Mr. Gladstone's speech on the Budget yesterday week was a
disappointing one. It was a series of pin-pricks in relation to details, followed by what seems to us, as we have elsewhere shown, avery inadequate attack on the principle of Sir Stafford Northcote's scheme for the reduction of the Debt. Mr. Gladstone quizzed fairly enough the ultimate determination to keep the Income-tax, after Mr. Disraeli's hasty electioneering promise that "the principal measures of relief would be the diminution of local taxation and- the abolition of the Income-tax, measures which the Conservatives. have always favoured, and which the Prime Minister [Mr. Glad- stone] has always opposed." Mr. Gladstone was also severe on the form of the Budget accounts, on the Conservative disposition to let the expenditure increase, on the real deficiency under the asserted surplus, on Sir Stafford Northcote's admission that he had at the end of the last financial year delayed the demand for a certain.' item of revenue (£300,000) in order to let it go to the _present. year's credit, on the evident but unauthorised expectation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the actual revenue would exceed his estimates of it; and finally, on the Sinking-fund scheme. The Chancellor of the Exchequer of 1885, Mr. Gladstone pre- dicted, Will not be much governed in his policy by any reference to the views of a predecessor in 1875 "who wished to do something, and had ,not the money to do it with."
