lay down a principle of this kind would be only to say that no statesman shall conclude an arrangement of any sort with the rulers of a state not so liberal as his own in its system of government. Of course no one ever thinks of arguing for such a principle in the regular diplomatic negotiations between States. Those who found fault with Mr. Cobden because he was willing to assent to an arrangement which the Emperor Napoleon imposed upon his subjects, must have known that our official statesmen were every day entering into engagements with one or the other European sovereign which were to be carried out by that sovereign on the same arbitrary principle. There was, in fact, no soundness or sincerity in such objections to Mr. Cobden's work. Some men opposed it because they were protectionists, pure and simple; some opposed it because they detested the Emperor Napoleon. The ground of objection with not a few was their dislike of Mr. Cobden and the Manchester School. The hostility of some came from their repugnance to seeing anything done out of the regular and conventional way. All these objections coalesced against the treaty and the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget; but the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and the strength of the Government prevailed against them all.

The effect of the treaty, so far as France was concerned, was an engagement virtually to remove all prohibitory duties on all the staples of British manufacture, and to reduce the duties on English coal and coke, bar and pig iron, tools, machinery, yarns, flax, and hemp. England, for her part, proposed to sweep away all duties on manufactured goods, and to reduce greatly the duties on foreign wines. In one sense, of course, England gave more than she got, but that one sense is only the protectionist's sense-more properly nonsense. England could not, with any due regard for the real meaning of words, be said to have given up anything when she enabled her people to buy light and excellent French wines at a cheap price. She could not be said to have sacrificed anything when she secured for her consumers the opportunity of buying French manufactured articles at a natural price. The whole principle of freetrade stamps as ridiculous the theory that because our neighbor foolishly cuts himself off from the easy purchase

of the articles we have to sell, it is our business to cut ourselves off from the easy purchase of the articles he has to sell, and we wish to buy. We gave France much more reduction of duty than we got; but the reduction was in every instance a direct benefit to our consumers. The introduction of light wines, for example, made after awhile a very remarkable, and, on the whole, a very beneficial, change in the habits of our people. The heavier and more fiery drinks became almost disused by large classes of the population. The light wines of Bordeaux began to be familiar to almost every table; the portentous brandied ports, which carried gout in their very breath, were gradually banished. Some of the debates, however, on this particular part of the Budget recalled to memory the days of Colonel Sibthorp, and his dread of the importation of foreign ways among our countrymen. Many prophetic voices declared in the House of Commons that with the greater use of French wines would come the rapid adoption of what were called French morals; that the maids and matrons of England would be led by the treaty to the drinking of claret, and from the drinking of claret to the ways of the French novelist's odious heroine, Madame Bovary. Appalling pictures were drawn of the orgies to go on in the shops of confectioners and pastry-cooks who had a license to sell the light wines. The virtue of English women, it was insisted, would never be able to stand this new and terrible mechanism of destruction. She who was far above the temptations of the public-house would be drawn easily into the more genteel allurements of the wine-selling confectioner's shop; and in every such shop would be the depraved conventional foreigner, the wretch with a mustache and without morals, lying in wait to accomplish at last his long-boasted conquests of the blonde misses of England. One impassioned speaker, glowing into a genuine prophetic fury as he spoke, warned his hearers of the near approach of a time when a man, suddenly entering one of the accursed confectioners' shops in quest of the missing female members of his family, would find his wife lying drunk in one room and his daughter disgraced in another.

In spite of all this, however, Mr. Gladstone succeeded in carrying this part of his Budget. He carried, too, as far as

the House of Commons was concerned, his important measure for the abolition of the duty on paper. The duty on paper was the last remnant of an ancient system of finance which pressed severely on journalism. The stamp-duty was originally imposed with the object of checking the growth of seditious newspapers. It was reduced, increased, reduced again, and increased again, until in the early part of the century it stood at fourpence on each copy of a newspaper issued. In 1836 it was brought down to the penny, represented by the red stamp on every paper, which most of us can still remember. There was besides this a considerable duty-sixpence, or some such sum-on every advertisement in a newspaper. Finally, there was the heavy duty on the paper material itself. A journal, therefore, could not come into existence until it had made provision for all these factitious and unnecessary expenses. The consequence was that a newspaper was a costly thing. Its possession was the luxury of the rich; those who could af ford less had to be content with an occasional read of a paper. It was common for a number of persons to club together and take in a paper, which they read by turns, the general understanding being that he whose turn came last remained in possession of the journal. It was considered the fair compensation for his late reception of the news that he should come into the full proprietorship of the precious newspaper. The price of a daily paper then was uniformly sixpence; and no sixpenny paper contained anything like the news, or went to a tenth of the daily expense, which is supplied in the one case and undertaken in the other by the penny papers of our day. Gradually the burdens on journalism and on the reading public were reduced. The advertisement duty was abolished; in 1855 the stamp-duty was abolished; that is to say, the stamp was either removed altogether, or was allowed to stand as postage. On the strength of this reform many new and cheap journals were started. Two of them in London-the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Star-acquired influence and reputation. But the effect of the duty on the paper material still told heavily against cheap journalism. It became painfully evident that a newspaper could not be sold profitably for a penny while that duty remained, and therefore a powerful agitation was

set on foot for its removal. The agitation was carried on, not on behalf of the interests of newspaper speculation, but on behalf of the reading public, and of the education of the people. It is not necessary now to enter upon any argument to show that the publication of such a paper as the Daily News or the Daily Telegraph must be a matter of immense importance in popular education. But at that time there were still men who argued that newspaper literature could only be kept up to a proper level of instruction and decorum by being made factitiously costly. It was the creed of many that cheap newspapers meant the establishment of a daily propaganda of socialism, communism, red republicanism, blasphemy, bad spelling, and general immorality.

Mr. Gladstone undertook the congenial task of abolishing the duty on paper. He was met with strong opposition from both sides of the House. The paper manufacturers made it at once a question of protection to their own trade. They dreaded the competition of all manner of adventurous rivals under a free system. Many of the paper manufacturers had been staunch free-traders when it was a case of freetrade to be applied to the manufactures of other people; but they cried out against having the ingredients of the unwelcome chalice commended to their own lips. Vested interests in the newspaper business itself also opposed Mr. Gladstone. The high-priced and well-established journals did not by any means relish the idea of cheap and unfettered competition. They, therefore, preached without reserve the doctrine that in journalism cheap meant nasty, and that the only way to keep the English press pure and wholesome was to continue the monopoly to their own publications. The House of Commons is a good deal governed, directly and indirectly, by "interests." It is influenced by them directly, as when the railway interest, the mining interest, the brewing interest, or the landed interest, boldly stands up through its acknowledged representatives in Parliament to fight for its own hand. It is also much influenced indirectly. Every powerful interest in the House can contrive to enlist the sympathies and get the support of men who have no direct concern one way or another in some proposed measure, who know nothing about it, and do not want to be

troubled with any knowledge, and who are therefore easily led to see that the side on which some of their friends are arrayed must be the right side. There was a good deal of rallying up of such men to sustain the cause of the papermaking and journal-selling monopoly. The result was that although Mr. Gladstone carried his resolutions for the abolition of the excise on paper, he only carried them by dwindling majorities. The second reading was carried by a majority of 53; the third by a majority of only 9. The effect of this was to encourage some members of the House of Lords to attempt the task of getting rid of Mr. Gladstone's proposed reform altogether. An amendment to reject the resolutions repealing the tax was proposed by Lord Monteagle, and received the support of Lord Derby and of Lord Lyndhurst.

Lord Lyndhurst was then just entering on his eightyninth year. His growing infirmities made it necessary that a temporary railing should be constructed in front of his seat, in order that he might lean on it and be supported. But although his physical strength thus needed support, his speech gave no evidence of failing intellect. Even his voice. could hardly be said to have lost any of its clear, light, musical strength. He entered into a long and a very telling argument to show that although the peers had abandoned their claim to alter a money-bill, they had still a right to refuse their assent to a repeal of taxation, and that in this particular instance they were justified in doing so. There was not much, perhaps, in this latter part of the argument. Lord Lyndhurst fell back on some of his familiar alarms about the condition of Europe and the possible schemes of Louis Napoleon, and out of these he extracted reasons for contending that we ought to maintain unimpaired the revenue of the country, to be ready to meet emergencies, and encounter unexpected liabilities. In an ordinary time not much attention would be paid to criticism of this kind. It would be regarded as the duty of the Finance Minister, the Government, and the House of Commons to see that the wants of the coming year were properly provided for in taxation; and when the Government and the House of Commons had once decided that a certain amount was suf ficient, the House of Lords would hardly think that on it