reland to the British
treasury of between four and five millions. It was to be extended, also,
at a reduced rate of fivepence, to incomes between a hundred and fifty
and a hundred pounds--the former having hitherto been the line of total
exemption. From the retention of the income-tax as a portion of the
permanent and ordinary finance of the country the chancellor of the
exchequer was wholly and strongly averse, and so he remained for more
than twenty years to come. In order, however, to meet a common and a
just objection, that under this impost intelligence, enterprise, and
skill paid too much and property paid too little, he resolved upon a
bold step. He proposed that the legacy duty, hitherto confined to
personal property passing on death, either by will or by inheritance and
not by settlement, should henceforth be extended to real property, and
to both descriptions of property passing by settlement, whether real or
personal. In a word, the legacy duty was to extend to all successions
whatever. This was the proposal that in many senses cut deepest. It was
the first rudimentary breach in the ramparts of the territorial system,
unless, indeed, we count as first the abolition of the corn law.[285]
Mr. Gladstone eagerly disclaimed any intention of accelerating by the
pressure of fiscal enactment changes in the tenure of landed property,
and the letters which the reader has already seen (pp. 345-9) show the
high social value that he invariably set upon the maintenance of the old
landed order. The succession duty, as we shall find, for the time
disappointed his expectations, for he counted on two millions, and in
fact it yielded little more than half of one. But it secured for its
author the lasting resentment of a powerful class.

Such was the scheme that Mr. Gladstone now worked out in many weeks of
toil that would have been slavish, were it not that toil is never
slavish when illuminated by a strenuous purpose. When by and by the
result had made him the hero of a glorious hour, he wrote to Lord
Aberdeen (April 19): 'I had the deepest anxiety with regard to you, as
our chief, lest by faults of my own I should aggravate the cares and
difficulties into which I had at least helped to bring you; and the
novelty of our political relations with many of our colleagues, together
with the fact that I had been myself slow, and even reluctant, to the
formation of a new connection, filled me with an almost feverish desire
to do no i