would be hard if, while we by our legislation affect the employment of the people, and induce the operatives of this country to ask for an asylum in those domiciles of woe which are provided for them, we refuse to afford them the means of supporting themselves in a manner becoming their ancient character and position. If charity is to be withheld, let not work, at all events, be refused. The people of England do not ask for charity, they do not go on their knees to ask any eleemosynary contributions; they ask for bread to produce work; for work to produce bread; they ask not for cheap bread, indeed, but for more-they ask for the means of earning bread, whether it be cheap or costly.— They call on us to strike off those fetters which cramp the industry of the country, and in doing so they wish us to consult, not merely their interest, but our own. I entirely agree in the sentiments which I have heard expressed by an honourable and learned member to-night, that the agricultural and commercial interests of the country are not distinct. So far from their being distinct so far from their being at variance and conflicting with each other, they are the same. Trade depends upon agriculture, agriculture depends upon trade. I am sure my honourable friend the member for Stockport, when he looks upon the splendid picture which the rural scenery of England presents, would draw from its contemplation one of the highest pleasures. I am sure the right honourable gentleman the member for Kent, a native English gentleman, must see in the very smoke with which our cities are enveloped from their furnaces, intimations of the means by which the agri cultural interest is advanced, and the greatness of the country is achieved. No, Sir, the commercial and agricultural interests of England are not distinct. But if they were-if it was necessary to make a distinction between them-if in giving sustainment to both it is necessary to make a sacrifice of either, I should be disposed to say that the maintenance of the commerce of England ought, in the mind of every Englishman deserving the name, to be the object of paramount consideration. It is not, after all, by agriculture that this country is so distinguished; for what is this but a speck upon the scene? It is not to agriculture—it is not to the extent or fertility of our soil-it is not to any rare skill in calling forth the products of the earth. No; it is the spirit of commercial enterprise by which Englishmen are distinguished from any other nation on the face of the earth. It is the indomitable perseverance in the glorious pursuit of our boundless traffic, by which every difficulty has been overcome, and every obstacle surmounted. It is to the unwearied energies of the country, to its amazing industry, to its untiring zeal, to the marvellous skill with which it has filled the earth with the products of its labour-it is this commerce which has extended its influence to the boundaries of the earth-it is to these glorious causes that England is indebted for its prominence among the nations of the earth. Against our trade it was that our mighty adversary directed his principal attempts. He, however, failed. Let us have a care est we effect by our policy what Napoleon was unable to accomplish; et us have a care lest by an obstinate adherence to a system which so many

enlightened men, men not more enlightened than impartial, have condemned as the source of so much mischief; which has already produced so much calamity, and threatens us with, perhaps, still greater injury; which contracts our commerce, which exposes our monetary system to perpetual disturbance, which reduces our operatives to a state of the most unhappy destitution; let us, too, have a care lest, by a pernicious adherence to that fatal system, we do not entail evils upon our country for which your talents, if you were the brightest, your wisdom if you were the wisest, and your virtues if you were the most high-minded minister to whom the care of England was ever intrusted, would be nnable to find a cure

INCOME TAX.

SPEECH ON THE INCOME TAX, APRIL 8, 1842.

IF for the sustainment of the honour and the interests of England an income tax were required, I make no doubt that the people of this country would at once submit to it, and follow with promptitude, the example which our gracious Sovereign has spontaneously and magnanimously given; but of this generous example, the minister should be slow to take advantage, and should avoid with peculiar care, any exaggerated description of the perils or of the embarrassments of the country, in order to produce an acquiesence in a tax of all others the most convenient to the minister, but the most harassing and vexatious to the people. Does the condition of England, does the state of her finances, do existing difficulties, do impending perils, make the imposition of a tax so odious, matter of inevitable need? That question will be put ere many months shall have passed, by that portion of the community in which political power is deposited, and upon the answer to that question, the stability of the government will depend, when the merits of the minister shall be tried by some better test than the acclamations of heated partisans, and shall be determined by the results to which his legislation will conduct

us.

The right honourable baronet has little to apprehend, during the passage of his bill through the parliament. He told us, that he was ready to take the course which he had adopted in 1835. But I cannot help thinking that his magnanimity is misplaced; his public virtue will not be put to a trial so severe. Although it may seem paradoxical to say so, his difficulties will be the result of his success, and his will be one of those victories, which it requires less ability to win than to follow up. When the income-tax shall have been in actual operation-when a theory in the parliament shall have become a burden upon the people when schedule D shall have been made fearfully intelligible-when this tax shall have been charged, to use a phrase familiar in debates on the Irish Registration Bill, upon the "beneficial interest" which a man has in all his earnings, and no allowance shall have been made as against this impost, for food, for fire, for raiment, for the roof over an English tradesman's head-when the privacy of so many Englishmen shall have been invaded by the inquisitors, who are to be attached to your new fiscal tribunal—when a scrutiny shall have been instituted into the affairs of every man, whom your commissioners, original, additional, or special, shall conjecture to have gained £150 in a single year-when all the pain and all the humiliation incidental to this tax shall have been felt, then, I feel persuaded that the people of this country will inquire whether this tax would not have been avoided, or whether the right honourable baronet did not take advantage of a majority, hot from the struggle of recent election, to inflict a tax, for which neither the present condition, nor the future prospects of England, afforded a justification. I have little doubt, that the people of England will think that the right hozgurable baronet was mistaken in his view of the public embarrass

ments, that he over-rated the exigencies of the hour, and that for the imposition of a tax so unjust, so inquisitorial and so immoral, he should have forfeited the confidence of the country. It is alleged by the right honourable baronet, that an income tax is indispensable for the purpose of repairing a two-fold deficiency-that which already exists, and that which a great commercial experiment will involve. To create an addi tional deficiency in order to repair it by an income tax, to inflict a new wound in order to apply a favourite cure, is more than tentative, and if my right honourable friend, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, had made a proposition like this, he would have been regarded as an empiric of the most adventurous kind. But it is the good fortune of the right honourable baronet, that his supporters entertain in his regard that sort of confidence, which Waller has happily described in his celebrated address to a great projector:

"Still as you rise, the state, exalted too,

Feels no disorder, when 'tis changed by you."

I am one of those, however, who do not think that the experiment of the right honourable baronet is of such value, that for the sake of indulging him in it, the country should submit to the calamity of an income

tax.

The tariff, by which the deficiency of £1,200,000 is to be at once created, is not such a masterpiece, as to induce us to acquiesce in such an imposition as he declares to be necessary for his great undertaking. He begins by sacrificing £600,000 of the timber duties. Why should he abolish the duties on Canadian timber? Sir Henry Parnell, whose authority he quotes, and for whom he entertains great respect, ever since his celebrated motion on the civil-list in 1830, does not suggest that the duties on Canadian timber should be given up. Mr. M'Gregor, the Secretary to the Board of Trade, a man of great talent, knowledge, and experience, whose evidence was so important before the Import Duty Committee; who resided a considerable time in Canada, and whe has written a valuable work on the subject, does not recommend that the duty on Canadian timber should be wholly relinquished, but that it should be reduced from 10s. to 7s. 6d. It is known to everybody that there is a species of Canadian timber, which we cannot dispense with, yellow pine for example, which is employed for a variety of purposes, to which Baltic timber is not applicable. It must come into this country, and to relinquish the revenue that would be derived from it, is a most imprudent proceeding. The course adopted with regard to the sugar duties is most censurable. When the enormous sum of £20,000,000 was given to the West-India planters, there was no stipulation that their monopoly should be preserved, and accordingly the duties on East-India and West-India sugar were soon after equalized. The duties on EastIndia and West-India rum were recently placed on a level. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, the champion of the West-India interest, expostulated in vain. His eloquence appears to be more influential in the cabinet, than it was last year in the House of Commons. As long as there existed an inequality of duty in East-India and West-India produce, the East and West-Indians were strong antagonists; but the duties having been equalized, they formed a junction in favour of mono

poly; the government here entered into their views, and have consulted their interests at the expense of the whole British community. The Import Duties Committee entered into a very minute and most important consideration of the effects that would follow from a reduction of

the duties on foreign sugar. Those duties are enormous; they amount to the sum of 63s. per cwt., while the duty on colonial sugar is only 24s. It was proved before the Import Duty Committee, by witnesses, whose judgment is unimpeachable, that as the reduction of the duty on coffee produced a great increase of consumption and of revenue, the reduction of the duty on sugar would have the same effect; that to cheapen one of the necessaries of life would be of essential utility to the humbler classes; that sugar would be employed in various ways in which on account of its cost, it is not now used; that our commercial relation with the Brazils would be most advantageously extended and confirmed; and that the demand for our manufactures would be considerably increased, and that an impulse would be given to the operative industry of the country. Mr. M'Gregor stated, that the revenue might be increased by so large a sum as £3,000,000, by a judicious alteration of the sugar duties. To that alteration the right honourable baronet prefers an income tax; and, among other objections to a change in the sugar duties, informs us that he does not desire to give an impulse to slave labour. Yet, by a strange contradiction, he reduces the duty on foreign coffee, the produce of slave labour, and he permits Brazilian and Cuba sugar to be refined in England, and to be exported for consumption in those very colonies in which slavery has been suppressed. His tariff is in these particulars most essentially imperfect. In the case of such a tariff, the evils of an income tax ought not to be inflicted, and if any substantial argument can be adduced in favour of so odious a measure, t is in the existing deficiency that we must endeavour to discover it. That a deficiency exists must be admitted and deplored, but those who are disposed to pronounce an unmeasured censure upon the Whig government, as the occasion of that deficiency, ought to bear in mind, that from 1830 to 1836, the Whigs reduced taxes to the amount of £6,000,000, and that notwithstanding that great reduction, there was a surplus of revenue in that time of upwards of £6,000,000, so that no actual augmentation of the national debt has taken place under the Whig ministry. It was imagined, that the Tories had reduced the taxes to such an extent, before the accession of the Whigs, that no opportunity would be afforded to their successors of diminishing the public burdens. I am very far from denying that the Tories deserve great praise for having, independently of the income tax, abolished seventeen or eighteen millions of other taxes, but it seems extraordinary that when his predeces sors began by repealing the income tax, and then proceeded to remit other taxes to a vast amount, the right honourable baronet should invert the order of proceeding, and as if the income tax were of all taxes the least onerous, the most popular and the most just, he should make it the object of predilection, and select it as the basis of his whole system of france. What is the history of this income tax, which the right honourable baronet prefers to every other impost? It was proposed by Mr.