London, February 3. On December 16, 1852 the first point of 
Disraeli’s budget—extension of direct taxation, initially house 
duty, was defeated by a majority of 19 votes. The Tory 
Government resigned. After ten days of intrigues the Coalition 
Government was formed. It consisted of a section of the Whig 
oligarchy—the Grey clan was excluded this time—of the Peelite 
bureaucracy, an admixture of so-called Mayfair Radicals, such as 
Molesworth and Osborne, and finally the brokers of the Irish 
Brigade who had decided the issue on December 16—Sadleir, 
Keogh, Monsell—and were accommodated in subordinate ministe- 
rial posts. The Ministry described itself as the “Cabinet of All the 
Talents”. And in fact it did include nearly all the talents that had 
been relieving one another in government for thirty years and 
more. The Times proclaimed the “Cabinet of All the Talents” with 
the words: We have “now arrived at the commencement of the 
political millennium.” The “political millennium” had in fact dawned 
for the ruling classes the moment they discovered that their party 
formations had dissolved, that their internal contradictions were 
only due to personal whims and vanities, and that their reciprocal 
frictions could no longer grip the nation’s interest. The Coalition 
Government represented no particular faction. It represented “all 
the Talents” of the class that has hitherto ruled England. It is 
therefore important to cast a glance in retrospect at its achieve- 
ments. 

After the fall of the Derby ministry Parliament adjourned for 
the Christmas recess. It then adjourned again for the Easter 
recess. Not until then did the real session of 1853 commence, 

The Defeated Government 639 

almost completely taken up with the debates on Gladstone’s 
budget, Sir Charles Wood’s Bill on India and Young’s Bill 
regulating the relations between landlords and tenant-farmers in 
Ireland. 

Before introducing his budget Gladstone announced major 
operations to reduce the national debt—both floating and 
consolidated debts. The operation regarding the former consisted 
in a lowering of interest on Exchequer Bills from 1'/.d. to 1d. per 
day, and that at a time when the market rate of interest was rising. 
The result was that first he had to redeem 3 million Exchequer 
Bills, and then he had to reissue them at a higher rate of interest. 
Even more significant was his experiment with that monster, the 
consolidated national debt. The ostensible aim was its reduction. 
He acted so skilfully that at the end of the financial year he had to 
buy back 8 million South Sea notes at par, though at the current 
stock exchange price they were only worth 85 per cent. At the 
same time he launched on to the stock exchange a new security 
invented by himself — Exchequer bonds. He had got Parliament to 
authorise him to issue £30 million worth of these securities. With 
some difficulty he got rid of £400,000 worth. In a word: his 
operations to reduce the national debt resulted in an increase of 
the capital of the consolidated debt, and an increase in the rate of 
interest of the floating debt. 

His budget, the pride of the Coalition, consists of various 
heterogeneous elements. Parts of it, such as the reduction of tea 
tax, of excise duty (except that he reduced it on soap, and Disraeli 
on malt) and the increase in direct taxation, have been borrowed 
from the budget of his predecessor. The other and most 
important provisions such as imposition of death duty on land, the 
abolition of tax on newspaper advertisements, etc., were forced on 
him since he twice failed to get his counter-proposals approved by 
the House. Other constituents of his plan, such as the new 
regulation of the licensing system, he was obliged to withdraw 
entirely. What he brought to the House as an encyclopaedic 
system emerged as a mish-mash of heterogeneous and contradic- 
tory items. His only remaining original contribution is the passage 
in the budget in which The Times is exempted from paying 
£30,000-40,000 p.a. as a result of the abolition of stamp duty on 
the supplements that The Times is the only one of the newspapers 
to publish. He insisted all the more firmly—and thus gained the 
goodwill of The Times to that it will not want to miss him in a new 
Administration either—on the retention of stamp duty for the 
main part of the newspaper. Those were Gladstone’s masterpieces 

from which the Coalition derived its sustenance throughout the 
whole of the 1853 session. 

The charter of the East India Company expired on April 30, 
1854. England’s relations with India thus had to be regulated 
anew. The Coalition intended renewing the charter of the East 
India Company for another 20 years. It failed. India is not to be 
“leased out” to the Company again for decades. It now exists only 
by “proclamation”, which Parliament can send it any day. This, 
the only significant feature of the India Bill, was passed despite the 
Government. With the exception of a few marginal reforms in the 
Indian judiciary and the opening of civil posts and_ scientific 
military posts to all qualified applicants, the actual kernel of the 
India Bill may be summarised as follows: the salary of the minister 
governing India from London (President of the Board of 
Control*) has been raised from £1,200 to £5,000 p.a. Of the 18 
directors the government will henceforth elect six, and the 
meeting of share-holders of the East India Company only twelve. 
The salary of these directors has been raised from £300 to £900 
and that of their two managers from 4400 to £1,000. Moreover, 
the office of Governor of Bengal (together with his board of 
control) is in future to be separate from that of Governor General 
of India; a new President, plus board, is likewise to be created for 
the Indus district itself. The Indian reform of the Cabinet of All the 
Talents is limited to this raising of salaries and creating of new 
sinecures. 

The Bills concerning relations between landlords and tenants in 
Ireland had been taken over by the Coalition Government from its 
Tory predecessors. It was not to be outdone by them. It adopted 
the Bills and carried them through the House of Commons shortly 
before the end of the session after a ten-month debate, or to be 
more accurate, allowed them to pass. In the House of Lords, on 
the other hand, Aberdeen consented to the rejection of the very 
same Bills—on the pretext of scrutinising them more closely and 
taking them up again in the next session. 

The ministerial Bills for parliamentary reform, education, legal 
and judicial reforms were postponed by request of the Cabinet 
until the next session. The great work of “all the Talents’”—the 
Bill regulating the cab-drivers of London—actually became law, 
but had scarcely crossed the threshold of Parliament before it had 
to return again to be refashioned. It had proved to be 
impracticable. 

“ Marx used the English term.— Fd. 

The Defeated Government 641 

Finally on August 20 Parliament adjourned. Palmerston sum- 
marised the foreign policy of the Ministry during this session 
when he dismissed Parliament with the words: It could adjourn 
without anxiety. He had full confidence in the honour and 
character of the Russian Emperor, who, he said, would evacuate 
the Danubian Principalities voluntarily. 

Palmerston’s public intervention in foreign policy was limited in 
the 1853 session to this declaration; to a parliamentary speech a 
few days before the adjournment of the House of Commons in 
which he treated the blocking of the Sulina estuary of the Danube 
by the Russians as a bad joke; and finally to the admission 
extracted from him in the sitting of April 15, 1853—on the 
occasion of the so-called Kossuth Powder Plot—that on behalf of 
continental courts he was employing the English police for the 
surveillance of political refugees.