Confidence is not wanting in certain quarters, though capability may be a matter of more dubiety. Mr M'Gregor, M.P. for Glasgow, and concocter of the famous free-trade tables, is ready at a moment's notice to produce a new financial scheme, founded upon unerring data, and promising a large increase of the revenue. Cobden has another scheme on the irons with the same view, benevolently proposing to lay the land of Great Britain under further contribution. We believe that, after the experience of the past, few people will be likely to accept either budget without considerable hesitation. Both gentlemen have committed a slight mistake in imitating Joseph's interpretation of the dream of Pharaoh; they should have inversed the order, and given the years of famine the precedence of the years of plenty. The truth is, that it is a very simple matter to take off existing taxes, but marvellously difficult to impose new ones. Granting that a certain sum is required for the annual engagements and expenditure of the country, no wise statesman would abolish any source of revenue, without, at the same time, introducing another equivalent. Our error has been abolition without any equivalent at all. It is all very well to say, that by reducing import duties upon particular articles you stimulate the power of production: that stimulus may be given--individuals may in consequence be enriched--and yet still there is a defalcation of revenue. This, however, is the best case which can be pointed out for the reduction of duties, and can only apply, in any degree, to imports of raw material. The greater part of Sir Robert Peel's tariff is founded upon a principle directly opposite to this. He removed import duties from articles which, so far from stimulating the power of production at home, absolutely crushed that power, by bringing in foreign to supersede British labour. Thus, in both cases, there was a sacrifice. In the one there was, at all events, a direct sacrifice of revenue; in the other, a sacrifice of revenue, and a sacrifice of labour also. The imposition (and the word is appropriate either in its plain or its metaphorical meaning) of the property and income tax, which gave Sir Robert Peel the power of making his commercial experiments, proved inadequate to replace the deficit. The promised gain was as visionary as the dividends on certain railway lines projected about the same period, and no new source of national income has been opened to supply the loss.