reductions in the duties on coffee and timber. It was absurd to dream of entering on a policy which involved further remission of taxation, so long as £5,000,000 of the revenue--for that was what the Income Tax brought in--depended on an annual vote of the House. Then the _concordia discors_ of the majority was made manifest. As everybody had voted with Mr. Hume from different motives, it was impossible to get competent men to serve on the Committee. That difficulty, however, was after much trouble overcome, and the Government made the best of the situation. They accepted defeat; Lord John Russell, however, stipulating that, whatever might be done, the national credit must be maintained. In other words, he accepted the proposal on the ground that, though the motion granting the Income Tax for one year only was carried, there was no serious intention of refusing to renew the tax if necessary; and that it would be necessary was, of course, certain, unless the £5,500,000 derived from it were replaced by protective duties. This was not a very logical position, and Mr. Disraeli seized the opening which it gave him. Hume’s victory, technically speaking, implied that the financial arrangements of the country were in a provisional state. [Illustration: GROUP OF DYAKS.] Why, then, asked Mr. Disraeli, sacrifice any revenue at all till something like permanence had been imparted to these arrangements? On the 30th of July he brought forward a futile motion to this effect in a grandiose speech, and was supported by Mr. Gladstone, whose antipathy to the Government was fast becoming uncontrollable. Yet Mr. Gladstone’s argument was sound enough. To surrender the Window Tax for one like the hated House Duty, which rested on a narrow basis and was vitiated by special anomalies of inequality and injustice of incidence, that had secured its abolition in 1834, was surely bad finance. And what was gained? Six-sevenths of the house property of the country were exempted from taxation--house property being a fair enough subject for taxation, provided it be assessed on fair general principles. Nothing could be more precarious than the position of the Income Tax; yet but for it the surplus in hand, which Sir Charles Wood was flinging away, would not exist. Mr. Disraeli, however, in spite of Mr. Gladstone’s support, lost his motion. His inconsistency in voting for Mr. Cayley’s proposal, on the 8th of May, to abolish the Malt Tax, which yielded £5,000,000 of revenue, and in protesting, on the 30th of June, against the sacrifice of £1,600,000 of surplus, as ruinous to public credit, was, of course, disastrous to his pleading. In the debates on Colonial Policy the Government were more successful than could have been anticipated. Mr. Baillie’s motion censuring Lord Torrington’s maladministration of the affairs of Ceylon was defeated by a large majority, which, says Mr. Greville, set the Cabinet, smarting from various reverses at the time, “on their legs again.”