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3rd. The exaction on imported corn of such a duty as shall be most productive to the revenue, without leaving its cost below the remunerative price of British corn, to the injury of the agriculturist; or raising it above that level, to the injury of the consumer.
To accomplish these purposes, a fixed duty is proposed; it has the merit of simplicity; it is free from the incongruity of reversing the established principle in fiscal enactments, which makes the amount of duty bear a proportion to the value of the article; and the objections raised to it resolve themselves into these two: the imperfect protection it would afford, and the impossibility of maintaining it.
These are weighty objections if well founded; and they are alleged, by the chief members of the present Government, as the grounds of their opposition to a fixed duty; but if it can be shewn that all the protection requisite to preserve our own agriculture in its -present efficiency,—all the protection which our agriculturists can demand, consistently with the award of justice to other classes of the community, can be assured by a fixed duty,— and if it can be further shewn that, except under circumstances so unusual as to be fairly excluded from consideration, (and of which no instance presents itself in the last four-and-twenty years,) a fixed duty could be maintained without injury to the consumer; it may surely then be asked, whether a fixed duty ought not to be adopted.
