this particular retrenchment I
do not know, nor does it matter. Fiercer engagements, and many of them,
were to follow. Meanwhile he bent all the energies of his mind to the
other front of financial questions--to raising money rather than
expending it, and with unwearied industry applied himself to solve the
problem of redistributing the burdens and improving the machinery of
taxation.

For many years circumstances had given to finance a lively and
commanding place in popular interest. The protracted discussion on the
corn law, conducted not only in senate and cabinet, but in country
market-places and thronged exchanges, in the farmer's ordinary and at
huge gatherings in all the large towns in the kingdom, had agitated
every class in the community. The battle between free trade and
protection, ending in a revolution of our commercial system, had
awakened men to the enormous truth, as to which they are always so soon
ready to relapse into slumber, that budgets are not merely affairs of
arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of the prosperity of
individuals, the relations of classes, and the strength of kingdoms. The
finance of the whigs in the years after the Reform bill had not only
bewildered parliament, but had filled merchants, bankers, shipowners,
manufacturers, shopkeepers, and the whole array of general taxpayers
with perplexity and dismay. Peel recovered a financial equilibrium and
restored public confidence, but Peel was gone. The whigs who followed
him after 1846 had once more laboured under an unlucky star in this
vital sphere of national affairs. They performed the unexampled feat of
bringing forward four budgets in a single year, the first of them
introduced by Lord John Russell himself as prime minister. By 1851
floundering had reached a climax. Finance had thus discredited one
historical party; it had broken up the other. It was finance that
overthrew weak governments and hindered the possibility of a strong one.

FISCAL CONFUSION

Mr. Disraeli, the most unsparing of all the assailants of Peel, tried
his own hand in 1852. To have the genius and the patience of a great
partisan chief is one gift, and this he had; to grasp the complex
material interests of a vast diversified society like the United Kingdom
demands powers of a different order. The defeat of Mr. Disraeli's budget
at the end of 1852 seemed to complete the circle of fiscal confusion.
Every source of publi