Excerpt from The System of National Finance Bitter and unavailing are the regrets of a reader who has read through a book, and wakes on the last page to the discovery that it is all about something other than he supposed. To save an intending reader from that disappointment, it will be as well to set down here what this book is not about. It is not about public finance in the abstract; that ground is well covered by Professor Bastable's "Public Finance," and other works on the same subject. It is not a history of British public finance in modern times. We are now fortunate enough to have that story admirably told in three books, Lord Iddesleigh's "Twenty Years of Financial Policy" (1842-62), Lord Buxton's "Finance and Politics" (1862-87), and Mr. Bernard Mallet's "British Budgets" (1887-1913), which taken together provide us with a detailed record of the subject and a commentary upon its developments during the last seventy years. It is not a history of taxation: for that we have Stephen Dowell's big work. Nor does it seek to be a compendious work of reference in which may be found all the laws, rules, principles, authorities, and precedents relating to the nation's financial business. That has yet to be compiled. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.