His other great achievement was that of reorganizing and simplifying the fiscal arrangements of the country. It was this that first so highly recommended him to the Queen and Prince. They were good economists in their own private affairs, and wished for good order in national revenue and expenditure also. When Peel succeeded Melbourne, huge deficits were of constant occurrence; the revenue was falling, and the expenditure was increasing. Peel evolved order out of this chaos. He inaugurated the era of financial reform. In 1845 import duties were levied on no fewer than 1,142 separate articles. Peel and his pupil and successor, Mr. Gladstone, reduced the number to about five, and Peel was the first to discover the productiveness and utility of the income tax, as a means of raising revenue. The Queen most cordially supported him in his financial reforms, and authorized him to announce in the House of Commons that she did not wish to be exempted from the operation of the income tax. We owe to him more than to any other of the Queen’s Prime Ministers that the national accounts almost invariably show a balance on the right side. Peel was a man of whom it was said that it was necessary to know him intimately to know him at all; and this intimate friendship existed between him and the Queen and her husband from the time he became Prime Minister, in 1841. It was an inestimable advantage for the Royal couple that their political tutor (if one may use the expression) in the early years of the reign was changed from the kindly but frivolous and complaisant Melbourne to the earnest and strenuous Peel, a man gifted beyond most with what Matthew Arnold has called “high seriousness,” a quality without some portion of which no character has any solid foundation. Peel’s Premiership was a national blessing from his political and economical achievements while he held the reins of power; and it was also a blessing from its effect on the Queen’s political education. [17] This generosity was thoroughly in keeping with his character. After Melbourne’s death, Greville tells how he occupied his room at Brocket, and, “poking about” to see what he could find, came upon several MS. books of the late Prime Minister. In one of these was recorded Melbourne’s settled determination “always to stand by his friend,” and his conviction that it was more necessary to do so “when they were in the wrong than when they were in the right.” [18] Lord Melbourne, to whom in 1839 Repeal of the Corn Laws had been “the maddest of all mad projects,” and who became a Free Trader, for party purposes, in 1841, spoke of Peel’s change of view at a dinner party at the Palace with vehemence which even the presence of a lady, and that lady his Sovereign, could not restrain. “Ma’am, it’s a damned dishonest act” (Greville, vol. v. p. 359). CHAPTER VIII. STOCKMAR.