ely cheapened, and agrarian
outrages sprang up. The continent, impoverished by the war, no longer
required British goods for military purposes, and, as its own domestic
industries revived, ceased to absorb British products, flung in
profusion on its markets. Hence came a reduction of 16 per cent. in the
export trade, and of nearly 20 per cent. in the import trade, which
resulted in bankruptcies and the dismissal of workpeople. If we add to
these causes of distress, the influence of over-speculation, the
accession of disbanded soldiers to the ranks of the unemployed, and the
substitution of the factory system with machinery for domestic
manufactures with hand labour, we can partly understand why Great
Britain, never harried by invading armies, should have suffered more
than France itself from popular misery and disaffection for several
years after the restoration of peace.

[Pageheading: _VANSITTART'S FINANCE._]

The history of these years is mainly a history of social unrest, and
attempts to cure social evils by legislation or coercion. Liverpool and
his colleagues, with the possible exception of Eldon, were not bigoted
tories, and it is sometimes forgotten that among them, together with
Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and Vansittart, were Canning, Palmerston, and
Peel. One of the first parliamentary struggles was on the proposal of
the government to reduce the income tax from 10 to 5 per cent., and to
apply this half of it, producing about L7,500,000, towards the expense
of maintaining an army of 150,000 men. Since the income tax has become a
favourite of democratic economists, as pressing specially upon the rich,
we may be surprised to find that its total repeal was successfully
advocated by Henry Brougham, the leading democrat of that day--a man
whose noble services to progress and to humanity in the earlier part of
his career have been obscured by the inordinate vanity and unprincipled
egotism which he displayed in the later phases of his long public life.
He had entered parliament in 1810, and rapidly became the most active of
the opposition speakers. He now employed without scruple all the arts of
agitation, petition-framing, and parliamentary obstruction to achieve
his object, and succeeded, by the aid of bankers and country-gentlemen,
in defeating the government by a majority of thirty-seven. This vote
might be justified, more or less, on the principle laid down by Pitt,
that the income tax should be held in reserve as