Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/433

A.D. 1733.] land tax of two shilling in the pound; and at that announcement all ideas of the dishonesty of robbing the fund set apart for justice towards posterity vanished, and the bill was carried by a majority of one hundred and ten. This convenient door being once set open, the sinking fund became common ministerial prey, and sank into a farce and a delusion. The very next year one million two hundred thousand pounds, being the produce of the fund, was swooped up, and in 1735 and 1736 ministers could not even wait for its coming in, but mortgaged it and took it by anticipation; and thus continued the fate of the so-called sinking fund down to our time, when some efforts have been made to restore its legitimate action, but with little sensible effect. Walpole, at that time, justified his robbery by asserting that the public debt was a public blessing, and a grand guarantee for the protestant succession; that it was well known that if the pretender came in he would wipe out the debt, the bulk of which had been accumulated in opposing him, and therefore it was folly to reduce this security. The pretender was accordingly drawn in the allegory of Addison as a young man with a sword in one hand and a sponge in the other; and the fundholders fostered this notion by submitting in 1717 to a reduction of interest. Better, they thought, one per cent. less than the abolition of so convenient a market for speculating and jobbing.

But Walpole had another scheme for increasing the revenue, which was an extension of the excise. The excise duties were first levied under the commonwealth, and, as we have shown, were restored at the restoration and made a permanent property of the crown, in return for the exemption of the landed gentry from the feudal dues which they owed to the state by original tenure for the very possession of their demesnes. At the time of the bargain betwixt the aristocracy and Charles II., these duties amounted only to two hundred and ninety-four thousand nine hundred and fifty pounds; but in William's reign they rose to nearly one million annually, and in queen Anne's to nearly two millions. They had now reached three millions two hundred thousand pounds annually. It was whilst the public were feeling the gradual increase of this item of taxation very sensibly, that they were alarmed by the news, which the opposition sounded abroad with all diligence, that ministers were about immediately to bring fresh articles under the operation of this tax, which was levied on articles of popular consumption. At the very moment that the house of commons was discussing the question of the sinking fund Pulteney exclaimed, "But, sir, there is another thing, a very terrible affair impending! A monstrous project! Yea, more monstrous than has ever yet been represented! It is such a project as has struck terror into the minds of most gentlemen within this house, and of all men without doors! I mean, sir, that monstrous thing, the excise!—that plan of arbitrary power which is expected to be laid before this house in the present session!"

Mr. Pelham, on the part of the ministry, advised the house to wait till the plan was disclosed, and not to enter into debates about what they knew nothing. But the alarm was given, and it flew through the country with lightning rapidity. "A general excise is coming!" was the cry. "A tax on all articles of consumption; a burthen to grind the country to powder; a plot to overthrow the constitution and establish in its place a baleful tyranny." The opposition had now got a most popular subject of attack on the ministry, and it prosecuted it vigorously. The "Craftsman" thundered incessantly on the subject, and the oppressive manner in which this tax had been collected, and the wide range of articles, used chiefly by the poor, on which it might be rapidly extended, fully justified the alarm. We may draw a lively idea of the feeling of even the most educated at that time against the excise laws, from the definition of excise given by Dr. Johnson in the first edition of his "Dictionary" in 1755:—"A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid."

It was not, therefore, a vain alarm which was raised by the opposition. The response to its tocsin cry was the best evidence of the dislike to this tax, and the distrust of its limitation which pervaded the whole community. There were petitions sent up from many towns and many constitutional bodies, including the city and merchants of London, against any extension of the excise laws, in any form, and on any pretence whatever."

Sir Robert Walpole was not a man, with his huge standing majority, to be readily frightened from his purpose. On the 11th of March, 1733, he brought forward his project in a speech in which he put forth all his ability, and that under a well-maintained air of moderation. He took advantage of the alarm that the tax was to be general, and certainly with an effective skill, by representing the falsity of that declaration, and the very slight and limited nature of his real proposal. Adverting to what he called the common slander of his having intended to propose a general excise, he said—"I do most unequivocally assert that no such scheme ever entered my head, or, for what I know, the head of any man I am acquainted with. My thoughts have been confined solely to the duties on wine and tobacco; and it was the frequent advices I had of the shameful frauds committed in these two branches that turned my attention to a remedy for this growing evil. I shall for the present confine myself to the tobacco trade."

He then detailed the various frauds on the revenue in tobacco, which he stated were of such extent and frequence, that the gross average produce of the tax was seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds, but the nett average only a hundred and sixty thousand pounds. The remedy which he proposed was to transfer this revenue from the customs to the excise. That the same might afterwards be applied to wine, a system of warehousing for re-exportation or placing in bond was proposed, which, he said, "would tend to make London a free port, and, by consequence, the market of the world." He held out the expectation that the success of this plan would render unnecessary the land tax, and thus enable the government entirely to dispense with that. "And this," exclaimed Walpole, "is the scheme which has been represented in so dreadful and terrible a light—this the monster, the many-headed monster, which was to devour the people, and commit such ravages over the whole nation."

But all this art, this affected simplicity, did not deceive