d and _just_ tolerable
actual. Then in the same month he 'finished Palmer on the Articles,
deep, earnest, and generally trustworthy. Worked upon a notion of
private eucharistical devotions, to be chiefly compiled; and attended a
meeting about colonial bishoprics,' where he spoke but indifferently.

IV

NEW FISCAL POLICY

In 1841 the whigs in the expiring hours of their reign launched
parliament and parties upon what was to be the grand marking controversy
of the era. To remedy the disorder into which expenditure, mainly due to
highhanded foreign policy, had brought the national finance, they
proposed to reconstruct the fiscal system by reducing the duties on
foreign sugar and timber, and substituting for Wellington's corn law a
fixed eight shilling duty on imported wheat. The wiser heads, like Lord
Spencer, were aware that as an electioneering expedient the new policy
would bring them little luck, but their position in any case was
desperate. The handling of their proposals was curiously maladroit; and
even if it had been otherwise, ministerial repute alike for competency
and for sincerity was so damaged both, in the House of Commons and the
country, that their doom was certain. The reduction of the duty on
slave-grown sugar from foreign countries was as obnoxious to the
abolitionist as it was disadvantageous to the West Indian proprietors,
and both of these powerful sections were joined by the corn-grower, well
aware that his turn would come next. Many meetings took place at Sir
Robert Peel's upon the sugar resolutions, and Mr. Gladstone worked up
the papers and figures so as to be ready to speak if necessary. At one
of these meetings, by the way, he thought it worth while to write down
that Peel had the tradesmen's household books upon his desk--a
circumstance that he mentioned also to the present writer, when by
chance we found ourselves together in the same room fifty years later.

On May 10th, his speech on the sugar duties came off in due course. In
this speech he took the sound point that the new arrangement must act as
an encouragement to the slave trade, 'that monster which, while war,
pestilence, and famine were slaying their thousands, slew from year to
year with unceasing operation its tens of thousands.' As he went on, he
fell upon Macaulay for being member of a cabinet that was thus deserting
a cause in which Macaulay's father had been the