=430. Burden of tariff on trade and manufactures.=—After this survey of the development of English trade in the first half of the century we must attend to a most important change in English commercial policy, which lies mainly in this period. We shall consider three groups of topics: the reform of the general tariff; the repeal of the corn laws, protecting agricultural products, especially wheat; and the repeal of the navigation laws, protecting shipping. England entered the nineteenth century with a cumbrous mass of tariff regulations inherited from the past, from which only the worst excesses had been pruned by statesmen like Walpole and Pitt. Customs laws had accumulated for 500 years to the amount of 1,500 statutes, “often confused, often contradictory, sometimes unintelligible.” Hardly any ware which was obtainable abroad, whether it was a raw material or a manufactured product, escaped the duties levied under one or another of these laws. The duties were heavy and were enforced with unreasoning severity; a man who imported a mummy from Egypt was told that it was a non-enumerated manufacture, dutiable at nearly $1,000. Internal taxes reached articles which escaped the customs tariff. The taxes on the publication of books were so heavy that they amounted on an ordinary edition to one seventh of the whole cost, and exceeded the remuneration of the author. The cotton manufacturer had to pay not only an import duty on his raw cotton (higher when it was brought in a foreign ship); he had to pay an excise or internal tax on calico which he printed; and he had to pay taxes, in one form or another, on all the important materials he used in manufacture,—flour, starch, leather, soap, dyestuffs, paper, timber, brick, tiles. A man could not build a factory, or run it, or feed and clothe his workmen, without paying taxes at every step.