues (on the principle that
Jous, having confessed to " doing nothing ;"
Tom, in answer to his master's inquiry
what he was about, reported himself to be
" helping Joust"). The six classes of landing
waiters to remain as before. Why ? Because of the
culpable dereliction of duty traced to their depart-
ment, in the so-called investigations already insti-
tuted. But now comes the flower of what our Sun-
day Contemporary quaintly calls this "scheme." Sixty
new officers, " subordinate to, and under orders of
the landing waiters, but superior to the lockers and
weighers," are to be chosen by the Commissioners.
There may be something very touching and magni-
ficent in this nicely-balanced gradation of ranks from
the oligarchy of the Board itself—(Magnates as they
are), through the successive gradations of an aristo-
cracy of surveyors, receivers for western ports, and in-
spectors-general to a gentry of landing waiters, a com-
monalty of " superintendents of locks and ware-
houses," and working classes of lockers, weighers,
and porters. But it is more to our purpose to be
told, from what body these " superintendents of locks"
—whose loftier state than the " lockers" them-
selves is thus carefully noted—are to be selected. And
we find they are to be taken " from the most expe-
rienced " of the old hands in this class. This is rather
ambiguous. The only "experience" of which the
public have had any remarkable evidence is con-
nected with those who must have knowingly lest
their important, though subordinate, aid to the
fraudulent entries, weighings, exchanges, and re-
movals of packages, and to the falsification of books,
whereby the revenue has been plundered to an ex-
tentistill utterly unfathomed ; and certain houses, of
more than equivocal reputation and enormous wealth,
have realised those sudden and colossal fortunes,
which enable them almost to brave and challenge ex-
posure on the one hand, with as little hesitation as
they pay down the pecuniary penalty accruing on
such occasional detection on the other. The truth is,
the whole "scheme," which we published recently
in The Sun, is an absurdly inadequate and puerile
contrivance to avert such delinquencies, as the already
ascertained frauds, in future. The great evil must be
either in the defective organization of the whole ma-
chinery of this important fiscal department, or in the
positive incompetency of the Board at its head for
their most responsible duties. The cutting down 183
lockers to 120, and 220 weighers to 180 ; the new
appointment of two inspectors-general, and the
addition of three landing surveyors, and the creation
of sixty superintendents of "locks'--were these last
even all of the family of Mr. Cumin himself—will
do no more to guarantee the Customs' revenue from
future spoliation, in the absence of a more intelligent,
vigorous,,and prompt controlling authority, than the
addition of twenty-four new Directors to the staff of
the Bank of England would operate to put the cur-
rency, under the present system, on a proper footing.
The Premier himself could not have devised a feebler
or a more delusive scbezne of improved, management
than these Coramissionets have produced !