THE HOME AND FOREIGN REVIEW. SEU VETUS EST VERUM DILIGO SIVE NOVUM. VOLUME IV. WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, 1864. THE HOME AND FOREIGN REVIEW. JANUARY 1864. MR. GLADSTONE'S FINANCIAL STATEMENTS.1 MR. GLADSTONE has collected into a single volume his financial speeches in 1853, 1860, 1861, 1862, and 1863, and added to them, in an appendix, his speech on the Customs and Inland Revenue Bill in 1861, and his speech on the extension of the Income Tax to Charities, delivered during the last Session. There is no preface, and there are not more than half a dozen notes-none of them of any length or importance. The author has thought it unnecessary to deprecate criticism or to conciliate hostility. Strong in a well-founded confidence in his own great achievements, he is content to be judged by his contemporaries and by posterity on his own statements, anticipations, and calculations, just as they were made; and he leaves it to the reader to qualify and correct them for himself by the teaching of a subsequent experience. He has no reason to shrink from the verdict of his contemporaries or of posterity: the present volume contains a durable monument of his renown. It is the history of a great financial revolution, which Sir Robert Peel had the honour of beginning, but which Mr. Gladstone has carried over difficulties innumerable to a grand and successful termination. We view its appearance as a proof that such is the opinion of its author. It would hardly have been published had he felt that any large portion of the field of finance remained unexplored, or that any serious difficulty remained to conquer. Not only is it the record 1 The Financial Statements of the Years 1853, 1860-1863; with Speeches on Tar-Bills, 1861, and Charities, 1863. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and M.P. for the University of Oxford. London, Murray. VOL. IV. b of the financial triumphs of a successful Chancellor of the Exchequer; it is also a splendid record of parliamentary eloquence. Never did Mr. Gladstone's powers of luminous statement and convincing argument appear to so much advantage as in his financial speeches. It is curious that the most florid, the most excursive, the most declamatory, and the most impassioned speaker of the day never shines so much as when manipulating dry statements of figures; expounding the minute reductions and qualifications which are necessary in order to make a fair comparison between estimate, revenue, charge, and expenditure; or narrating the dry details of a business of which the interests of the Excise or Customs revenue have compelled him to make himself master. The book is exceedingly difficult to review, because hardly any thing can be said of Mr. Gladstone's proposals which he has not previously said of them himself. He has laid bare to us the processes of reasoning and investigation,-the first idea maturing gradually into the full-blown conviction. He has stated, analysed, refuted all the arguments against him. He has turned his proposals round on every side, and looked at them in every light, until the reader or listener-carried away by the mixture of so much subtlety and so much candour-surrenders his mind to the influence of a man who seems to have foreseen, anticipated, and surmounted more objections to his own plans than the most determined and ingenious antagonist would ever have thought it possible to suggest. In two of these speeches - the financial statement of 1853, and the speech on the extension of the Income Tax to Charities-Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly put forth the whole powers of his mind, and exhausted the whole resources of his eloquence: in the first, to force an Income Tax on an unwilling House of Commons; in the second, to extort from an assembly which he well knew had already decided against him the tribute of an involuntary admiration, and of a conviction which some of the most prejudiced of his hearers found it impossible to withhold. Every speech in this volume, however, deserves study from those who wish to learn the art of addressing with success an assembly like the House of Commons. We may read and admire the speeches of the great orators of the earlier part of the century; but the style and manner suited to the present day can no more be extracted from them than from the orations of Cicero. Mr. Gladstone's treatment of every subject is essentially modern: it catches and preserves the tone of the days in which we live, and shows us at least one style which has been crowned with the most complete success. The advantage, however, after all, of possessing these monuments of splendid eloquence is not so great as it seems. We never heard of any body attempting to imitate Mr. Gladstone; and such an effort would be very unlikely to be rewarded with success. He is above all things an exemplar vitiis imitabile. His peculiarities in inferior hands would very easily degenerate into faults. The fall of Phaeton may be prognosticated for any one who with less delicate and practised hand should strive to drive the coursers of the sun. The wonderful command of language might easily degenerate into languid prolixity; the subtlety of thought into verbal quibbling; the affluence of detail into minute and tedious disquisition. Mr. Gladstone deserves the highest credit for originality: his style, his point of view, his manner of treatment, are all his own. But unless a man can bring himself to the belief that he possesses the faculties which enable him to move at ease in so difficult an element, he will do wisely to select for himself some simpler but more attainable model for imitation. When Mr. Gladstone rose to propose the Budget of 1853, he was placed in a position of no small difficulty and anxiety. He had exactly four months before succeeded in demolishing Mr. Disraeli's Budget by a most bitter and unsparing philippic, and in putting an end by that means to the administration of Lord Derby. From his political antagonists he had of course no mercy to expect when placed himself in a similar position. The battle of free trade had been finally fought and won in the general election of 1852; and the country looked forward, not unreasonably, to great financial reforms. The Coalition Government was in its earlier days of strength and union; and the shadow of the coming war with Russia scarcely yet darkened the horizon. There was nevertheless a tremendous difficulty to overcome. The Income Tax expired in the course of that very year. It is difficult for us at the present time vividly to recall the degree of detestation in which that tax was then held. Men talked loudly of its total repeal, or at any rate of the necessity of taxing incomes at different rates, in proportion to the uncertainty or permanence of the ownership. There can be no doubt that had one or other of these opinions prevailed, such a resolution would have operated as a sentence of official insignificance, almost of nullity, on the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This in his case would have been political extinction. Mr. Gladstone played his stake boldly, and won it easily against the most formidable difficulties. We do not notice those portions of his statements which are of merely transitory interest; but this memorable disquisition on the Income Tax, memorable not only for the mastery of the subject it displayed, but for its influence on the future destiny of our finances, is of no transitory importance. Mr. Gladstone began with great dexterity, avoiding the weak part of his subject, and |