o do in regard to tobacco was to make the customs
duty very small and to increase the excise duty; to establish bonded
warehouses for the storing of the tobacco imported into this country
and meant to be exported again or sold here for home consumption; thus
to encourage and facilitate the importation; to get rid of many of the
dishonest practices which injured the fair dealer and defrauded the
revenue; to put a stop to smuggling; to benefit at once the grower, the
manufacturer, the consumer, and the revenue. We need not relate at
great length and in minute detail the history of these resolutions
{317} and of the debates on them in the House of Commons. But it may
be pointed out that, wild and absurd as were the outcries of the
Patriots, there yet was good reason for their apprehension of a growing
scheme to substitute excise for land-tax or poll-tax or customs.
Walpole was, as we know, a firm believer in the advantages of indirect
taxation, and of the introduction, as freely as possible, of all raw
materials for manufacture, and all articles useful for the food of a
nation. He was a free-trader before his time, and he saw that in
certain cases there was immense advantage to the consumer and to the
revenue in allowing articles to be imported under as light a duty as
possible, and then putting an excise duty on their distribution here.
Walpole was perfectly right in all this, but his enemies were none the
less justified in proclaiming that the proposals he was introducing
could not end in a mere readjustment of the tobacco and wine duties.

Walpole's first resolution was carried by 206 votes against 205. The
Government had won a victory, but it was such a victory as Walpole did
not care to win. He had been used of late to bear down all before him,
and he saw with eyes of clear foreboding the ominous significance of
his present majority. He knew well that the Opposition had got the
most telling cry they could possibly have sought or found against him.
He knew that popular tumult would grow from day to day. He knew that
his enemies were unscrupulous, and that they were banded together
against him on many grounds and with many different purposes. Every
section of the nation which had any hostile feeling to the House of
Hanover, to the existing administration, or to the Prime-minister
himself, made common cause against, not his Excise Bill, but him. The
tobacco resolutions were passed, and a bill to put them into exe