experimenting long enough to enable our rulers, if they are at all fit for their duty, to have arrived at some positive results. Why should any "experiments" have been tried, if they were not to lead to such an end? We say deliberately, that no better opportunity than the present can occur for forcing on that revision of the taxation which almost every one believes to be necessary. The excise reformers--those who demand the repeal of the taxes on paper and on soap--those who wish the window duty abolished--those who advocate a further reduction of customs duties, and those who, like Mr Disraeli, desire an equitable adjustment of the burdens upon land--have all here a common ground to rest upon,--namely, the injustice or the inexpediency of our present fiscal regulations. We occupy the same ground in protesting against the continuance of the Income-Tax. Surely, with such general testimony from men of all parties against the continuance of the present heterogeneous and unsatisfactory arrangements, it is time that our statesmen should really bestir themselves, and announce to us upon what principles for the future our taxation is really to proceed. We cannot go on for ever robbing Peter to pay Paul. We cannot always submit to a perpetual shifting of burdens, as if the people of this country were so many dromedaries, to have their hourly capabilities of relief determined by the caprice of their drivers. Yet such, in effect, is the present state of matters; and such it will continue, unless we are resolved to avail ourselves of an opportunity like the present, and force our governors, as is the clear right of the governed, to explain and justify the principles upon which their method of taxation is framed. Unless this be done, we are indeed a degraded people; because, when every class believes that it suffers injustice, to submit tamely to that, with constitutional remedies in our hands, would argue a pusillanimity utterly unworthy of a free and enlightened nation. We have long foreseen that some such crisis as the present must arrive. It was, indeed, inevitable, from the time when the two rival Premiers began to bid against each other for popular support, and to make the British nation a chess-board for the purpose of exhibiting their individual dexterity. The cleverer man of the two lost the game by over-finessing. But before that occurred, enormous mischief had been done. All was disorder; and the conqueror at this moment does not see his way to a proper readjustment of the pieces. But order we must have, and arrangement, and that speedily too, if the functions of the State are to go on tranquilly and unimpeded. Men are tired of being used as actual impassive puppets. They want to have a reason for the moves to which they have lately been subjected; and a reason they will have, sooner or later, let Ministers palter as they may.