eir amount in a manner which he proceeded to
explain; and after accounting for L200,000, the balance of the surplus
he intended to apply to the reduction of the stamp on newspapers. The
duty minus the discount was fourpence, which he proposed to reduce to a
penny, and to give of course no discount. The reader must not suppose
from the foregoing, however, that all the proprietors of newspapers of
that day paid the duty; on the contrary, the large majority evaded it in
every possible way. The measure in fact was intended as much as a
protection to the revenue as anything else, for the sale of unstamped
newspapers throughout the country had become so extensive that no series
of prosecutions was found effectual to put them down. Every sheet, it is
true, professed to bear on it the printer's name; but the name so
appended was in six cases out of eight a false one. Exchequer processes
were issued; all the power of the law was set in motion; in the course
of three weeks three hundred persons had been imprisoned for selling
unstamped papers in the streets, but without in the slightest degree
repressing the illegal sale. The Chancellor argued that the loss which
the revenue would sustain in the first instance would be more than
compensated by the enormous increase of duty to be obtained from the
enlarged circulation; from the additional duty arising from the greater
consumption of paper; and from the very large increase which might be
expected from the produce of the duty on advertisements.

The opponents of the measure were of three classes: first, those who
looked upon the proposal as radical and subversive; secondly, those who
because a reduction is suggested in one quarter invariably consider it
the correct thing to propose it in another; and lastly, the owners of
the established newspapers of the day. The arguments of the first class
assumed the following form: "In proportion as any political party
approaches more or less towards pure democracy and the right divine of
mere numbers, its interests will require that the means should be
increased of disseminating among the lower classes, and as nearly
gratuitously as possible, the exciting and poisonous food which is at
last to end in the revolutionary fever."[113] The second class, strange
to say, rested their hopes in this instance on the singularly slippery
basis of _soap_. Sir C. Keightley moved (on the 20th of June) that
instead of diminishing the stamp duty on newspapers,