TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BUDGET.
AS an Opposition journal justly observes, it would be as absurd to find fault with Mr. Goschen's Budget as it would be to praise it. Having no margin, Mr. Goschen rightly contented himself with leaving matters just as they were, neither adding to the taxation, nor lightening its burdens except in one insignificant detail of the charges on patents. But though it would be absurd either to denounce or extol Mr. Goschen's policy, it is by no means absurd to find his speech full of interest. There were many points on which he threw light ; and several on which his statement was really more amusing than statements which are occupied in discussing the true financial policy. For example, his remark that wines, the luxuries of the rich, are the first to betray a falling revenue, and that tobacco, the luxury of the poor, will often continue to show an in- creasing consumption in the face of a falling revenue, ought to satisfy us that at present it is not the poor who are the first to feel the pinch of diminishing prosperity. The truth certainly is that the profits of capitalists suffer long before working men are dismissed, and even before their wages are seriously threatened. What with the power and activity of the 'Unions, and the reluctance even of men of leisure to contract their households by dismissing the staff of servants to which they have been accustomed, or even by conditioning for their services on lower terms, it has become quite a common experience in England that the first sufferers are the distributors who provide the richer classes with the least needful articles of their consumption, or what they deem the least needful. And of these, wine-merchants are always some of the first to suffer. The revenue now has no means of gauging the expenditure on books, but we believe that booksellers feel the pinch of a diminishing prosperity even sooner than wine-merchants. At all events, for years after the high-tide mark of prosperity, is passed, the great producers will go on without con- tracting the scale of their manufactures, though not without contracting the scale of their private expendi- ture. As regards the working classes, however, it is very satisfactory to find that beer suffers before the higher comforts of the family are touched at all. The diminished expenditure on spirits and beer betrays the wish of the working man to save even while the expenditure on tea and tobacco steadily increases ; and Mr. Goschen showed that while in fifty years the expenditure per head on tea and coffee had almost tripled, the expenditure per head on spirits had hardly increased perceptibly at all. It was satisfactory, too, to learn that, so far as diminishing pros- perity touches business, it begins with destroying speculative business, the business of the Stock Exchange, and leaves the more substantial business, the business of foreign imports and the business of the home contractor, nearly untouched. That looks as if the gambling instincts of the commercial classes were at least under some restraint, and as if that rash and risky spirit which meets loss by risking further and greater loss in the wild hope of extinguishing loss in gain, were losing ground.
But the most interesting part of Mr. Goschen's speech was that in which he discussed the Income-tax returns under Schedule D, and showed us that the total earnings of the great professions of which the separate members are not very rich, are larger than the total earnings of the great industries of which the separate members are usually persons of much wealth and influence. The total earnings of medical men are, for instance, greater than the total earnings of the cotton lords. And the total earnings of the lawyers, again, are greater than the total earnings of the coalowners. Still more in- teresting is it to learn that the distribution and trans- portation of merchandise earns, on the whole, twice as much as its manufacture and production ; in other words, the persons who take goods to the destination at which they are consumed, earn, on the whole, twice as much as the persons who produce and prepare them for consumption. It will surprise most people to be told that a larger pro- portion of the physical products of the world goes to those who carry them where they are wanted, than goes to those who produce and prepare tbem • but that is what Mr. Goschen's investigations show us, of course in the end A is e, ortien of the physical produo Pelt whie,14 either pays the distributor, or obtains for him the goods or money- in which he is paid. No doubt services are, in fact, often.
exchanged against each other ; the music-master teaches the children of a distributor, and as a consequence the distributor brings him some of his goods, not, indeed,. gratuitously, but at a cost which the distributor him- self defrays, by way of compensation ; but, except so far as this exchange of services goes on, it is the physical products of the world which are so.
divided among producer, labourer, and distributor as to compensate them all for their share in the industry of the world. Mr. Goschen has brought home to us as it has never been equally distinctly brought home before, that the industry spent in healing disease, in protecting life. and property, in so distributing it as to meet best the wants of men, in arranging their disputes, in enforcing- their bargains and contracts, and in instructing, refining, and amusing them, is a great deal more extensive in quantity, and obtains a considerably larger share of the physical products yielded by the earth and the manu- factory, than even the industry spent on the direct work of agriculture, and the direct work of so manipulating these products as to fit them for the food and clothing and con- venience of the consumer. Perhaps nothing helps us so. much to apprehend clearly the intellectual and moral ele- ment in civilisation, as the evidencewhich such statements as Mr. Goschen's give us that the greater part of the material products of agriculture and manufactures is expended in paying for the services which make life worth living, the services of the Judges, the Magistrates, the police, the lawyers, the artists, the teachers, the engineers, the railway servants, the Post Office servants, the merchants, the com- mercial travellers, the wholesale and retail traders, the shep- herds, the soldiers, the sailors, the actors, the writers, the thinkers, and the employes in all the departments of State,. none of whom either aid in producing or in manufacturing anything material, but all of whom are essential to the integrity of that great social organisation which we label and forget under the abstract term "civilisation." How little does the farm-labourer, or the miner, or the collier,. or the artisan in a cotton or worsted factory, realise that a large proportion of what he produces is destined after various exchanges to pay for a hundred thousand ser- vices all over the globe,—for feeding policemen in the Antipodes, for adorning actresses in London, for warming soldiers in barracks, for clothing labourers everywhere,—and that only a very small proportion of it or its equivalents will eventually be retained by the owner for whom he works. There is no purpose for which a Budget statement that does not involve great questions of policy, is more useful, than enabling us to. realise in how much need "producers," as they are some- what misleadingly termed,—for are not teachers and artists and poets equally producers P—stand of the aid of an. infinite number of services which are not in that misleading sense "productive," but which contribute in a quite in- calculable degree to the significance, structure, and charm of human life. Consider only Mr. Goschen's statement that even of the total expenditure of the 'United Kingdom, more than a twelfth is devoted to defraying the cost of elementary education, and it will be evident at once how vast a proportion of the material products of labour is absorbed in compensating the labour of intellectual and moral agencies ; for when we consider how minute a part scholastic agencies are of the whole systematic organisa- tion of human life, and see how much we spend even on that fraction of it, we can realise at a glance that producing and manufacturing take place in the interests of a far greater number of millions who are not employed in either- producing or manufacturing, than can be counted up amongst the agricultural and .operative classes who are so engaged. To maintain the order, to meet the con- venience, and to minister to the instruction and amuse- ment of human beings, is, after all, a far more gigantic enterprise than to produce its food and clothing, its houses and its ships. Whatever may be said of the sim- plicity and obviousness of Mr. Goschen's Budget, there can be no doubt that his Budget speech is one of the most interesting and instructive which we have heard for many years. He has judiciously seized the occasion to comment with much ability upon figures and facts which are full of interest, but for the elucidation of which in a year of financial change there is no time or opportunity,
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