enormously increased the food-producing resources of the country. [Sidenote: Walpole's home government.] For two years the ascendancy of Walpole was unquestioned. He was enabled to turn his thoughts to domestic improvements. English was substituted, certainly most reasonably, for the ancient Law Latin in all legal proceedings, to the grief it is said of some conservative lawyers, and against the opposition of most of the judges. There was a Committee of Inquiry also into the condition of public prisons, which brought many revolting horrors to light. Both in the Fleet and Marshalsea torture by thumbscrew and otherwise was constant, and the condition of poor prisoners who could not bribe the gaolers was inconceivably horrid. Forty or fifty of them, for instance, were locked up for the night in a cell not sixteen feet square. Gaol-fever and famine were constantly destroying them, so that the deaths at one prison were frequently eight or ten a day. [Sidenote: His financial measures. 1733.] But it was as a financier that Walpole was most favourably known, and somewhat strangely it was a great financial reform in the year 1733 that almost brought him to ruin. Walpole was desirous of lessening even the weak opposition by which he was confronted in Parliament; and in the hope of attracting to himself the country gentlemen, he appealed, in accordance with his usual principle, to their love of money, and sought some way to lessen the Land Tax. For this purpose he suggested an excise upon salt. This must have been contrary to his own convictions. He could not have been ignorant how important an article salt is in many manufactures, how necessary an article of purchase even among the poorest. He was in fact taxing the poor and the manufacturing classes for the sake of winning the landed interest, which would be called upon to pay a land tax of one instead of two shillings. The new duty was carried, but by no large majority. The chief argument against it was that it was a step towards a general excise, which, because it seemed to infringe on the rights of the subject by giving revenue officers the right of entering houses, was much detested, and regarded as a badge of servitude. Although the tax upon salt was not really intended as a beginning of a general excise, it was nevertheless true that Walpole had a scheme of that nature in his mind: for it was found after a year's experience that the new tax upon salt fell short by two-thirds of the sum required to admit of the reduction of the Land Tax to one shilling. It was to a new measure of excise that Walpole looked to supply the deficiency. The excisable articles at that time were malt, salt, and distilleries, and the produce of the tax in 1733 was about £3,200,000. When Walpole's project of extending the excise got wind it proved most repugnant to the people. Numerous meetings were held, and many members were instructed to vote against any such attempt. But when the project