ad valorem it is impossible to prevent a contraband traffic. The lowering of the import duties in this country since 1830 has done more to prevent smuggling than all the Custom-house officers, Coast-blockade, Preventive-men, and Coast-guard put together.
In order the better to understand how it was that in open defiance of the law, and in the face of an immense cost to the country for its suppression, a gigantic system of contraband trade could be carried on, it may be well to glance at the geographical and topographical condition of this part of England.
The counties of Kent and Sussex may be considered to consist mainly of three distinct and well marked divisions ;-they are the extensive level tracks of land known as Pevensey Level and Romney Marsh ; the latter terminating westward at Dungeness, and containing at a rough guess, upwards of sixty thousand acres, and the district called the Weald, from its general wooded character, enclosed in a series of hills, termed the North and South Downs, and varied to some extent by a range " of elevated lands, called the Hastings Sands, from their terminating southward in bluff cliffs at Hastings.
I omit from this brief outline that part of the county of Kent which forms the southern shore of the estuary of the Thames, because my remarks on "Smugglers and Smuggling" will have little or no reference to that part of that county.
