The Customs are excessively high, especially for a country that has comparatively few manufactures of its own to protect. To take a few instances at random from the Tariff: Straw hats pay about 20 pesetas per kilogramme; preserves, 3 pesetas per kilogramme; typewriters, 8 pesetas per kilogramme; timber in boards, 6 pesetas per cubic metre; materials of silk and velvet, from 30 pesetas per kilogramme; woollen materials, from 13 pesetas per kilogramme; drugs at various rates from 36 pesetas per kilogramme downwards, and so forth. The consequence is seen in the prices charged in the shops for ordinary commodities. Thus Danish tinned butter costs pesetas 2.75 per lb.; tapioca, 1 peseta per packet of about ¼ lb.; coffee, pesetas 2.50 to 3 per lb.; Keiller’s marmalade, 3 to 4 pesetas the 1 lb. pot; Burroughs & Welcome’s tabloids, pesetas 2.50 the small bottle of 25; and most other things in about the same proportion.[24] The Customs receipts form, with the exception of the tax on real estate, the largest single item in the Budget. For the year 1909 they were estimated at pesetas 153,600,000 (£6,144,000). The _Contribucion industrial_ is a tax upon every imaginable trade, profession, and industry that can be exercised: on merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, professional men of all sorts, on means of transit, on public entertainments, on schools, newspapers--in short, it is almost impossible to find any kind of business or occupation that is not taxed. The amount of the tax varies with the population, a scale of ten different rates being drawn up according to the size of the town. Bankers pay from about £300 a year downwards, according to the place of residence; merchants from £200; shopkeepers from £70; hotels from £60; contractors 6 per mil. on their contracts; railways £10 per kilometre constructed, and a tax on their receipts; brokers from £80; newspapers from £35; publishers from £25; private schools from £10; and so on. It is tedious and unnecessary to accumulate instances.[25] That such a burdensome tax as this necessarily hampers trade and goes to prevent commercial and industrial development needs no demonstration: the thing is self-evident. The compiler of the manual of this law says in his Introduction, with perfect truth, that it has the radical defect of making heavier demands as the trader’s profits fall, and that the framers of the law, so far from attempting to harmonise the interests of the Treasury with those of the taxpayer, thought only how to squeeze him, so that the tax nips in the bud whatever might aid in the increase of prosperity or open new fields for the productiveness of the nation. This tax immediately affects the professional and commercial classes: the poor, such as street hawkers, journeymen labourers, fishermen, &c., are exempt; but indirectly they too suffer, as naturally it helps to increase the price of necessaries.