I suppose it
may be efficient, and perhaps sufficient, to make slight improvements and
repairs in harbors already in use and not much out of repair. But if I
have any correct general idea of it, it must be wholly inefficient for
any general beneficent purposes of improvement. I know very little, or
rather nothing at all, of the practical matter of levying and collecting
tonnage duties; but I suppose one of its principles must be to lay a duty
for the improvement of any particular harbor upon the tonnage coming into
that harbor; to do otherwise--to collect money in one harbor, to be
expended on improvements in another--would be an extremely aggravated
form of that inequality which the President so much deprecates. If I be
right in this, how could we make any entirely new improvement by means of
tonnage duties? How make a road, a canal, or clear a greatly obstructed
river? The idea that we could involves the same absurdity as the Irish
bull about the new boots. "I shall niver git 'em on," says Patrick, "till
I wear 'em a day or two, and stretch 'em a little." We shall never make a
canal by tonnage duties until it shall already have been made awhile, so
the tonnage can get into it.
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