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seen, an open question.! But t'vo years later the financisl
position of the country had become so serious, and the credit
and forces of the party had fallen so low, that it became
necessary to enter upon a more decisive course. The ex:
penditure had undergone a progressive increase, amounting
in six years to four millions sterling on the annual estimates
for the military and naval services alone, a rise of more than
thirty per cent. For each of the last four years there had
been a serious deficiency of income. In 1840 it was &
willion and a half. For 1841 it was given out as upwards
of one million, eight hundred and fifty thousand. Nor was
this the result merely of an absence of fiscal skill in the
government of the day. It was the sign, confirmed by the
obstinate depression of trade and the sufferings of the population,
 of an industrial and commercial stagnation which
could only be dealt with by an economic revolution.
Besides such considerations as these, there were the considerations
 of party strength. Macaulay’s biographer quotes
a significant passage from his diary. “The cry for free
trade in corn,” he wrote in 1839, and Macaulay was in the
Cabinet, “seems to be very formidable. If the Ministers play
their game well, they may now either triumph completely,
or retire with honour. They have excellent cards, if they
know how to use them.””* Unluckily for themselves, they
did not know how to use them; and everybody was quite
aware that their conversion towards Free Trade was nob
the result of conviction, but was only the last device of &
foundering party.
In 1840 a committee on import duties had sat, and
produced a striking and remarkable report, recommending
an abandonment of the illiberal and exclusive policy of the
past, and a radical simplification of the tariff by substituting
for a multitude of duties, imposts on a small number of the
8 dbove, pp. 148 and 148. * Trovelyan'n Lifs, ii. 87.