Mr. Gladstone introduced his Budget on the 3rd of May. The income, he said, had been £67,812,000 and the expenditure £66,474,000, leaving a surplus of £1,338,000. His estimated loss from remission of taxes had been very slightly below the actual loss, except in the case of Income Tax, for the wealth of the nation was now accumulating so rapidly, that a penny Income Tax, instead of producing £1,000,000, as had always been the calculation, produced £1,400,000. For the coming year Mr. Gladstone estimated, on the existing basis of taxation, a revenue of £67,575,000. His probable expenditure, from an increase of £78,000 in Estimates, he set down at £66,225,000, so that he had an estimated surplus of £1,350,000 to dispose of. He therefore repealed the timber duties, equalised the duties on wines in bottle and in wood, abolished the duty on pepper, and made a considerable reduction in the tax on carriages. He calculated that there would be a loss of £502,000 on the conversion of debt, so that he would, with these changes in taxation, be left with a surplus of £286,000. The financial debates simply ratified Mr. Gladstone’s schemes; but they were rendered memorable by Mr. J. S. Mill’s celebrated speech urging on the House the necessity of reducing the National Debt as a matter of duty to posterity. One of his chief arguments was based on the thesis of Mr. Stanley Jevons that succeeding generations must, at the existing rate of consumption, face a failure in the coal supply of the country owing to the exhaustion of its mines.[245]
Early in the year the Government obtained the consent of Parliament to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, in order to enable the Executive to deal with the Fenian conspiracy. Mr. Mill, however, though he supported the Ministry, very pertinently observed that, after it got fresh powers, it must not go asleep, as it had done for eighteen years, over Irish grievances. The Bill was passed on the 17th of February. The next step was to obtain the Queen’s assent immediately. As her Majesty was at Osborne, this took time, and the Irish Executive could not brook delay. As soon as the House of Lords had read the Bill a third time, a telegram was sent to Earl Granville, who was at Osborne, announcing the result, upon the receipt of which the Queen instantly signed the document authorising the Commissioners to give her assent to the measure. In order to allow time for bringing her authorisation to London, the sitting of the House of Lords was suspended until 11 o’clock p.m., when it was calculated that the special train with the Queen’s messenger would arrive in London. Time, however, rolled on, but no messenger appeared. The hour of midnight struck. Then the clock chimed the half-hour after twelve, when there entered a clerk bearing a despatch-box, which the Chancellor nervously opened and from which he took out the long-expected document. The House of Commons having been summoned, and about fifty members answering the call, at twenty minutes to one o’clock on the Sunday morning the Queen’s sanction was proclaimed, and the Bill became law. Probably no statute was ever passed with so much celerity as this Irish Coercion Bill—the first Act of the new Parliament. The powers of the Act had indeed been put into operation in anticipation of its passing, and on the 16th of February a large number of arrests were made in Dublin and its vicinity. The mischief done by the alarms of this period was, however, irretrievable, but, with the cessation of active movements on the part of the Fenians, a feeling of contempt for the conspiracy took the place of panic. For a few months, therefore, the country appeared to subside into its usual tranquillity.
On the 21st of March the Commissioners who had been investigating the negro outbreak in Jamaica finished their inquiry. The feeling in London was as violently in favour of repressive measures against the negroes, as it had been in favour of the Southerners during the American Civil War, and against the German Powers during the war in Sleswig-Holstein. It was therefore with some chagrin that the Party of Panic discovered that the Commissioners extenuated the action of the negroes. There had been a planned resistance to the Queen’s authority in Jamaica; but the chief cause was
MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS HELENA. (See p. 262.)
not merely the desire for free land, but the want of confidence of the black population in the tribunals before which cases affecting their interests were tried. It was shown that, if the insurgents had been temporarily successful, the suppression of the rebellion would have been attended with greater loss of life and property than had been recorded. Hence praise was awarded to Governor Eyre for the vigour and promptitude with which he put down the rising. But, on the other hand, the Commissioners strongly condemned the Authorities for continuing martial law longer than was desirable, for inflicting excessive punishments, for awarding the death penalty far oftener than was necessary, for sentencing people to be flogged with reckless barbarity, and for burning 1,000 houses in a wanton and cruel manner. This Report, on the whole, justified the first suspicions of calm-minded men at home. The Governor had very skilfully put down the rising before it grew from a riot to a revolution. Then, carried away by “the White Terror” which Lord Canning had so coolly withstood at Calcutta during the Indian Mutiny, he had let the colonial authorities violate the common law, and revel in judicial murders and other hideous barbarities which are inevitable, though regrettable, incidents in the suppression of all servile revolts.
PRINCESS CHRISTIAN.