ll without throwing the financial machinery wholly out of
gear. By including all the taxes in a single finance bill the power of the
Lords to override the other House was effectually arrested.

(M12) In language of that time, he had carried every stitch of free-trade
canvas in the teeth of a tempest that might have made the boldest
financial pilot shorten sail. Many even of his friends were sorry that he
did not reduce the war duty on tea and sugar, instead of releasing paper
from its duty of excise. Neither friends nor foes daunted him. He
possessed his soul in patience until the hour struck, and then came forth
in full panoply. Enthusiastic journalists with the gift of a poetic pen
told their millions of readers how, after weeks of malign prophecy, that
the great trickster in Downing Street would be proved to have beggared the
exchequer, that years of gloom and insolvency awaited us, suddenly, the
moment the magician chose to draw aside the veil, the darkness rolled
away; he had fluttered out of sight the whole race of sombre Volscians;
and where the gazers dreaded to see a gulf they beheld a golden monument
of glorious finance; like the traveller in the Arabian fable who was
pursued in the Valley of Shadows by unearthly imprecations, he never
glanced to right or left until he could disperse the shadows by a single
stroke. "He is," says another onlooker, "in his ministerial capacity,
probably the best abused and the best hated man in the House; nevertheless
the House is honestly proud of him, and even the country party feels a
glow of pride in exhibiting to the diplomatic gallery such a transcendent
mouthpiece of a nation of shopkeepers. The audacious shrewdness of
Lancashire married to the polished grace of Oxford is a felicitous union
of the strength and culture of liberal and conservative England; and no
party in the House, whatever may be its likings or antipathies, can sit
under the spell of Mr. Gladstone's rounded and shining eloquence without a
conviction that the man who can talk 'shop' like a tenth Muse is, after
all, a true representative man of the market of the world."

In describing the result of the repeal of the paper duty a little after
this,(28) he used glowing words. "Never was there a measure so
conservative as that which called into vivid, energetic, permanent, and
successful action the cheap press of this country." It was also a common
radical opinion of that hour that if the most numerous classes