After many harassing consultations, the Queen felt that it was impossible for the Cabinet to resist the growing agitation against the Income Tax. The coalition between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli was too ominous to be disregarded; and so, on the 10th of February, she wrote to King Leopold, “We think we shall be able to reduce the Income Tax and yet maintain an efficient navy, and the _organisation_ of the army, which is even more important than the number of the men.”[296] When Sir George Cornewall Lewis brought in his Budget on the 13th of February, it was found that he reduced the Income Tax from 1s. 4d. to 7d. in the pound; but of course this was still 2d. above the peace limit fixed in 1853. The complaint of the Opposition was that the Government imposed that 2d. merely to promote what Mr. Disraeli called the “turbulent and aggressive policy” abroad by which Lord Palmerston diverted the attention of the country from its own affairs at home.[297] Mr. Gladstone attacked the Budget all along the line. Sir George Lewis, he said, pretended to remit £11,000,000 of taxation. But of that sum £4,470,000 were war taxes, which necessarily dropped when war was over, and though Sir George brought the tea duty down from 1s. 9d. to 1s. 7d. on the lb., and on sugar from 20s. per cwt. to 18s. 4d., that still raised from tea and sugar £1,400,000 more than the old peace duties drew from them. The real remission, then, was not £11,000,000, but £3,184,000. The faults of the Budget were obviously two. It virtually ignored the pledge of the Government in 1853 to abolish the Income Tax in 1860. Instead of cutting down expenditure so as to render it possible to keep that pledge, it increased expenditure above the peace limit, so as to make it impossible to surrender the Income Tax.[298] The accepted financial policy of the country had been to grant an Income Tax during peace solely to enable the Government to remit taxes on articles of popular consumption. It was granted merely to give an elastic revenue time to recover from sudden remissions of indirect taxation. Sir George Lewis, however, still kept the tax above the peace limit, and his small reductions on the tea and sugar duties left them standing above the peace limit also. Moreover, he maintained his expenditure on a scale which created deficits that rendered the continuance of the Income Tax, without compensating remissions of indirect taxes, inevitable. In fact, Sir George Lewis may be said to have introduced the vicious principle of modern finance, by which a temporary Income Tax is insidiously converted into a permanent one, and by which, under cover of extraordinary disbursement during a war, the country is left after peace is declared with a residue of that outlay clinging to the estimates, as ordinary and permanent annual expenditure. The Budget, however, was carried through in a slightly modified form, but the sudden dissolution of Parliament in