1831.] [ 263 ] 



COAL DUTY AND COAL TRICKERY.* 



UNLUCKY as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer has been with 

 his Budget, the Coal Duty meets with no opposition, and will, it may 

 be presumed, let who will be ministers, be finally repealed. If ever 

 tax deserved to be branded with the epithet of atrocious, that upon 

 Coal does it falls in a cold and wintry country, where other fuel is 

 not to be got, upon a necessary of life, a necessary as essential for the 

 poor as the rich with a most preposterous selection, it falls exclusively 

 upon regions the most remote from the source of supply. The coal 

 exists only in the north and west; the rest of the country, east, south, 

 and south-west, can procure it only by importation, and, from tlie dis- 

 tance, only by sea : and this sea-importation it is, which the equity of 

 the government has long burdened with a tax of. six shillings a chaldron. 

 In the districts where coal is to be had for the digging, no tax is levied 

 so that those precisely who can best afford to pay, are studiously exempted. 

 Those who can most readily get at the coal, are gratuitously left un- 

 touched, while those who, from their geographical position, are com- 

 pelled to pay dearly for the cost of conveyance to make the matter 

 worse are perversely saddled with a heavy and vexatious incumbrance. 

 The advantage was already with the coal countries, and of course, if a 

 tax was, in spite of all consistency and humanity, to be raised upon 

 this article of necessity, they were the parties to levy it upon. The 

 more distant parts of the country must of necessity pay smartly to pro- 

 cure it, and should at least be suffered to procure it at the cheapest rate, 

 and not be compelled to pay also for the right of purchasing. The 

 first duty of a government professedly instituted for the benefit of the 

 whole community, is to balance, to the full extent of the practicable, 

 the inequalities arising from natural as well as artificial circumstances. 



But not only is this tax upon coal conveyed by sea, thus oppressive 

 by a kind of political favoritism, it is not levied universally a whole 

 region is privileged the whole coast of Scotland is exempted from 

 this sea-duty and why ? Because Scotland, for more than half a cen- 

 tury, has always had a friend at court ! She escapes, not because she 

 is poor, but because she has influence, and cannily makes the most of it. 

 The Monmouthshire Canal Company, too, contrived to wheedle the same 

 favour from the government of 1797 ; they obtained by what means 

 it will not, perhaps, be easy now to discover the privilege of export- 

 ing, duty-free, as far west as the Holmes' Islands at the mouth of the 

 Channel, within which limits come Bristol and Bridgewater, and other 

 populous places. The consequence is, that Newport, the seat of the 

 Company's trade, exports 550,000 tons annually, while Cardiff, at a 

 very short distance from Newport, and quite as well supplied with 

 coals, can export at the most, only 60,000. 



The tax will now, however, without doubt, be disposed of; but the 

 effects it has mainly contributed to produce, will not speedily vanish 

 with it. The coal districts have become almost exclusively the seats 

 of our manufacturers. They must go, now that steam-machinery enters 

 into all of them, where coals are cheap ; but had the trade been free, 

 uncrippled by this iniquitous tax, the growing facilities of conveyance 

 would long ago have all but equalized advantages, and made it almost 

 as desirable to prosecute manufactures in one spot as in another. The 

 perpetuation of the tax, has by degrees drawn all to the same neighbour- 

 hood; the consequences are comparative desolation and desertion in three- 



* Observations on the Duty of Sea-borne Coal, &c. Longman and Co. 1JJ30. 



