The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-01-16

the Necessity-The English System.
When the Senate Investigating Committee
shall have completed its labors it will prob
ably, as we have indicated, talk very gravey
about general order stores and dishonest in
spectors; it may even hurl pointless anath-
ema against persons high in power, cut
OIL few official heads, and then leave the
case much as they found it. The cause and
effect of official dishonesty will be left to
themselves, and then civil service reform will
come in to do its tinkering. We admit that
any system which will make the present hap
hazard plan Of appointments aud removals a
thing OF the past will be move in the right
direction. A Custom House officer in these
days approximates closely to Mexican
guerilla chieftain, and the whole Custom
House management is as irregular as guerilla
warfare. In power for short period only,
the officer feels that tomorrow or the next
day may bring decapitating pronunciamento
from somewhere, and his only chance is to
''levy on the merchants" while he rules. The
chaotic mass of regulations patched, rent and
repatched during seventy odd years, until they
would puzzle German philosopher, tend only
to make the successful practice of dishonesty
the more simple, and mako a journey down
the broad road to moral obliquity enticing
enough to tempt a saint. No wonder, then,
that the deep mines of corruption, theft and
trickery into which the committee has been
descending, as Dante descended in inferno,
exist The very ''circles" of hell are repro
duced, too, only that here they are called
''rings"-from the Inspectors ring to the
weighmasters. from the weighers' to the
deputy collectors, from the general order
ring to the collectors, and who knows how
many others. We sincerely hope, although
we gravely doubt, that every scoundrel found
traitor in his trust will be punished not
merely by removal but by the law where it
can reach him.
But what is wanted Is radical change In
the laws governing the Importation of foreign
goods and simplifying change in the duties
imposed on them. Protectionists will imme-
diately raise howl when their darling tariff
is threatened: but it will be found that
the association between import duties and
their successful collection is intimate. In the
first place we have too many articles taxed
whose profit to the government does not pay
one fourth the cost of collection. An army of
officials is maintained, one-half of which
could be disbanded If the range of taxable
articles was forty instead of four hundred. The
mercantile community would be relieved of ans
annoyance and no branch of industry here at all
injured. Let raw material of all kinds in free,
and retain only the duties necessary to a
moderate revenue, with these on manufac-
tured. articles alone. Thus, with a clean
sweep and with no impairment to American
wealth or industry, a profitless system, fruit
full only in decentralization among merchants
and corruptness in officials, would be brushed
out of the way.
The great means through which dishonesty
creeps into the Custom House is, as we have
said, the homogeneous mass of laws and rules
which have descended from administration to
administration, each one tinkering, but none
attempting to remodel or reconstruct them on
plan in consonance with the extension of our
interests or the increase of the population,
which means of consumers. AS our commerce
expanded we were given new complications
instead of greater simplicity, the authorities
in their carelessness taking the inverse course
to the rational one. If the Senate CON-
mttee, then, wish to mark their work by prac-
teal results, let them recommend to Congress
that all the old cumbrousness of regulations
give place to clear, simple system, as plain
to the public as the present heterogeneous alb
surdities are incomprehensibe.
We shall take an instance. In the United
States imported goods are accompanied by an
invoice bearing the certificate of the Ameri-
can Consul at the place whence they are
shipped. On their arrival the Custom House
officials overhaul them, weigh, gauge or
otherwise value them. If they are found to
be undsrvalued they are confiscated, and then
follow tedious, expensive lawsuits, ending
frequently, as we have seen, in disgraceful
illegal compromises, where the law Is
broken and somebody makes thiefs profit.
If, as in rare cases, the goods are condemned,
o corrupting ''moiety" goes to the officials.
In either ease the result is dishonesty.
But the worst effect of the system, and that by
which the revenue suffers most, arises from its
cumbrous Effectiveness, which takes manifold
precautions at the back door only to leave
the front door unguarded. The con6scation
plan, with its great risks, causes the dishon-
esty inclined merchant to reach out bis means
Of corruption to the other side of the Allan
tic. Numbers Of large manufacturing houses
abroad will not sell goods to American mer-
chants except through their special agents
here, and whya In order that they can evade
the revenue law at both ends Of it's precau-