Most financiers, and all sound ones, in such circumstances, would devote the surplus of revenue which might accrue to redressing the adverse balance of former years. But Mr Gladstone belongs to a new school. He leaves the balances to come right as they may, or bequeaths them as an embarrassment to his successor; while he goes on in his seemingly endless process of devising financial alterations, which always leave him deeper in the mire. He loves to carry every inch of canvass—he crowds all sail as he drives his financial pinnace through strange waters; but he has shipped so many seas that the Exchequer has become waterlogged. He had better bale out the water before he goes any further. But this is precisely what he will not do. He must have a “sensation” budget. He must reduce some branches of the revenue and experiment with more. Already he lifts up a corner of the curtain to give us a glimpse of the grand tableau of jugglery which he has in store for us; and in due time the House will be wheedled and overwhelmed by the suave rhetoric of the great financial juggler. Possibly, however, the country will think that it has had too much of this already. It thinks of the cheap paper and cheap wines, and cannot see anything in these changes to atone for a deficit of seven millions and a half. Mr Gladstone’s abolition of the paper-duties was done not only at a wrong time, but in a wrong way. He not only landed himself in a deficit, but he landed the papermakers in a dilemma. He struck off the excise-duty on the one hand and the import-duty on paper on the other, and called it “free trade;” but while making free trade in the manufactured article, he ought to have taken care that there should be free trade likewise in the raw material. Several Continental countries send their paper, untaxed, to compete in the English markets with the produce of our own paper-mills, while at the same time they place a prohibitory duty on the export to our shores of rags. Our papermakers do not object to fair competition, but they object to be subjected by legislative enactment to so serious a disadvantage. If the crop of cotton in America were to fall off in extent (as it has done during this civil war), and the Americans, when peace is restored, were to place (as they have talked of doing) a prohibitory duty upon the export of cotton, while we did not retaliate by placing an import-duty on the manufactured article from their ports, what would our manufacturers think of this sort of “free trade?” Why, such a state of matters would produce a calamity in our manufacturing districts equal to that under which we are now suffering, and ruin the cotton industry in this country permanently. Yet this is the condition of affairs which Mr Gladstone voluntarily chooses to impose upon our paper manufacture, in deference to the clamour and exhortations of his Radical friends. What has become of the touching picture which the