The history of these years is mainly a history of social unrest, and attempts to cure social evils by legislation or coercion. Liverpool and his colleagues, with the possible exception of Eldon, were not bigoted tories, and it is sometimes forgotten that among them, together with Sidmouth, Castlereagh, and Vansittart, were Canning, Palmerston, and Peel. One of the first parliamentary struggles was on the proposal of the government to reduce the income tax from 10 to 5 per cent., and to apply this half of it, producing about £7,500,000, towards the expense of maintaining an army of 150,000 men. Since the income tax has become a favourite of democratic economists, as pressing specially upon the rich, we may be surprised to find that its total repeal was successfully advocated by Henry Brougham, the leading democrat of that day--a man whose noble services to progress and to humanity in the earlier part of his career have been obscured by the inordinate vanity and unprincipled egotism which he displayed in the later phases of his long public life. He had entered parliament in 1810, and rapidly became the most active of the opposition speakers. He now employed without scruple all the arts of agitation, petition-framing, and parliamentary obstruction to achieve his object, and succeeded, by the aid of bankers and country-gentlemen, in defeating the government by a majority of thirty-seven. This vote might be justified, more or less, on the principle laid down by Pitt, that the income tax should be held in reserve as a war tax only, or on the ground that it was equally wasteful and mischievous to keep up so large a peace-establishment, especially if it might be used to bolster up despotism abroad. It was also unfortunate that Castlereagh, ignoring the heroic efforts made by the people of England for more than twenty years, should have deprecated "an ignorant impatience to be relieved from the pressure of taxation". Still, it is remarkable that friends of the people and the ultra-liberal corporation of London, as it then was, should have concentrated their indignant protests against the financial policy of the government, not on the corn laws, or any other indirect tax, but on the income tax.