as
exalted and spacious. The arguments throughout were close, persuasive,
exhaustive; the moral appeal was in the only tone worthy of a great
minister addressing a governing assembly--a masculine invocation of
their intellectual and political courage. This is the intrepid way in
which a strong parliament and a strong nation like to see public
difficulties handled, and they now welcomed the appearance of a new
minister, who rejected what he called narrow and flimsy expedients, of
which so much had been seen in the last half dozen years; who was not
afraid to make a stand against heedless men with hearts apparently set
on drying up one source of revenue after another; who did not shrink
from sconcing the powerful landed phalanx like other people; and who at
the same time boldly used and manfully defended the most unpopular of
all the public imposts. In politics the spectacle of sheer courage is
often quite as good in its influence and effect as the best of logic. It
was so here. While proposing that the income-tax should come to an end
in seven years, he yet produced the most comprehensive analysis and the
boldest vindication of the structure of the tax as it stood. His manner
was plain, often almost conversational, but his elaborate examination of
the principles of an income-tax remains to this day a master example of
accurate reasoning thrown into delightful form. He admitted all the
objections to it: the inquisition that it entailed, the frauds to which
it led, the sense in the public mind of its injustice in laying the same
rate upon the holder of idle and secured public funds, upon the
industrious trader, upon the precarious earnings of the professional
man. It was these disadvantages that made him plan the extinction of the
tax at the end of a definite period, when the salutary remissions of
other burdens now proposed would have had time to bring forth their
fruits. As was said by a later chancellor of the exchequer, this speech
not only won 'universal applause from his audience at the time, but
changed the convictions of a large part of the nation, and turned, at
least for several years, a current of popular opinion which had seemed
too powerful for any minister to resist.'[291]

The succession duty brought Mr. Gladstone into the first conflict of his
life with the House of Lords. That land should be made to pay like other
forms of property Was a proposition denounced as essentially
impracticable, oppressive, unjus