In the Cabinet that followed, headed by Lord Aberdeen, Gladstone succeeded Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position in which he was to make a great mark. In April, 1853, he introduced his first Budget, a marvel of ingenious statesmanship, in its highly successful effort to equalize taxation. It remitted various taxes which had pressed hard upon the poor and restricted business, and replaced them by applying the succession duty to real estate, increasing the duty on spirits, and extending the income tax. The latter Gladstone spoke of as an emergency tax, only to be applied in times of national danger, and presented a plan to extinguish it in 1860. His plan failed to work. Nearly fifty years have passed since then, and the income tax still remains, seemingly a fixed element of the British revenue system. [=Gladstone's Great Budget Speech=] Taken altogether, and especially in its expedients to equalize taxation, this first Budget of Mr. Gladstone may be justly called the greatest of the century. The speech in which it was introduced and expounded created an extraordinary impression on the House and the country. For the first time in Parliament figures were made as interesting as a fairy tale; the dry bones of statistics were invested with a new and potent life, and it was shown how the yearly balancing of the national accounts might be directed by and made to promote the profoundest and most fruitful principles of statesmanship. With such lucidity and picturesqueness was this financial oratory rolled forth that the dullest intellect could follow with pleasure the complicated scheme; and for five hours the House of Commons sat as if it were under the sway of a magician's wand. When Mr. Gladstone resumed his seat, it was felt that the career of the coalition Ministry was assured by the genius that was discovered in its Chancellor of the Exchequer. [=Gladstone's Powers as an Orator=] It was, indeed, to Gladstone's remarkable oratorical powers that much of his success as a statesman was due. No man of his period was his equal in swaying and convincing his hearers. His rich and musical voice, his varied and animated gestures, his impressive and vigorous delivery, great fluency, and wonderful precision of statement, gave him a power over an audience which few men of the century have enjoyed. His sentences, indeed, were long and involved, growing more so as his years advanced, but their fine choice of words, rich rhetoric, and eloquent delivery carried away all that heard him, as did his deep earnestness, and intense conviction of the truth of his utterances. We must pass rapidly over a number of years of Gladstone's career, through most of which he continued to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and to amaze and delight the country by the financial reforms effected in his annual Budgets. Between 1853 and 1866 those reforms represented a decrease in the weight of the burden of the national revenue amounting to £13,000,000.