ly
unsuccessful as a specimen of whig finance. Finding that, after all, he
could not effect a saving of more than one million on the national
expenditure, as reduced by his capable predecessor, Goulburn, he
nevertheless proposed to repeal the duties on coals, tallow candles,
printed cottons, and glass, as well as to diminish by one half the
duties on newspapers and tobacco. To meet the deficit thus created, he
designed an increase of the wine and timber duties, new taxation of raw
cotton, and, above all, a tax of ten shillings per cent. on all
transfers of real or funded property. This last proposal was at once
denounced by Goulburn, Peel, and Sugden, the late solicitor-general, as
a breach of public faith between the state and its creditors. Their
protests were loudly echoed by the city, and the obnoxious transfer duty
was abandoned. The same fate befell the proposed increase of the timber
duties, and Althorp only carried his budget after submitting to further
modifications. Those who had relied on his promises of economical reform
were signally disappointed, and, had not parliamentary reform
overshadowed all other issues, the credit of the government would have
been rudely shaken in the first session after its formation. But this
great struggle, now to be described, so engrossed the attention of the
country, that little room was left for the consideration of other
interests, until it should be decided.

It is probable that no great measure was ever preceded by so thorough a
preparation of the public mind as the reform bills of 1831-32. Ever
since the early part of the eighteenth century the abuses of the
representative system had been freely acknowledged, and no one attempted
to defend them in principle. The multitude of close boroughs, the
smallness of the electoral body, the sale of seats in parliament, the
wide prevalence of gross bribery, and the enormous expense of
elections--these were notorious evils which no one denied, though some
palliated them, and few ventured to assail them in earnest by drastic
proposals, lest they should undermine the constitution. So far back as
1770 Chatham had denounced them, and predicted that unless parliament
reformed itself from within before the end of the century, it would be
reformed "with a vengeance" from without. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond
had introduced a bill in favour of universal suffrage, and Pitt had
brought forward bills or motions in favour of parliamentary reform