“MEMORANDUM ON THE DUTIES ON NUTMEGS.

“The duty proposed to be levied on nutmegs is 1s. per pound for cultivated, and 5d. per pound for those commonly called wild.  The ground on which this distinction is founded, is said to be that the market value of the one is but half that of the other, and that the Customs can readily distinguish between them.

Now it is admitted, on all sides, that there is but one species of culinary nutmeg, the Myristica Moschata of botanists, although at least a score of the same genus, all unfit for human food.  The parent country of the aromatic nutmegs extends from the Molucca Islands to New Guinea, inclusive.  In this they grow with facility and even in the Banda Islands, where there are parks of them, they hardly undergo any cultivation, and may truly be said, even there, to be a wild product.  It is only when grown as exotics, as in the British settlements of Pinang and Singapore, that they require cultivation, and that a more careful and expensive one than any other produce of the soil.

Aromatic nutmegs are sometimes large and sometimes small—­sometimes round, sometimes oblong, and sometimes long, and this will be found the case whether cultivated or uncultivated.  How, then, the Customs are able to distinguish them it is difficult to understand.  In the ordinary Prices Current no mention whatever is made of the wild and cultivated, the lowest quality being quoted in the most recent at 2s. per pound, and the highest at 3s. 10d.,—­the best of what are called wild fetching a higher price than the lower qualities of what are called cultivated.

But suppose the distinction could be made with the most perfect certainty, to make it would be a palpable departure from the principle adopted with every other commodity, of charging a uniform rate of duty on quality.  To give an example, the present price of black pepper is 3-5/8d. to 4d. per pound, while that of white pepper is 81/2d. to 1s. 2d. per pound, both paying the same duty of 6d.; yet nothing can be more easily distinguished than these two commodities, which, except as to curing, are the same article.

Tea is a still more striking example.  The duty is the same on all qualities, though prices range from 1l1/2d. to 3s. 6d. per pound.  It was the very circumstance of the difficulty of distinguishing between the different kinds of tea, especially between Bohea and Congou, which, after an eighteen months trial, overthrew the system of rated duties of 1s. 6d., 2s., and 3s., adopted on the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1833.

Unless the duty on nutmegs is equalised there will be no end of trouble and disputes, and however expert the Customs may be, they will certainly be outwitted, and long-shaped and small nutmegs, although really cultivated, will be introduced at the lower duty, by unscrupulous traders, as