nancial prosperity was restored at home. Into the details
of his measures devised for this last-mentioned object, though the
leading features of his administration, and those on which his fame
chiefly rests, it would be beside the purpose of the present work to
enter. It is sufficient to say here that, in the spirit of Pitt's great
financial reform of 1787, he revised the whole of the import duties of
our commercial tariff, especially reducing the duties on raw
material;[261] making up the deficiency so caused by an income tax,
which he described as a temporary imposition, since he doubted not that
the great increase of lawful trade, which would be the consequence of
the reduction of duties, would soon enable the revenue to dispense with
a tax to the objections of which he was not blind. In recommending this
great change to the House, he laid down as the soundest maxim of
financial legislation, in which "all were now agreed, the principle that
we should buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," a
doctrine which, when more fully carried out, as it was sure to be, led
almost inevitably to the great measure for which his administration is
most celebrated, the repeal of the Corn-laws. There could be no doubt
that, in the most modified application of it, it struck at the root of
the principle of protection, which had hitherto been the fundamental
principle of our finance, and made a farther extension of it inevitable.

And, as he had been one of the leading members of the ministry which
carried Catholic Emancipation, so he now proceeded on the same path of
religious toleration; and, in the session of 1844, successfully
recommended to the House of Commons a bill which had already been passed
by the Lords, repealing a number of penal acts affecting the Roman
Catholics, which, though they had long been practically obsolete, still
encumbered, and it may be said disgraced, the statute book, and were, so
to say, a standing degradation of and insult to the Roman Catholic body.
One of them, passed in the reign of William and Mary, still forbade any
Roman Catholic to come within ten miles of London, to have either sword
or pistol in his house, or to possess a horse worth more than five
pounds. Another, enacted under Elizabeth, still made every Roman
Catholic who omitted to take certain oaths guilty of high-treason,
though no attempt to administer those oaths had been made since the
Revolution. Another, of the time of Charle