The Sun. — 1864-02-17 (London, England)

TIMES.—Mr. Gladstone introduced his bill for the better Collection of Taxes, which was read a second time on Monday night, in a speech which was a miracle of ingenuity. Few could have supposed that there existed on this dry ground so many varied materials of moral and imaginative interest. It is true that the greater part of mankind are hopelessly ignorant as to the nature of the gulf between the tax collector and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and how it is bridged over. The tax paid and the receipt filed, no one cares to know what becomes of the money, except that one occasionally reads in the papers the portentous account of a collector having disappeared, and the taxes having actually to be levied again. An event so hideous we class with a conflagration or an attack of hydrophobia—a calamity that only occurs to one in ten thousand, or not so many. But the general public now learns from Mr. Gladstone that there is a world of existence, of incident, and of excitement in that fiscal hierarchy of which the collector, with his iron pen, his inkbottle, and his book, is the humble messenger and representative ; and that in it there are grievances, jealousies, opportunities of spite and persecution. and room for catastrophes, even to the chance of whole parishes being laid under unknown collectors against their will, plundered wholesale, and compelled to make good the defalcations of men whom they had no hand in appointing. That taxpayers, indeed, should suffer grievances is intelligible and probable ; but that parishes, commissioners of land-tax, assessed taxes, and income-tax, clerks, assessors, and even collectors, should be actually suffering untold wrongs, is a revelation which the world was hardly prepared for. It is a new source of interest, and a new field of sympathy. In the almost utter exhaustion of domestic incidents our novelists might find a new world in Mr. Gladstone's disclosures. A general officer or a lady of rank compelled by a rejected assessor, or a jealous Board of Commissioners, to collect taxes and to sell up half the neighbourhood, being thrice obliged to abandon the London season, a Continental tour, and still more interesting en gagements, bat taking a just revenge by bolting with the money and leaving all the neighbourhood to pay their taxes over again, the surveyor to go into the Gazette, and the clerk to commit suicide, would, at least, have the claim of novelty, and a dedication to Mr. Gladstone would secure a large and entehusiastic class of readers. For our part, we will not rush in where the veil is so recently raised, and where Mr. Gladstone himself cannot answer for the temper of the agencies he has brought to light. Our interest is that of the taxpayer. In that capacity we are quite content to have no voice in the appointment of the collector, particularly as we recognise the principle involved in the present system of voluntary assessment, that so long as the Treasury does not appoint the collector it will not be answerable for his defalcations. Of course we consider it an object to secure that the ghost of a tax once laid, it shall not revisit us. Then, too, we cannot but acknowledge the simplicity and economy of making one set of efficials do all the work. On one point there must still be a difference of opinion; or rather, as Mr. Gladstone says, a decided objection, for the present, to collection by the officers of the Inland Revenue. In many places the office of collector is