As An Illustration Of How A State Monopoly May Become A State Duty,
Let Us Suppose That No Gold Existed In Australia, But That It Had
Been Found In Immense Quantities By One Of Our Ships In Some Small
And Barren Island.
In this case it would plainly become the duty of
the state to keep and work the mines for
The public benefit, since
by doing so, the gain would be fairly divided among the whole population
by decrease of taxation; whereas by leaving it open to free trade
while merely keeping the government of the island; we should certainly
produce enormous evils during the first struggle for the precious
metal, and should ultimately subside into the monopoly of some wealthy
individual or great company, whose enormous revenue would not
equally benefit the community. The nutmegs of Banda and the tin
of Banca are to some extent parallel cases to this supposititious
one, and I believe the Dutch Government will act most unwisely if
they give up their monopoly.
Even the destruction of the nutmeg and clove trees in many
islands, in order to restrict their cultivation to one or two
where the monopoly could be easily guarded, usually made the
theme of so much virtuous indignation against the Dutch, may be
defended on similar principles, and is certainly not nearly so
bad as many monopolies we ourselves have until very recently
maintained. Nutmegs and cloves arc not necessaries of life; they
are not even used as spices by the natives of the Moluccas, and
no one was materially or permanently injured by the destruction
of the trees, since there are a hundred other products that can
be grown in the same islands, equally valuable and far more
beneficial in a social point of view. It is a case exactly
parallel to our prohibition of the growth of tobacco in England,
for fiscal purposes, and is, morally and economically, neither
better nor worse. The salt monopoly which we so long maintained
in India was in much worse. As long as we keep up a system of
excise and customs on articles of daily use, which requires an
elaborate array of officers and coastguards to carry into effect,
and which creates a number of purely legal crimes, it is the
height of absurdity for us to affect indignation at the conduct
of the Dutch, who carried out a much more justifiable, less
hurtful, and more profitable system in their Eastern possessions.
I challenge objectors to point out any physical or moral evils
that have actually resulted from the action of the Dutch
Government in this matter; whereas such evils are the admitted
results of every one of our monopolies and restrictions. The
conditions of the two experiments are totally different. The true
"political economy" of a higher race, when governing a lower race,
has never yet been worked out. The application of our "political
economy" to such cases invariably results in the extinction or
degradation of the lower race; whence, we may consider it probable
that one of the necessary conditions of its truth is the
approximate mental and social unity of the society in which it is
applied.
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