“The duty or custom levied upon goods has been introduced at Nagasaki, merely with an intent to take off part of the vast profits which foreigners get upon their commodities, and to assign them for the use and maintenance of the poorer inhabitants of the town, among whom it is distributed in proportion to the trouble they must be at, on account of the public offices they must serve by turns. They commonly receive in this distribution from three to fifteen taels each. The duty laid upon the goods belonging to the Company is fifteen per cent, producing forty-five thousand taels. The goods belonging to private persons, which are commonly sold at the end of the _Kamban_, pay much more—no less than sixty-five per cent upon goods sold by the piece, and sixty-seven per cent on goods sold by weight. Rating each sort at half the whole amount, and the whole produce is twenty-seven thousand taels. The reason they give for the difference in the rate of duty is, because private goods are brought over in the Company’s ships, at the Company’s expense, and, consequently, deserve less profit. The Chinese, for the like reason,—that is, because they are not at the expense of such long and hazardous voyages as the Dutch, but are nearer at hand,—pay a duty of sixty per cent for all their goods, which brings in a sum of three hundred and sixty thousand taels duty. If to this be added the yearly rent for our houses and factories, which is five thousand five hundred and eighty taels, and that of the Chinese factory, which is sixteen thousand taels, it makes up in all a sum of four hundred and fifty-three thousand five hundred and eighty taels (upwards of half a million of dollars) which the foreign commerce produces annually to the magistrates and inhabitants of Nagasaki. “The profits our goods produce may be computed to amount, one year with another, to sixty per cent, though, if all the charges and expenses of our sale be taken into consideration, we cannot well get above forty or forty-five per cent clear gain. Considering so small a profit, it would scarcely be worth the Company’s while to continue this branch of our trade any longer, were it not that the goods we export from thence, and particularly the refined copper, yield much the same profit, so that the whole profit may be computed to amount to eighty or ninety per cent.