ot the least interesting fact concerning this
debate was that the leading part in opposition to the Bill was taken by
Lord Carteret, who had returned from his Irish Government, and was
beginning to show himself a pertinacious and a formidable enemy of
Walpole and his administration. Carteret outshone even Pulteney and
Wyndham in wholesale and extravagant denunciation of the measure. He
likened it to the domestic policy of Cardinal Richelieu, by which the
estates of the nobility and gentry were virtually confiscated to the
Crown, and the liberties of the people were lost. It would place it in
the power of a wicked administration to reduce the English people to
the same condition as the people in Turkey; "their only resource will
be in mobs and tumults, and the prevailing party will administer
justice by general massacres and proscriptions." All this may now seem
sheer absurdity; but for the purposes of Carteret and Pulteney it was
by no means absurd. The salt tax was carried through the House of
Lords; but the public out-of-doors were taught to believe that the
Minister's financial policy was merely a series of artifices for the
destruction of popular rights, and for robbing England of her political
liberty.

[Sidenote: 1733--"A very terrible affair"]

Walpole had long had in his mind a measure of a different {315}
nature--a measure to readjust the duties on tobacco and wine. It was
known that he was preparing some bill on the subject, and the
excitement which was beginning to show itself at the time of the salt
tax debates was turned to account by the Opposition to forestall the
popular reception of the expected measure. The cry was got up that the
administration were planning a scheme for a general excise, and the
bare idea of a general excise was then odious and terrible to the
public. Whatever Walpole's final purposes may have been, there was
nothing to alarm any one in the scheme which he was presently to
introduce. Nobody now would think of impugning the soundness of the
economical principles on which his moderate, limited, and tentative
scheme of fiscal reform was founded.

The coming event threw its shadow before it, and the shadow became
marvellously distorted. Pulteney, speaking on February 23, 1733, with
regard to the Sinking Fund proposal, talked of the expected excise
scheme in language of such exaggeration that it is impossible to
believe the orator could have felt anything like the alarm and h