The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

a scepticism underlined by the rigorous financial policies of the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855 and again from 1859 to 1866, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), who had come over to the Whigs with the Peelites. Over this long period, he abolished hundreds of tariffs and excise duties and reduced income tax to four pence in the pound. Money, he believed, should not be handed over to the state to waste, but should be allowed to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’. Further reforms included the liberation of the press through the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers (1855) and the ending of paper duty (1861), measures that hugely increased the circulation of the dailies, and in 1857 the imposition of duties on inherited estates. All of this made Gladstone a popular figure among the working classes and their representatives and paved the way for his electoral successes after he became leader of the Liberal Party (as the Whigs were rechristened in 1859) two years after the death of Palmerston in 1865.