the public. If the alarm which had been raised had warned the minister to show only the nose of the monster, the public saw that the whole monster was there. Though he dealt now only with tobacco, he did not conceal the fact that he had his eye also on wine; and let the people only submit easily, and that eye would very speedily have ranged over a score of other articles, all equally of popular and not of aristocratic consumption. At this very moment they heard him appealing to his landed majority on the merits of his system, which was to relieve them at the expense of the people. There was to be no land tax, but a tobacco tax, and, if that succeeded, a wine tax, and so on; it might soon descend to meat, bread, and even vegetables. Of the utter want of principle in Walpole they had at the same moment a glaring proof in his invasion of the sinking fund. And, as to all those improvements in the system, might they not be as readily introduced into the customs as into the excise? Why not the same searching inquiry into the frauds of the custom-house, and proper securities taken?
GREAT SEAL OF GEORGE II.
Why remove tobacco and then wine from the customs to the excise? The people's own common sense gave the answer—Because the practice of levying an excise on articles of daily consumption might be extended by artful and successive movements over the whole host of consumable articles.
The people saw deeper than those historians who have represented this scheme as so reasonable, and the popular outcry as so unreasonable. Walpole ridiculed the notion which had gone abroad, that the revenue officers would be increased into quite a standing army, and would endanger the common liberty by their being empowered to enter private dwellings to search for concealed excisable articles. He said the increase would only be a hundred and twenty-six persons, and that the customs now possessed more searching power than he proposed to give to the excise. But these excisable articles might be deposited in warehouses adjoining dwelling-houses, by which the danger of fraud would be much increased over the custom-house, which stood alone, and on the river banks; and in such cases searching of private houses would be rendered much more inconvenient. It was contended, too, that it was a benefit to the merchant to convert the duty from one on importation to one on consumption, and that it did not affect the people at all, because the fraudulent trader sold the article to them at the price of duty paid. But it was clear that if the bonding system had been adopted as a general system, allowing merchants to pay the duty or excise at the moment only when it was taken from the government warehouses for sale, a customs duty must be, as proved by the regulations of our own time, as good to him as an excise duty.
Wyndham declared that in all countries excises of every kind were looked on as badges of slavery; but Walpole asked triumphantly in reply, whether brewers or maltsters were reckoned slaves? Whether they were not just as free in elections to elect or be elected as any other persons? But Wyndham rose into higher denunciation. He drew awful pictures of corruption, extortion, and tyranny which would inevitably attend such a system as this tended to inaugurate. He recalled the memories of Dudley and Empson, and asked what was their fate? Popular enough in their own master's time, they found his successor more just, and he took off their heads. At this moment Frederick, prince of Wales, was sitting under the gallery, and the allusion told with immense effect.
Walpole was ably supported by Sir Philip Yorke, the attorney-general, whose abilities as a lawyer and a debatist had for some time been rapidly rising into note. Sir Joseph Jekyll, the master of the rolls, who was more noted for his eccentricities of dress and manner than for eloquence, and who was described by Pope as a man "who never changed his principles or wig," declared that he had come to the house quite undetermined how to vote, but that the arguments of Walpole had quite decided him in favour of the measure.
Whilst the debate was proceeding, great crowds gathered
