and necessary levies, which support all the dignity, the credit, and the power of his country, the reader will excuse a little further detail on this subject; that we may see how little oppressive those taxes are on the shoulders of the public, with which he labors so earnestly to load its imagination.  For this purpose we take the state of that specific article upon which the two capital burdens of the war leaned the most immediately, by the additional duties on malt, and upon beer.

Barrels. 
Average of strong beer, brewed in eight years
before the additional malt and beer duties 3,895,059

Average of strong beer, eight years since
the duties 4,060,726
---------
Increase in the last period 165,667

Here is the effect of two such daring taxes as 3_d._ by the bushel additional on malt, and 3_s._ by the barrel additional on beer.  Two impositions laid without remission one upon the neck of the other; and laid upon an object which before had been immensely loaded.  They did not in the least impair the consumption:  it has grown under them.  It appears that, upon the whole, the people did not feel so much inconvenience from the new duties as to oblige them to take refuge in the private brewery.  Quite the contrary happened in both these respects in the reign of King William; and it happened from much slighter impositions.[62] No people can long consume a commodity for which they are not well able to pay.  An enlightened reader laughs at the inconsistent chimera of our author, of a people universally luxurious, and at the same time oppressed with taxes and declining in trade.  For my part, I cannot look on these duties as the author does.  He sees nothing but the burden.  I can perceive the burden as well as he; but I cannot avoid contemplating also the strength that supports it.  From thence I draw the most comfortable assurances of the future vigor, and the ample resources, of this great, misrepresented country; and can never prevail on myself to make complaints which have no cause, in order to raise hopes which have no foundation.

When a representation is built on truth and nature, one member supports the other, and mutual lights are given and received from every part.  Thus, as our manufacturers have not deserted, nor the manufacture left us, nor the consumption declined, nor the revenue sunk; so neither has trade, which is at once the result, measure, and cause of the whole, in the least decayed, as our author has thought proper sometimes to affirm, constantly to suppose, as if it were the most indisputable of all propositions.  The reader will see below the comparative state of our trade[63] in three of the best years before our increase of debt and taxes, and with it the three last years since the author’s date of our ruin.