'and with my whole
heart, for I did not yet fully understand the vicious operation of the
sliding scale on the corn trade, and it is hard to see how an
eight-shilling duty could even then have been maintained.'

III

THE NEW POLICY

The three centres of operations were the corn bill, then the bill
imposing the income-tax, and finally the reform of the duties upon seven
hundred and fifty out of the twelve hundred articles that swelled the
tariff. The corn bill was the most delicate, the tariff the most
laborious, the income-tax the boldest, the most fraught alike with peril
for the hour and with consequences of pith and moment for the future. It
is hardly possible for us to realise the general horror in which this
hated impost was then enveloped. The fact of Brougham procuring the
destruction of all the public books and papers in which its odious
accounts were recorded, only illustrates the intensity of the common
sentiment against the dire hydra evoked by Mr. Pitt for the destruction
of the regicide power of France, and sent back again to its gruesome
limbo after the ruin of Napoleon. From 1842 until 1874 the question of
the income-tax was the vexing enigma of public finance.

It was upon Mr. Gladstone that the burden of the immense achievement of
the new tariff fell, and the toil was huge. He used afterwards to say
that he had been concerned in four revisions of the tariff, in 1842,
1845, 1853, and 1860, and that the first of them cost six times as much
trouble as the other three put together. He spoke one hundred and
twenty-nine times during the session. He had only once sat on a
committee of trade, and had only once spoken on a purely trade question
during the nine years of his parliamentary life. All his habits of
thought and action had been cast in a different mould. It is ordinarily
assumed that he was a born financier, endowed besides with a gift of
idealism and the fine training of a scholar. As matter of fact, it was
the other way; he was a man of high practical and moral imagination,
with an understanding made accurate by strength of grasp and
incomparable power of rapid and concentrated apprehension, yoked to
finance only by force of circumstance--a man who would have made a
shining and effective figure in whatever path of great public affairs,
whether ecclesiastical or secular, duty might have called for his
exertions.

It is curious that t