The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-04-26 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

G We shall be happy, at all times, to receive communications
on subjects of local or general interest; and if ourfriends
will be good enough to authenticate the same by their si,;na-
tures, for our own satisfaction, we shall feel obliged.
We have received a letter, badly spelt and worse written, on
a dirty pieceof paper, signed "Thos. May, 22 Argyle-street,"
doubting whether our correspondent of last week is a "Roman
Catholic," because he is not so " biggotted" as this erudite
champion of "Dr. Chail," as he calls him.
A Iloax.—Some of our contemporaries, metropolitan and pro-
vincial, have published a lengthy epistle, purporting to have
been written by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to a poor
clerk at Birmingham. We have too high an opinion of the
abilities of Mr. Gladstone, to believe him capable of so sorry
a production, and he has too high an opinion of his position
as a Cabinet Minister to enter into a newspaper controversy

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Loaxes are general

newspapers

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TUESDAY MORNING,

APRIL

26, 1353.

REVIEW OF THE BUDGET,

MR. GLADSTONE'S FINANCE POLICY

- •
THE Financial Statement of the CHANCELLOR of
the EXCHEQUER, of which we were only enabled
to give an imperfect summary last week, consti-
tutes of course the leading topic of the day, and is
entitled to a more than ordinary share of careful
consideration. Although differing widely from
MR. GLADSTONE and his colleagues, in political

we do n

t hesitate to confess that it

nances, the CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER

ability for which few
were inclined to give him credit. His Budget dis-
plays an ingenuity of design, a comprehensiveness
of detail, a depth of research, and moreover a plau-
sibility of purpose, which ranks it far before that
of his predecessor; while it manfully grapples with
many subjects which previous Ministers had hesi-
tated to deal with, from the difficulty attending
complicated details. MR. GLADSTONE, however,
seems to have devoted all his energies to the task
before him, and the result has proved that he was
at least the only man of the present Cabinet so well
fitted for it. But while we give credit to the Mi-
nister for the ability and ingenuity of which he has
furnished such a striking proof, we do not on that
account unhesitatingly adopt all his propositions;
but, in justice to our readers, shall proceed to treat
of them more in detail, with such comments as
suggest themselves from a consideration of the
several items.

has shown an amount of

The first in order, as in importance, is the pro-
posal to renew the PROPERTY AND INCOME TAX,
not as on the last two occasions for one year only,
but for a period of seven years,--the first two
years, at the present rate of seven-pence in the
pound, the next two years at six-pence, and the
succeeding three years at five-pence. In the length-
ened argument by which this subject was intro-
duced, MR. GLADSTONE laboured to show the
difficulty of removing the inequalities of this tax
by any of the modes which had been suggested, and
herein expressed an unwilling condemnation of it.
We can readily agree with him that any attempt at
re-arrangement would but multiply, instead of di-