minister confronted by a mixed opposition which the proposal would unite he thought it ‘unseasonable’ (Hervey, Memoirs, i. 154). On the other hand, both in 1731 and again in 1733 he promoted a measure in favour of the dissenters in Ireland which he was obliged to abandon as impracticable.
The popularity which now fell to Walpole from his extraordinary success at home and abroad provoked the opposition to scandalous personal attacks. The ‘Craftsman’ of 7 Nov. 1730 affirmed that the housekeeping bills at Houghton amounted to 1,500l. a week. In ballads and broadsides he was represented as plundering the treasury and as selling the country to France. Walpole himself was serenely indifferent, but on 7 July 1731 the grand jury of Middlesex presented ‘Robin's Reign’ and others of the libels circulated in the streets, together with some numbers of the ‘Craftsman.’ This was followed by a number of successful prosecutions. Pulteney having published a pamphlet styled ‘An Answer to one Part of an Infamous Libel,’ &c., in which he disclosed a conversation with Walpole on the reconciliation of the Prince of Wales with his father, so incensed the king that he struck him off the roll of the privy council with his own hand. The year 1733 witnessed the introduction by Walpole of two important financial measures. Of these the first was his proposal to take 500,000l. from the sinking fund. The objections to such a precedent were obvious, but Walpole's reasons deserve examination. The alternative, he told the country gentlemen, was raising the land tax, which in the previous session he had cut down by a shilling, once more to two shillings in the pound. But a principal point of his policy was the reconciliation of the country gentlemen to the whig government. Had he to make choice between them and ‘the moneyed interest,’ he would certainly have sacrificed the country gentry. ‘A minister,’ he once remarked, ‘might shear the country gentlemen when he would, and the landed interest would always produce him a rich fleece in silence; but the trading interest resembled a hog, whom if you attempted to touch … he would certainly cry out loud enough to alarm all the neighbourhood’ (D. Pulteney to the Duke of Rutland, Rutland MSS. p. 202). In this case the moneyed interest approved because, as Walpole explained, the credit of the government had now risen to such a height that they ‘apprehended nothing more than being obliged to receive their principals too fast.’ This combination of interests triumphed over the opposition, and the proposal was carried by 245 to 135 votes (23 Feb. 1733). It was a triumph of political exigency over fiscal principle.
The conciliation of the country gentry by the reduction of the land tax was preparatory to another financial change which, had it been effected, would have anticipated the great reforms of the present century. This was the famous excise scheme of the same session. Walpole's attention had been drawn to the state of the customs' revenue. Since 1723 he had checked the smuggling of tea and coffee by applying to them a compulsory warehousing system under government supervision (see Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. v. ch. ii.), thereby increasing the revenue derived from them by 120,000l. in seven years. No change was made in the name of the duty, and the reform passed unnoticed. He had (14 March 1733) projected the application of the same system to tobacco and wine. By so doing there would not merely be a check put upon smuggling. Under the existing complicated system of discounts, drawbacks, and allowances, with the aid of false weights and false entries, vast frauds, as he pointed out, had been detected, especially upon re-exportation. His proposal was to levy the full tax on tobacco and wine imported only when they were removed from the warehouses for sale. Where imported for re-exportation no tax was to be levied at all. The former of these two measures would, it was thought, check smuggling, because the importer ‘would never run any risk, or be at any expense to evade the customhouse officers at the first gate, when at so many more afterwards he would be equally exposed to be catched by the excise officer’ (Hervey, Memoirs, i. 184). The second would, as Walpole explained, ‘tend to make London a free port, and by consequence the market of the world.’ The change was, in technical terms, a transfer of customs to ‘excise,’ and therein the opposition saw their opportunity. Excise had at various times been levied with vexatious incidents upon most of the necessaries of life. Its very name was odious. The ‘Craftsman’ and the pamphleteers discerned in the proposals the first approach to an excise upon all articles of food and clothing. Walpole had himself given some colour to the suggestion by reimposing in 1732 (5 Geo. II, c. 6) the salt tax, which he had repealed in 1730 (3 Geo. II, c. 20). Even then, Sir William Wyndham had argued, ‘it is one step towards a general excise’ (9 Feb. 1732), and Walpole had indignantly repudiated the suggestion (Parl. Hist. viii. 960). But the course of events strengthened the public suspicion. Petitions against the scheme poured into the House
