As ours is the day when rioting is popular, and rebels in every country are modellers of government, it may be amusing to remember how those matters were managed in the last century. The history of the famous Excise scheme, which in its day convulsed England, and finally shook the most powerful of all ministers out of the most powerful of all cabinets, is amongst the curious anecdotes of a time full of eccentricity. Walpole was no more superior to the effects of prosperity than honester men. Long success had confirmed him in a belief of its perpetual power; and the idea that, with a court wholly at his disposal, with a Queen for his agent, a King almost for his subject, the peerage waiting his nod, and the commons in his pay, he could be cast down and shattered like a plaster image, seems never to have entered into his dreams. But in this plenitude of power, whether to exercise his supremacy, or for the mere want of something to do, it occurred to him to relieve the country gentlemen by reducing the land-tax to a shilling in the pound, turning the duty on tobacco and wine, then payable on importation, into inland duties,—that is, changing customs on those two commodities into excise. By which scheme, and the continuation of the salt-duty, he proposed to improve the revenue half a million a-year, so as to supply the abatement of the shilling in the pound. The plan seemed feasible, and it also appeared likely to attract popularity among the country gentlemen, who had frequently complained of the pressure of the land-tax—two shillings in the pound. The result, however, showed that a man may govern a court who is unequal to govern a people. The very mention of excise raised a universal storm,—all kinds of exaggerations flew through the land. The subject, at no time popular, was converted into a source of frantic indignation. The orators alleged, that if excise was once to be made a substitute for the land-tax, it might be made a substitute for every tax; that if it was laid on wine and tobacco, it would soon be laid on corn and clothing; that every man’s house would be at the mercy of excise-officers, whose numbers would amount to a standing army, and of the most obnoxious kind, an army of tax-gatherers; that liberty must perish; Magna Charta be not worth its own parchment; parliament be voted useless; and the monarch, who could extract every shilling from the pockets of his subjects under the pretext of an excise, might soon ride roughshod over the liberties of England. Petition on petition, of course, showered into parliament; the boroughs angrily advised their representatives to vote against the measure; and the towns and cities haughtily commanded their parliamentary delegates to resist all extension of the excise, however qualified, corrected, or modelled by the minister.