XXXVIII. 1839. CHAP. that it was evident that the limits of indirect taxation had been reached; for the Chancellor of the Exchequer had, in May 1840, imposed 5 per cent additional on Customs and Excise, and 10 per cent on assessed taxes, and the result had been in the highest degree illustrative of the real state of the country, and causes of the embarrassments of the Treasury. For the estimated increase on the Customs and Excise was £1,895,000; whereas the actual increase was only £206,000-being, instead of 5 per cent, but little more than one half per cent; whereas the increase on the assessed taxes was £311,357, being day, ii. 314, 114 per cent-considerably more than had been expected. Parl. Deb. It was evident, therefore, that the limits of indirect May 10, 1840; Ann. taxation, for the time at least, had been reached, and Reg. 1840, 136, 137. that nothing remained, in Sir Robert Peel's words, but the" dire scourge of direct taxation." 1 1 Double 32. 344; perils of the various quarters. This state of things was the more alarming, that while Increased the chief sources of revenue were thus visibly failing, or country in had reached their extreme limit, the public necessities, owing to the state of the national affairs in many parts of the world, loudly called for a great increase in the national armaments by sea and land. Affairs were so imminent in the Levant that a collision between the English and French fleets in that quarter might be hourly expected. Canada had recently before been in open rebellion; the West Indies were only hindered by weakness from following its example; a great and costly XXXVIII. 1339. war, fraught with imminent danger, had been waged in CHAP Affghanistan; hostilities was going on on a great scale with the Chinese empire; and at home an insurrection from the Chartists had recently taken place, and was again threatened. On all sides the Government was assailed with applications for ships, men, and money; yet where to find them, with a growing deficit in the revenue, which had come now to exceed two millions a-year, and in a country where the limits of indirect taxation had evidently been reached, seemed an impossibility. 33. the general opinion on the subject. The country distinctly perceived their perilous circumstances, and they generally ascribed them to the imbe- Injustice of cility and want of business habits in the Government, which was almost entirely composed of the Whig nobility. The opinion, in consequence, had become general in all ranks, excepting their own immediate dependants, that an entire change of government had become necessary to face the public necessities, that the administration of public affairs by a few Whig families was out of date, and that a large infusion of the commercial interests of the country into the Cabinet had become indispensable. The opinion, in particular, was all but universal, that they were especially deficient in knowledge of finances, and that to that the deplorable state of the Exchequer was to be ascribed. There can be no doubt that there was much injustice in these judgments. The Whig Ministry was by no means responsible for the disastrous state of the finances—at least, not in a greater degree than their opponents had been. They had carried retrenchment and reduction of the national armaments by sea and land to the most extreme point, and increased neither till the public necessities rendered it absolutely indispensable. They had given in, it is true, to the desperate plunge of the penny postage; but in so doing the House of Commons had cordially supported them, and the magnitude of the general distress probably at that period XXXVIII. 1839. CHAP. rendered some alleviating measure indispensable. The true cause of the penury of the Exchequer, as of the suffering of the nation, was the establishment of a monetary system entirely dependent on the retention of gold, which, in seasons of scarcity, it was impossible to retain; but that, though by far the greatest mistake of the age, and the parent of boundless disasters, was not in a peculiar manner the fault of the Government, but was shared with them by the greater part of the House of Commons and a decided majority of the Conservative Opposition. 34. crease of the army in 1839. The alarming state of the country after the riots at Slight in Birmingham and Newport, and the incessant demands for additional troops to Canada, the West Indies, and India, from the important events of which they had become the theatre, led the Government to propose a slight increase of 5000 men to the military force of the country, by raising the strength of each regiment of infantry from 739 to 800 men. Small as this addition was, and evident as was the necessity under which it was proposed, it was strongly opposed by Mr Hume and the Radical party. The effect of this vote was to raise the military force of the country, including India, to 109,818, of whom 27,000 were charged on the revenues of the latter country, leaving 82,000 to be provided for by Great March 9, Britain. This force was, in 1840, increased to 121,112 men, of whom 28,213 were employed in India, and charged on its finances, leaving 92,899 for whose maintenance the country at home was to provide. Mr Hume 1 Parl. Deb. strongly objected to this increase, and moved that it 1100; Ann. should be reduced to 81,319 men; but the larger numReg. 1839, ber was carried by a majority of 92, the numbers being 1840. lii. 1086, 282. 35. Extreme weakness of the navy. 100 to 8.1 Small as this force was for a country involved in a desperate conflict in India and China, and threatened with an immediate rupture with France, which had 300,000 disposable men under arms, the state of the navy at the same XXXVIII. 1840. period was still more alarming. Lord Colchester brought CHAP. this important subject under the notice of the house on 6th February 1840, and, referring to the Admiralty reports just published, he stated that our whole force on the home station consisted of three guard-ships, manned by a third of their complement, and therefore incapable of putting to sea; one frigate of 36 guns, and some schooners. There were two sail of the line at Lisbon, twelve in the Mediterranean, and one or two in other quarters of the globe-in all only twenty. On the other hand, the official reports proved that the Russians had 28 sail of the line, 18 frigates, and 39 smaller vessels, carrying in all 3672 guns and 30,087 men, in the Baltic, and 13 sail of the line, 11 frigates, and 17 smaller vessels in the Black Sea, carrying 1956 guns and 14,300 men. France at the same period had 34,000 seamen in the royal service, being only 1000 less than the number in this country, and 40 sail of the line ready for sea, of which 20 were afloat and fully manned, besides 12 frigates, 20 steamers, and 90 smaller vessels. Thus France, which had no colonial dependency except Algiers, had as large a naval force as Great Britain, whose fleets were necessarily scattered over the globe, in defence of her immense. colonial possessions. Lord Minto, the First Lord of the Admiralty, admitted, in his place in Parliament, "that we had not ships enough in commission to cope with the whole Russian fleet, if that fleet were also in commission, and prepared to take the seas against us; but it was not necessary that we should be in such a situation at this moment." What rendered this state of things peculiarly alarming was, that the naval establishment, in every one particular, was less at this time than it had been in 1792, when the population was not a half, nor its resources a fourth, of what they had since become, while our colonial dependencies, requiring defence in every quarter of the globe, had more than doubled since the former period; and so far from being at peace, we were XXXVIII. 1840. CHAP. engaged in a serious war with the greatest power in Asia, and on the verge of one with the greatest in Europe. It has been truly said, that on looking back to the extraordinary infatuation of these times, and the enormous perils with which it was attended, we feel as if reflecting on the li. 1279, 1 Parl. Deb. movements of a somnambulist on the edge of a precipice, whom a single false step might at any moment have precipitated into the abyss.1* 1314. 36. the aboli Serious as these considerations were, and pregnant, to Outery for the prophetic eye, with disaster in future times, they were, tion of the in those days of pacific occupation and severe distress, Corn Laws. less generally interesting than such topics as promised, however remotely, relief to the universal suffering. Of these agitations, the cry for the abolition of the Corn Laws had now become the loudest and most threatening, both from the quarters in which it was heard and the privations in which it originated. It is very evident now to what cause the extreme vehemence of the outcry on this subject had been owing. It arose from the extraordinary * COMPARATIVE STATE OF THE NAVY, POPULATION, EXPORTS, AND IMPORTS -JAMES'S Naval History, ii. 404; BARROW'S Anson, App. 424; PORTER'S Parl. Tables for 1838. |