re laid upon stamp paper; an impost
of 9 livres (7s. 6d.) for each thousand foot square of ground,
and the tenth of the price of every habitation that is sold. The
productions are all subjected to five per cent. duty on their
leaving the colonies, and to three per cent. on their arrival in
any of the ports of the mother-country, exclusive of the duties
which are paid for rum when consumed in retail. These tributes
collectively bring in to the crown an income of eight or nine
hundred thousand livres, (from 33,333 pounds. 6s. 8d. to
37,500l.).

It is time that the court of Copenhagen should give up these
numerous and oppressive taxes. Well-grounded motives of interest
ought certainly to suggest the same kind of conduct to all the
powers that have possessions in the New World. But Denmark is
more particularly compelled to this act of generosity. The
planters are loaded with such enormous debts, that they will
never be able to repay the capitals, and cannot even make good
the arrears, unless the treasury should entirely drop every kind
of claim upon them.

But can such a prudent measure be expected, either in Denmark or
elsewhere, as long as the public expences shall exceed the public
revenues; as long as the fatal events, which, in the present
order, or rather disorder, of things, are perpetually renewed,
shall compel the administration to double or to treble the burden
of their unfortunate, and already overloaded subjects; as long as
the councils of the sovereigns shall act without any certain
views, and without any settled plan; as long as ministers shall
conduct themselves, as if the empire, or their functions, were to
end the next day; as long as the national treasures shall be
exhausted by unparalleled depredations, and that its indigence
shall only be removed by extravagant speculations, the ruinous
consequences of which will not be perceived, or will be
neglected, for the trifling advantages of the moment? and to make
use of an energetic, but true metaphor, one that is terrifying,
but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as
the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the
tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much
exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to _burn the harvest