Lord Stanley has announced, with the candour and straightforwardness which become a lofty character, what are the principles on which he is prepared to accept office. He was instantly to have taken off the Income Tax, which presses so severely on the industrious classes, and supplied the deficiency, which would amount to about £3,000,000, by a moderate import duty on all _foreign_ commodities. The effect of these measures would have been incalculable: it is hard to say whether they would have benefitted the nation most by the burdens which were taken off, or those which were laid on. The first would relieve the most hard-working and important part of the middle class, and let loose above £5,000,000 a-year, now absorbed by the Income Tax, in the encouragement of domestic industry; the second would produce the still more important effect of enabling the nation to bear the burden of the necessary taxation, and compel the foreigners, who now so liberally furnish us with everything we desire _tax-free_, to bear the same proportion of our burdens which we do of theirs. A large part of the taxes of Prussia, and all the Continental States--the whole of the American--is derived from import duties; and in this way our artisans and manufacturers are compelled to pay a considerable proportion, probably not less than a half, of the national burdens of these states. Meanwhile their rude produce is admitted duty free to our harbours, so that we get no part of our revenue from them. They levy _thirty per cent_ on our goods, and the whole of that goes to swell their revenue, to the relief of their subjects; we levy _two_ or _three per cent_ on their grain, and the miserable pittance is scarcely perceptible amidst the immense load of our taxation. The benefit of the fiscal changes which Lord Stanley proposed would have been great, immediate, and felt by the most meritorious and heavily burdened class of the community--the middle class; the burden for which it would have been commuted would have afforded a certain amount of protection to native industry, so as to relieve the most suffering classes engaged in production, and that at the cost of a burden on consumers so trifling as to have been altogether imperceptible. To illustrate the extreme injustice of the Income Tax, and the way in which it presses on the most industrious and hard-worked, as well as important class of the community, we subjoin a Table of Schedule D (Trades and Professions) for the year ending 5th April 1848; and we take that year in preference to the subsequent ones, to avoid the objection of the commercial crisis of 1848 having rendered the view partial and deceptive.[61] From this important Table it appears that the sums received from persons _under_ £500 a-year were--