the constitution of his country and in her European policy. To
describe the acts he carried would almost be to write the history of
recent British legislation; to pass a judgment upon their merits
would be foreign to the scope of this sketch: it is only to three
remarkable groups of measures that reference can here be made.

The first of these three groups includes the financial reforms
embodied in a series of fourteen budgets between the years 1853 and
1882, the most famous of which were the budgets of 1853 and 1860.
In the former Mr. Gladstone continued the work begun by Peel by
reducing and simplifying the customs duties. The deficiency in
revenue thus caused was supplied by the enactment of less oppressive
imposts, and particularly by resettling the income tax, and by the
introduction of a succession duty on real estate. The preparation
and passing of this very technical and intricate Succession Duty Act
was a most laborious enterprise, of which Mr. Gladstone used to
speak as the severest mental strain he had ever undergone.

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The budget of 1860, among other changes, abolished the paper duty,
an immense service to the press, which excited the hostility of the
House of Lords. They threw out the measure, but in the following
year Mr. Gladstone forced them to submit. His achievements in the
field of finance equal, if they do not surpass, those of Peel, and
are not tarnished, as in the case of Pitt, by the recollection of
burdensome wars. To no minister can so large a share in promoting
the commercial and industrial prosperity of modern England, and in
the reduction of her national debt, be ascribed.