NEWS OF THE WEEK.
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1 VIR. LOWE'S Budget, after a week's struggle for acceptance in the country, has collapsed. The grand attack on it was commenced on Monday, by Mr. White, the Radical Member for Brighton, who with an " agility " on which he was sarcastically -complimented by Mr. Gladstone, managed to threaten a direct vote of want of confidence before Mr. Disraeli could interpose. Mr. White's grand point was that Mr. Bright had once said that a (Government which could not administer this country under 170,000,000 a year did not deserve support, and his grand objection was to an increase of the War estimates, against which, it should be observed, he had voted. He threatened the House that if the sums expended for the protection of property were so enormous, the electors would return a Parliament pledged to tax property to pay for them. That is not exactly a Tory notion, but Mr. Disraeli did not disdain to support Mr. White, alleging that we might, next year, have to face a deficit of /5,000,000, denouncing the tax on matches as founded on "amazing sta- tistics," the succession duty as a tax levied when it is most inconvenient to pay it, and the alteration in the mode of cal- culating the income-tax as unintelligible to ordinary people. He might be, in the abstract, in favour of the abolition of purchase ; but that, at all events, was a measure which would keep, and he called upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer to withdraw and re- consider his budget, without threatening the House with a political crisis and a " mock resignation."
