During their five years of power the Government had remitted £9,000,000 of taxation. They had reduced a chaotic Naval Administration to something resembling order, and not far removed from efficiency; and yet at the Admiralty there had been a saving of £1,500,000 on the Estimates of their predecessors. They had taken the Army out of pawn to its officers by abolishing Purchase, and had laid the basis for a compact military organisation; yet they had saved £2,300,000 a year at the War Office. The Army and Navy, though by no means efficient, were much more efficient than they had been when Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry came to power; and yet they were costing the country £4,000,000 less a year.[56] In spite of the great increase in Civil Service expenditure--much of which, like the Education Vote, being morally rather than financially reproductive, showed no “results” in figures on the credit side of the public ledger--there had been since 1857 a decrease in the drain on the taxes of about £1,500,000.[57] Mr. Lowe’s last Budget in 1873 did not discredit the Ministry. In spite of his reductions of taxation in the previous year, he had obtained £2,000,000 more than his estimated income. For the coming year (1873-4) he estimated a surplus of £4,746,000; but he could promise no great remission of taxation, for he had to pay the damages (£3,000,000) which had been awarded at Geneva to the United States Government. Still, he halved the sugar duties and took another penny off the Income Tax. With all his faults, he was accordingly entitled to claim credit for reducing the Income Tax to the lowest point it had ever touched (threepence in the £) since it had been imposed by Peel in 1842. And yet Mr. Lowe could not, even with such a Budget, refrain from expressing his thankfulness in an acrid gibe against the populace. Referring to the marvellous increase in the receipts from Customs and Excise, he said he had been able to produce a good Budget because the nation had drunk itself out of debt.