at Alma and Inkerman, and wresting from them the mighty fortress of Sebastopol, in the Crimea, which hitherto they had believed to be absolutely impregnable.  Our fleet was, if possible, still more triumphant, destroying Bomarsund and Sweaborg, in the Baltic, without the Russian ships daring to fire a single gun in their defence, while their Black Sea fleet was even sunk by its own admiral, as the only expedient to save it from capture.  And in the spring of 1856 the war was terminated by a treaty of peace, in which, for the first time since the days of Peter the Great, Russia was compelled to submit to a cession of territory.  But (it may almost be said) to the credit of the nation these successes, glorious and substantial as they were, made at the time scarcely so great an impression on the people as the hardships which, in the first winter of the war, our troops suffered from the defective organization of our commissariat.  Want of shelter and want of food proved more destructive than the Russian cannon; presently our gallant soldiers were reported to be perishing by hundreds for lack of common necessaries; and the news awakened so clamorous a discontent throughout the whole of the United Kingdom as led to another change of ministry, and Lord Aberdeen was succeeded by Lord Palmerston.  While a war on so large a scale was being waged there was but little time to spare for the work of the legislator, though it is not foreign to our subject to relate that in 1855 the last of those taxes which the political economists denounced as taxes on knowledge, the tax on newspapers, was abolished.  Originally it had been fourpence; in 1836 Mr. Spring Rice, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne’s ministry, had reduced it to a penny; and now, with a very general acquiescence, it was abolished altogether.

The entire abolition of a tax is not properly to be called a financial measure, that epithet belonging rather to those which aim at an augmentation of revenue by an increase in the number of contributors to a tax, while lessening the amount paid by each.  But the abandonment of the tax in question should rather be regarded as a sacrifice of revenue for the instruction of the people in political knowledge; a price paid to enable and induce the poorer classes to take a well-instructed interest in the affairs of the state and the general condition of the country.  And, viewed in this light, the abolition of this tax must be allowed to have been a political measure of great importance, and to have contributed greatly to the end which was aimed at.  Till 1836 a daily paper, costing sevenpence, was the luxury of the few; and the sale even of those which had the largest circulation was necessarily limited.  But the removal of the tax at once gave birth to a host of penny newspapers, conducted for the most part with great ability, and soon attaining a circulation which reached down to all but the very poorest class; so that the working-man has now an opportunity of seeing the most important