out that during these years we had not only abolished, and put out of reach, several important taxes for the remission of which there was no urgent necessity, but that, in order to do so, we had actually incurred a considerable deficit. Of late years not only the leaders of the Opposition, but some of the highest financial authorities on the Ministerial side of the House—including Lord Overstone, Lord Monteagle, and Earl Grey—had denounced as most impolitic the hand-to-mouth system pursued by Mr Gladstone, and had urged the necessity of framing the estimates with a view to obtaining a substantial yearly surplus. These were the considerations which led the House of Commons last summer to adopt the resolution to which the Chancellor of the Exchequer now appeals in justification of his Budget; and they must not be forgotten when examining how far the financial programme of the present year is in accordance with that resolution. A new critic now takes the field against Mr Gladstone, and adds his protest to those which have already been made by the other leading financial authorities. In a new edition of his work on Taxation, that veteran Liberal and political economist, Mr M’Culloch, severely criticises the recent financial policy of the Government, and endorses with his high and obviously impartial authority the opinions by which that policy has been so often combated by the Conservatives. To all the special features of Gladstonian finance Mr M’Culloch is opposed. He is strongly in favour of the maintenance of a good yearly surplus, as an indispensable feature of a prudent system of finance; he condemns as most impolitic that narrowing of the area of taxation which Mr Gladstone extols as a “simplification of the tariff;” and he moreover objects, in the strongest terms, to the manner in which that principle of “simplification” has been applied.