He had collected £54,025,000 of revenue, or £1,035,000 in excess of what he had counted on. He had spent £51,171,000, which, in spite of military operations, was less by £1,012,000 than he had estimated. His balance in hand from the past year was £2,854,000. For the coming year his estimates must necessarily be increased by additional military outlay,[168] which would bring up his estimated expenditure to £56,189,000. As the revenue he could depend upon from existing taxes was only £53,349,000, he had therefore a deficit of £2,840,000. Had there been no need to increase his estimates,[169] he might have had a surplus of £1,166,000 for the remission of taxation. As things stood, how was the deficit to be met? Not by a loan, answered Mr. Gladstone, because no nation had mortgaged its industry to such a frightful extent as England, whose National Debt of £750,000,000 exceeded that of all countries in the world put together. Without pledging themselves to pay all future war charges out of the revenue of each year, Mr. Gladstone said it was as yet possible for the House of Commons “to put a stout heart upon the matter, and to determine that so long as these burdens are bearable, and so long as the supplies necessary for the service of the year can be raised within the year, so long we will not resort to the system of loans.” The expenses of a war, he observed, “are the moral check which it has pleased the Almighty to impose upon the ambition and the lust of conquest that are inherent in nations.” He therefore proposed to increase the Income Tax by one-half, but to collect the whole of the increase in the first six months of 1854; in other words, he doubled the tax in the first half year. He was assailed on two grounds. The Tories protested against the doctrine of meeting war expenditure out of current revenue, and they taunted him with the failure of his scheme for the conversion of the debt,[170] which, they pretended, had been disastrous. “The next Party conflict,” wrote Prince Albert in a letter to Stockmar on the 18th of April, “will be upon finance. Gladstone wants to pay for the war out of the current revenue, so long as he does not require more than ten millions sterling above the ordinary expenditure, and to increase the taxes for the purpose. The Opposition are for borrowing--that is, increasing the debt--and do not wish to impose in the meantime any further burdens on themselves. The former course is manly, statesmanlike, and honest; the latter is convenient, cowardly, perhaps popular. We shall see.”[171] This is a masterly summary of the great financial controversy that raged throughout the Session of 1854. It leaves nothing more to be said save this, that when Mr. Gladstone explained his second or War Budget (8th of May), after war had been declared, his eloquence carried the country in favour of his policy. He obtained his war expenditure by doubling the Income Tax and increasing