PRODUCTION AND COMMERCE. 165 



claim to grow real tobacco in England or Ireland is based 

 upon the allegation that the herb can be grown at a profit. 

 The best evidence furnished to the House of Commons on 

 Monday evening on this point was that of Lord Harris, 

 who affirmed boldly that Ireland and parts of England 

 were prepared to enter into a fair competition with the 

 recognized productive colonies. The Government, and 

 with them. Lord Iddesleigh, are in favour of an experiment 

 largely granting all that is asked, and carefully observing 

 the result. Then, when the British tobacco comes upon 

 the ordinary market, let it be taxed as any other similar 

 product would be. The Government could not view with 

 anything but dismay the j) respect of a fall in revenue ; 

 and there is no question, therefore, that the home-grown 

 tobacco must pay duty to the full. The crux of the 

 question is how such duty can be enforced without an 

 army of revenue officers, whose practical duties would 

 bear no reasonable proportion to their probable cost. Our 

 own impression is that tobacco can never be grown in 

 these islands on any large scale to compete with the 

 growers within the tropics, and that the expense of col- 

 lecting revenue would be out of all proportion to the 

 amount collected. At the same time, it ill becomes us as 

 a Free-trading nation to shut out any class of our own 

 countrymen, by duties distinctly prohibitive, from follow- 

 ing a branch of agriculture which they think they could 

 make profitable. It is against our principle to offer a 

 bounty on the forced cultivation of exotics, such as tobacco 

 undoubtedly is when grown in these islands, but it would 

 be still worse to maintain, on merely pedantic grounds, a 

 prohibitive import on a crop which many men think the 



