on. This was the way in which he at all times strove to
stir the self-respect of the House of Commons. Not sparing his critics a
point or an argument, he drove his case clean home with a vigour that
made it seem as if the study of Augustine and Dante and the Fathers
were after all the best training for an intimate and triumphant mastery
of the proper amount of gold to be kept at the bank, the right interest
on an exchequer bond and an exchequer bill, and all the arcana of the
public accounts.[333] Even where their case had something in it, he
showed that they had taken the wrong points. Nor did he leave out the
spice of the sarcasm that the House loves. A peer had reproached him for
the amount of his deficiency bills. This peer had once himself for four
years been chancellor of the exchequer. 'My deficiency bills,' cried Mr.
Gladstone, 'reached three millions and a half. How much were the bills
of the chancellor whom this figure shocks? In his first year they were
four millions and a half, in the second almost the same, in the third
more than five and a quarter, in the fourth nearly five millions and a
half.' Disraeli and others pretended that they had foreseen the failure
of the conversion. Mr. Gladstone proved that, as matter of recorded
fact, they had done nothing of the sort. 'This is the way in which
mythical history arises. An event happens without attracting much
notice; subsequently it excites interest; then people look back upon the
time now passed, and see things not as they are or were, but through the
haze of distance--they see them as they wish them to have been, and what
they wish them to have been, they believe that they were.'

For this budget no genius, only courage, was needed; but Mr. Gladstone
advanced in connection with it a doctrine that raised great questions,
moral, political, and economic, and again illustrated that
characteristic of his mind which always made some broad general
principle a necessity of action. All through 1854, and in a sense very
often since, parliament was agitated by Mr. Gladstone's bold proposition
that the cost of war should be met by taxation at the time, and not by
loans to be paid back by another generation. He did not advance his
abstract doctrine without qualification. This, in truth, Mr. Gladstone
hardly ever did, and it was one of the reasons why he acquired a bad
name for sophistry and worse. Men fastened on the general principle, set
out in all its breadth and with