33. In 1676 King Charles II granted to his natural son, the Duke of Richmond, a tax of a shilling a chaldron on all the coal which was exported from the Tyne. We regard such a grant as a shocking abuse of the taxing power. It is, however, a very interesting case because the mine owner and the tax owner were two separate persons, and the tax can be examined in all its separate iniquity. If, as I suppose was the case, the Tyne Valley possessed such superior facilities for producing coal that it had a qualified monopoly, the tax fell on the coal mine owner (landlord); that is, the king transferred to his son part of the property which belonged to the Tyne coal owners. In that view the case may come home to some of our protectionists as it would not if the tax had fallen on the consumers. If Congress had pensioned General Grant by giving him seventy-five cents a ton on all the coal mined in the Lehigh Valley, what protests we should have heard from the owners of coal lands in that district! If the king’s son, however, had owned the coal mines, and worked them himself, and if the king had said: “I will authorize you to raise the price of your coal a shilling a chaldron, and, to enable you to do it, I will myself tax all coal but yours a shilling a chaldron,” then the device would have been modern and enlightened and American. We have done just that on emery, copper, and nickel. Then the tax comes out of the consumer. Then it is not, according to the protectionist, harmful, but the key to national prosperity, the thing which corrects the errors of our incompetent self-will, and leads us up to better organization of our industry than we, in our unguided stupidity, could have made. (_E_) EXAMINATION OF THE PROPOSAL TO “CREATE AN INDUSTRY.” 34. The protectionist says, however, that he is going to create an industry. Let us examine this notion also from his standpoint, assuming the truth of his doctrine, and see if we can find anything to deserve confidence. A protective tax, according to the protectionist’s definition (§ 13), “has for its object to effect the diversion of a part of the labor and capital of the people ... into channels favored or created by law.” If we follow out this proposal, we shall see what those channels are, and shall see whether they are such as to make us believe that protective taxes can increase wealth.