On the 5th of April Sir Charles Wood, after his usual manner, brought forward a new Budget. He proposed now to levy a uniform duty of ninepence on the annual value of houses, and sixpence on shops, without reference to the number of their windows. This would in nearly all cases impose a smaller burden on houses than the Window Tax, the capricious and unequal incidence of which had made it intensely unpopular--the greatest relief being given to the houses which had more windows than were proportionate to their annual value. The loss from the Window Tax and the reduction of the duty on coffee left a surplus of £924,000 for emergencies, and Sir Charles Wood was still deaf to the demand for the abolition of the Income Tax. The Tories contended that the tax had been granted to meet a deficit. There was now no deficit, therefore the tax ought to be removed. The Whigs admitted these facts, but denied the conclusion drawn from them. The tax, they argued, ought not to be removed, because a new reason had risen for its continuance, namely, that the Income Tax enabled the Government to minimise the loss to the revenue which might be entailed by the abandonment of protective duties. This, in fact, is the clue to all the tangled Income Tax controversies of the time. The Income Tax was in truth the keystone of Peel’s Free Trade policy. The Tories, therefore, spared no pains to strike it out of the fabric of fiscal legislation which he and the Whigs had built up. Yet the injustice and frauds perpetrated under the Income Tax were admitted on all sides; and finally an effort was made by Mr. Hume to limit the renewal of the tax to one year, and refer the whole question of its assessment and incidence to a Select Committee. Mr. Hume’s motion was carried against the Government by a vote of 244 to 230. But the fatal objection to it, as Mr. Sidney Herbert pointed out, was that, unless the Government had the Income Tax secured to them for three years, they could not make permanent [Illustration: THE CAFFRE WAR: NATIVES ATTACKING A CONVOY.]