The Sun.
London, England, 1842-04-01 00:00:00

national expenditure and the national burdens.
rSuch an opposition between them and the public
welfare must weaken the Government, let it be
placed in whose hands it may. The people find
its burdens too grievous to be borne, and more
than it is worth ; and to add to the load may
make the nation throw it entirely off.
To us it seems that the lessons of experience
are lost on our leaders. With the most solemn
aspect, but with the greatest levity of mind, Sir
R. PEEL proposes additional taxes, as if he were
merely setting down to a state dinner. lie can-
not be ignorant that excessive taxation has
been the precursor to national decay and re-
volution. If the French had been prosperous
no demagogues would ever have induced
them to put down the• Monarchy, and
put the BOURBONS to death. The enormous
burdens laid on the bulk of the people by the
Government and the aristocratic classes were
the causes of the French Revolution. It had
its origin in distress, brought on by financial
oppression. Similar causes made the people
of the states which surrounded France indif-
erent to their Governments, arid the oppressive
taxation levied on them was a more potent
cause than the valour of the French armies of
the subjugation of the monarchies of Europe.
Take, for example, the case of Holland as an
illustration of the whole. At the close of the
lith and beginning of the 18th centuries, Hol-
land, whose people were then prosperous and
united, was able to resist the whole powers of
France. Before the breaking out of the French
Revolution they had become comparatively
poor and discontented, and soon after that event
occurred they opened their fortresses and towns
to the French. 'Now there is no doubt that
their discontent was mainly the consequence of
exorbitant taxation, which should be an especial
lesson to us, as it was inflicted by a quasi popular
Government. In Dr. SMITH'S time, " heavy
taxes upon the necessaries of life bad gone so far
in Holland, that they had ruined, it is said, their
principal manufactures, and are likely to discou-
rage gradually even their fisheries and their trade
in ship-building." That heavy taxation continued
to cut up the trade of the Dutch, destroyed their
property and patriotism, and made them an easy
prey to the French Republicans.
In spite of these terrible lessons our states-
men are treading in the same paths as the states-
men of France, Holland, and Germany, before
the French Revolution. Much of our prosperity
as compared to them, arose from circumstances
the reverse of those of Holland. According to
Dr. SMITH, " the taxes upon the necessaries of life
were then inconsiderable in Great Britain, and
no manufacture has hitherto been ruined by
them." Since then, however, our Government
has surpassed all other Governments in heaping
taxes, partly for the service of the State and partly
for behoof of monopolists, on the necessaries of
life. They were emphatically, indeed, warned
by the great authority we have quoted, but
warned in vain, that
Taxes upon the necessaries of life have nearly the
same effect upon the circumstances of the people as a
poor soil and a bad climate. Provisions are thereby
rendered dearer, in the same manner as if it required ex-
traordinary labour and expense to raise them.
Such taxes, when they have grown up to a certain
height, are a curse eqval to the barrenness of the earth
and the inclemency of the heavens ; and yet it is in the
richest and most industrious countries that they have been
most generally imposed.
Our statesmen have seen this verified; they
have seen an industrious people ground down
to poverty and despair by excessive taxation ;
they have seen them filled with discontent, and
beard them demand great constitutional changes ;
yet they perversely persist in adding to their
burdens, and increasing their distress and dis-
content. They are driving the people to the
wall, and leaving them no alternative but t ) be
destroyed themselves, or destroy the Govern-
ment. If, from the unteachable arrogance and
pride of the routine men, whom the ignorance
and selfishness of the electors have placed at the
head of our affairs, England is doomed to decay,
similar to that which excessive taxation and
aristocratic oppression brought on Venice and
Holland, writers, like ourselves, will only have
to mourn over a calamity they have no power to
avert. We may think perhaps that the fate of
an individual is in his own hands ; the fate of
nations, however, their grandeur find decay, arc
to the order of nature, and must be the work of
PROVIDENCE. Nevertheless, it is given to man
to avoid the rocks on which others have split
and it is now, therefore, the duty of the people
to resent that increase of taxation which has
been in other cases so fatal to national greatness.
Primarily, they ought to oppose the proposed
income tax as the most odious of all taxes, but,
secondly, they ought to resist all increase of
taxation, and let the Government understand
that its preservation is not worth purchasing by
the poverty, misery, degradation, and ruin of
the people.

We have never advocated vhat is falsely
called protection for any one class of producers,
but we have always been aware that consider-
able injustice has been committed by reducing
the protecting duties on certain foreign com-
modities, and will be again committed should
such duties be again reduced before the Corn,
la

ws be abolished. Free trade must begin by
abolishing the master monopoly. Though the
silk and glove manufacturers have struggled
through the difficulties of competition, since Mr.
HUSKISSON and the late Lord SYDENH AM ex-
posed them to its rough breezes, and have been,
as we believe, much improved, yet owing to the
continuance of the Corn-law, success has been
purchased by very considerable sacrifices, both
on the part of the masters and the workmen. It

is a manifest injustice to keep out foreign corn
by a high duty on the pretext that the land is
peculiarly taxed, and, after having by this
means laid a very heavy and peculiar burden
on handicrafts, to expose them to the com-
petition of other people, whO are not subject
to their burdens. It was well said by
Mr. MACFARLANE, at the meeting of the
Edinburgh Merchants' Company, that " while

corn and food remained at their presen

prices, and the whole general taxation re•
mained the same as now, our handicraft la.

bourers could not compete with their brethren
on the Continent."

The glove trade at Yeovil, of which some ac-
count will be found in another part of The Sun,
is a case in point, and the manufacturers there-
feel the injustice with which Sir ROBERT PEEL'S
tariff threatens them so strongly, and dread so
much the injury he will inflict on them, that
they have resolved to suspend working for one
month. About 20,000 persons will suffer the
want of bread from that resolution, which is one
of the first consequences of Sir ROBERT
PEEL allowing the competition of foreign
glovers under a small fixed duty, while he
will not allow the competition of foreign
corn-growers except with an onerous sliding
scale. The people of Yeovil complain of the
cheaper provisions obtained by those with
whom they will now have to compete; and, as
long as the Corn-law is continued, we must con-
tend that their complaints are well founded. One
of the curses attendant on those laws is, that
they forbid extending free trade in manufac-

tures. It is on this ground alone that we have
any sympathy with the protected manufacturers;
and were the corn-trade free, we should be
amongst the foremost to contend that the Yeovil
glovers have no more right to tax people in the
price of their gloves, than the landlords have to
tax them in the price of their food.

Sir R. PEEL and the Tory journals, who
are very noisy, if not very consistent advocates
of the principle of protection, their reclamations
ought to have great weight. Ile has armed them
against himself. He has stolen into power on the
principle of protecting " native industry," and
native industry will compel him to act on the
principle, or give up his power. In particular, he
has encouraged the farmers to believe that they
must, and that they will be protected; and we are
not sorry to see the agriculturists in different
parts of the kingdom repudiatingh is tariffbecause
it violates the principle of protection. We told
Sir ROBERT PEEL from the first, that by propo-
sing to deal out protection to all classes he had