Customs dues and embargoes on imports and exports are things of immemorial antiquity, the inevitable accompaniments of civilisation and luxury; and the smugglers, who paid no dues and disregarded all prohibitions, are therefore of necessity equally ancient. Carthage, the chief commercial community of the ancient world, was probably as greatly troubled by the questions of customs tariffs and smuggling as was the England of George the Third. Without civilisation, and the consequent demand for the products of other lands, the smuggler’s trade cannot exist. In that highly organised condition of so-styled civilisation which produces wars and race-hatreds and hostile tariffs and swollen taxation, the smuggler becomes an important person, a hateful figure to governments, but not infrequently a beneficent being to the ill-provided—in all nations the most numerous class—to whom he brought, at a reasonable price, and with much daring and personal risk, those comforts which, when they had paid toll to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were all but unattainable.

The chief defence, on the score of morals, set up by those few smugglers who ever were at pains to prove that smuggling could be no crime, was that customs duties were originally imposed in the time of Charles the Second to provide funds for the protection of our coasts from the Algerine and Barbary pirates who then occasionally adventured thus far from their piratical lurks in the Mediterranean and ravaged the more remote villages of our seaboard. When these dangers ceased, contended these smugglers on their defence, the customs dues should automatically have been taken off; but they were, on the contrary, greatly increased.

This view, or excuse, or defence—call it how we will—was, however, entirely without historical foundation. It is true, indeed, that some ports had been taxed, and that customs dues had been imposed for this purpose, but customs charges were immemorially older than the seventeenth century. There were probably such imposts in that lengthy era when Britain was a Roman colony, and we certainly hear of customs charges being levied in the reign of Ethelred, when a toll of one halfpenny was charged upon every small boat arriving at Billingsgate, and one penny upon larger boats, with sails.

These pages will show that not only import, but also export smuggling was long continued in England, and not only so, but that the export smuggling, notably that of wool, was for centuries the most important, if not the only, kind. The prohibition of sending wool out of the kingdom was, of course, introduced with the object of fostering the cloth manufacture; but there are always two sides to any question, and in this case the embargo upon wool soon taught the cloth-workers that, in the matter of prices, they had the wool-growers at their mercy. By law they could not sell to foreign customers, or (later) only upon paying heavy dues; and the cloth-workers could therefore practically dictate their own terms. In this pitiful resort—an example of the disastrous effect of government interference with trade—there was nothing left but to set the law at defiance, which the wool-growers and their allies, the “owlers,” accordingly did, risking life and limb in the wholesale exportation of wool. It is the duty of every citizen to oppose bad laws, but this opposition to ill-conceived enactments creates a furtive class of men, very Ishmaelites, who, with their liberty, and even their lives, forfeit, are rendered capable, in extremity, of any and every enormity. Hence arose those reckless bands of smugglers who in the middle of the eighteenth century became highly organised and all-powerful in Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, and, realising their power, developed into criminals of the most ferocious type. They were, properly regarded, the products of bad government, the creatures brought into existence by a vicious system that took its origin in the coming of William the Third, the “Deliverer,” as history, tongue in cheek, styles him.

The growth of customs dues in the last years of the seventeenth century, and so onward, in a vicious progression until the opening years of the nineteenth, was not in any way owing to consideration for home traders, or to a desire for the protection of British industries. They grew exactly in proportion as the needs of the Government for revenue increased; and were the direct results of that long-continued policy of foreign alliances and aggressive interference in continental politics—that “spirited foreign policy” advocated even in our own times—which was introduced with the coming of William the Third. We did well to depose James the Second, but we might have done better than bring over his son-in-law and make him king; and we might, still more, have done better than raise the Elector of Hanover to the status of British sovereign, as George the First. Then we should probably have avoided foreign entanglements, at any rate, until that later era when increased intercourse between the nations rendered international politics inevitable.

Foreign wars, and the heavy duties levied to pay for them, brought about the enormous growth of smuggling, and directly caused all the miseries and the blood-stained incidents that make the story of the smugglers so “romantic.” Glory is very fine, and stirs the pulses in reading the pages of history, but it is a commodity for which victorious nations, no less than the defeated, are called upon to pay in blood, tears, and privation.

With the great peace that, in 1815, succeeded the long and harassing period of continual war, the people naturally looked forward towards a time when the excessively heavy duties would be reduced, and many articles altogether relieved from taxation. As a matter of fact, some of these duties scarce paid the cost of their collection, and simply helped to keep in office a large and increasing horde of officials. But the price of glory continues to be paid, long after the laurels have faded; and not for many years to come were those imposts reduced.

Sydney Smith, writing in 1820 on the subject of American desire for a large navy, even then very manifest, warned the people of the United States of the nemesis awaiting such indulgence. “We can inform Jonathan,” he said, “what are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of glory: Taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste; taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion; taxes on everything on earth, and the waters under the earth; on everything that comes from abroad, or is grown at home; taxes on the raw material, taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man; taxes on the sauce which pampers man’s appetite and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates the judge and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man’s salt and the rich man’s spice; on the brass nails of the coffin and the ribands of the bride; at bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent., into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent., flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent., makes his will on an eight-pound stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a licence of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is then immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and he is then gathered to his fathers—to be taxed no more.”

The real cost of military glory was aptly shown by a caricaturist of this period, who illustrated the general rise of prices consequent upon war in the following incident of an old country-woman buying a halfpenny candle at a chandler’s shop:

“Price has gone up,” said the shopkeeper curtly, when she tendered the money.

“What’s that for, then?” asked the old woman.

“On account of the war, ma’am.”

“Od rot ’em! do they fight by candlelight?” she not unnaturally asked.Housekeepers of the present day may well enter—although somewhat ruefully—into the humour of this simple story, for in the great and continued rise of every commodity since the great Boer War, it is most poignantly illustrated for us. In short, the people who pay for the glory see nothing of it, and derive nothing from it.

How entirely true were those witty phrases of Sydney Smith we may easily guess from the mere rough statement that there were, in 1787, no fewer than 1,425 articles liable to duty (very many of them taxed at several times their market value), bringing in £6,000,000 a year.

In 1797 the customs laws filled six large folio volumes. The total number of Customs Acts prior to the accession of George the Third was 800, but no fewer than 1,300 were added between the years 1760 and 1813, and newer Acts, partly repealing and partly adding to older enactments, were continually being added to this vast mass of chaotic legislation down to the middle of the Victorian era, until even experts were frequently baffled as to the definite legal position of many given articles. Finally—it is typical of our English amateur way of doing things—in 1876, when so-called “Free Trade” had come in, and few articles remained customable, the customs laws were consolidated.

Many years before, at one swoop, Sir Robert Peel had removed the duties from four hundred different dutiable articles, leaving, however, many hundreds of others more or less heavily assessed.In consequence of this relief from taxation, smuggling rapidly decreased, and the Commissioners of Customs were enabled to report: “With the reduction of duties, and the removal of all needless and vexatious restrictions, smuggling has greatly diminished, and the public sentiment with regard to it has undergone a very considerable change. The smuggler is no longer an object of general sympathy, as a hero of romance; and people are beginning to awaken to a perception of the fact that his offence is not only a fraud on the revenue, but a robbery of the fair trader. Smuggling is now almost entirely confined to tobacco, spirits, and watches.”

No fewer than four hundred and fifty other dutiable articles were struck off the list in 1845, and the Cobdenite era of Free Trade, to which, it was expected, all other nations would speedily be converted, had opened.

“Free Trade,” we are told, “killed smuggling.” It naturally killed smuggling so far as duty-free articles were concerned; but this all-embracing term of “Free Trade” is altogether a mockery and a delusion. There has never been—there is not now—complete Free Trade in this so-called free-trade country. Wines and spirits, tobacco, tea and coffee, cocoa and sugar, are not they in the forefront of the articles that render regularly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? There have been, indeed, throughout all the years of the Free Trade era, some forty articles scheduled for paying customs duty on import into the United Kingdom. They help the revenue to the extent of about £27,000,000 per annum.

The romance of smuggling has very largely engaged the attention of every description of writers, but we do not hear so much of its commercial aspects, although it must be evident that for men to dare so greatly as the smugglers did with winds and waves and with the customs’ forces, the possible gains must have been great. Time and again a cargo of tea or of spirits would be seized, and yet the smugglers be prepared with other ventures, knowing, as they did, that one entirely successful run would pay for perhaps two failures. When tea could be purchased in Holland at sevenpence a pound, and sold in England at prices ranging from 3s. 6d. to 5s., and when tobacco, purchased at the same price, sold at 2s. 6d., it is evident that great possibilities existed for the enterprising free-trader.

As regards spirits, if we take brandy as an example, we find almost equal profits; for excellent cognac was shipped from Roscoff, in Brittany, from Cherbourg, Dieppe, and other French ports in tubs of four gallons each, which cost in France £1 a tub, and sold in England at £4. One of the ordinary smuggling luggers, generally built especially for this traffic, on racing lines, would hold eighty tubs.

On such a cargo being brought, according to preconcerted plan, within easy distance off-shore, generally at night, a lantern or other signal shown from cliff or beach by confederates on land would indicate the precise spot where the goods were most safely to be beached; and there would be assembled a sufficient company of labourers engaged for the job. A cargo of eighty tubs required forty men, who carried two each, slung by ropes over chest and back. According to circumstances, they marched in company on foot, inland; or, if the distance were great, they went on horseback, each man with a led horse, carrying three or four tubs in addition. These labourers, although not finally interested in the safe running of the goods, and not paid on any other basis than being hired for the heavy job of carrying considerable weights throughout the night, were quite ready and willing to fight any opponents that might be met, as innumerable accounts of savage encounters tell us. Besides these carriers, there were often, in case of opposition to the landing being anticipated, numerous “batsmen,” armed with heavy clubs, to protect the goods.

The pay of a labourer or carrier varied widely, of course, in different places, at different times, and according to circumstances. It ranged from five shillings to half a sovereign a night, and generally included also a present of a package of tea or a tub of brandy for so many successful runs. It is recorded that the labourers engaged for riding horseback, each with a led horse, from Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Folkestone, or Romney, to Canterbury, a distance of some fifteen miles, were paid seven shillings a night. The horses cost the smugglers nothing, for they were commandeered, as a general rule, from the neighbouring farmers, who did not usually offer any objection, for it was not often that the gangs forgot to leave a tub in payment. The method employed in thus requisitioning horses was quite simple. An unsigned note would be handed to a farmer stating that his horses were wanted, for some purpose unnamed, on a certain night; and that he was desired to leave his stables unlocked for those who would come and fetch them. If he did not comply with this demand he very soon had cause to regret it in the mysterious disasters that would shortly afterwards overtake him: his outbuildings being destroyed by fire, his farming implements smashed, or his cattle mutilated.

The farmers, indeed, were somewhat seriously embarrassed by the prevalence of smuggling. On the one hand, they had to lend their horses for the smugglers’ purposes, and on the other they discovered that the demand for carriers of tubs and other goods shortened the supply of labour available for agricultural purposes, and sent up the rate of wages. A labourer in the pay of smugglers would often be out three nights in the week, and, with the money he received and with additional payment in kind, was in a very comfortable position.