In principle a tax on incomes is quite wrong: it ought to be a tax upon expenditure--not a penalty on amassing wealth, but a penalty on frittering wealth away--and import duties are a tax upon expenditure, as they are finally paid out of prices. Yet smuggling seems to be regarded as a game of skill, a sort of hide-and-seek in passengers’ luggage: the hider need not betray the lair, if the seeker cannot find it. I have seen this smuggling done by people of great probity, not because the payment would have hurt them, but just (I think) because the searching was a challenge to their skill. And once I met some foreigners on the Mont Cenis line smuggling things out of Italy into France, and not only priding themselves upon their skill but also on their merit in the sight of Heaven, as the things were destined for a convent or a church. They seemed to think that Heaven had helped them in dodging the douaniers; and I rather wondered if their confessors would take that view or would enjoin them to send conscience-money to the State. While travelling in Switzerland in 1840, my father found a firm of watch-makers who would deliver gold Geneva watches in London at prices that did not allow for duty. When he wanted to make a handsome present, he would send over for a watch, and friends sometimes asked him to send for watches for them. He never enquired how the watches came, nor did his friends enquire; but one man (a diplomatist) took some pains to find out, and the explanation was, “We usually smuggle them in some diplomatist’s baggage, as that is not examined; and in this instance we smuggled them in your Excellency’s own.” My father got my grandfather an English watch in London in 1850, and my grandfather did not consider it as good as one that he had chosen for himself in 1807. That always was the trouble about getting things for people here. A century ago Newton was a smaller place than Ashburton, and Torquay was smaller still; and though there were good shops at Exeter, they were not like the London shops. If people did not want to go up there themselves, they had to get some friend up there to choose things for them; and this was an invidious task, as they did not always like his choice, and then said unkind things about his judgement or his taste.