The only advantage to taxpayers of taxes on commodities is that they are paid in small sums at a time, whereas taxes on possessions are paid in large lump sums. But to the government there is the all-important fact that they are paid insensibly and are not so much murmured against. “When we buy a pound of tea we do not reflect that the most part of the price is a duty paid to the government, and therefore pay it contentedly, as though it were only the natural price of the commodity. In the same manner, when an additional tax is laid upon beer, the price of it must be raised, but the mob do not directly vent their malice against the government, who are the proper objects of it, but upon the brewers, as they confound the tax price with the natural one.” In Holland the consumer first paid the price to the merchant and then (separately) the tax to the excise officer. “We in reality do the very same thing, but as we do not feel it immediately we imagine it all one price, and never reflect that we might drink port wine below sixpence a bottle were it not for the duty.” His general objection to duties on imports is that they divert capital and industry into unnatural channels, while the effects of export duties are still more pernicious in confining consumption and diminishing industry. Uztariz, a well-known Spanish writer of that day, had observed in his book on commerce:— “I have found ministers and others, both in their conversation and writings, maintain the erroneous maxim that high duties are to be laid upon commodities exported, because foreigners pay them; and, on the contrary, very moderate ones on such as are imported, because his majesty’s subjects are at the charge of them.”[19] This policy, says Smith, is one great cause of the poverty of Spain. Yet the Spaniards were wiser than some moderns who have sought to persuade the public that both export and import duties are paid by the foreigner. Apart from their extraordinary power and originality as contributions to a new science, we are struck in these lectures by two qualities, freedom from prejudice, with the accompanying desire for reformation, and a tolerance of things that are tolerable. Even when he is exposing the absurdities of the Mercantile System, and the evils of the scheme of taxation which it had produced in England, he readily concedes that things might have been far worse, and is glad to confess that upon the whole “the English are the best financiers in Europe, and their taxes are levied with more propriety than those of any country whatever.” Elsewhere, indeed, he shows that the fiscal system of Holland was in some important respects superior; and in the _Wealth of Nations_ his language cooled:—“Our state is not perfect, but it is as good or better than that of most of our neighbours.”