SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT'S POSSIBLE BUDGET.
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT will certainly have a grand opportunity on his Budget night. He believes himself a financier, and there is everywhere an uneasy or hopeful sense abroad that he is going to make this year memorable in finance, and place himself on a level with Sir Robert Peel or Mr. Gladstone as a financial benefactor. He is to release the poor from their burdens without emptying the Treasury, and to plunder the well- to-do without rousing them to positive resistance. He is to propose, in fact, a grand Democratic Budget, which will delight the masses, and produce an immediate forget- fulness of less popular proposals ; drown Home-rule in cheers for Harcourt ; and extinguish all objections to Dis- establishment in cries of gratification at the future cheapness of humble life. How he is to do all these grand things is, of course, a secret between him, the chiefs of the Treasury, and the head people in Somerset House ; but the popular notion of his method takes a very definite—though, of course, possibly very inac- curate—form. Sir William Harcourt, the experts say, will have to meet a positive deficit of £5,000,000, produced by a decline of receipts to the extent of £1,500,000, and an increase of expenditure in several directions, including the new outlay on the Navy, to the extent of £3,500,000 as a strict minimum. To these £5,000,000 must be added £5,000,000 more, being the loss to be incurred by sweep- ing away all taxes on the breakfast-table, that is, on tea, coffee, cocoa, and dried fruits, and by raising the minimum incidence of the Income-tax to, say, £300 a year. The total deficit therefore to be met will be no less than £10,000,000, and it will be met by imposing an Income- tax of 9d. in the pound, which everybody will have to pay on his income before it reaches him, and by a graduated Income-tax of 3d. or 4c1. more, to be paid only by, those who have £2,000 or more a year on an ascending scale in proportion to their wealth. The bar- rister who earns £3,000 a year will probably pay 9.0. in the pound, while the Duke of Devonshire or Lord Rothschild will be mulcted in 13d., the collector adding the extra charge to his bill, he knowing from his returns what the total income is. The same principle will be applied to the death-duties, with this addition, that the exemption hitherto allowed to relatives will be finally swept away. That is indeed inevitable on democratic principles, for the very idea of graduated duties is either to punish the riah; for being rich, that is, to fine thrift as an undemocratic,.
quality, or to deplete their presumed surplus in relief of those who enjoy too little physical comfort. Neither of, those objects is accomplished if sons remain exempt from. succession-duties, for every heavy exemption in their, favour acts as an entail on them, and preserves, the family surplus for the family, and not • either for the State or for the poor. The remainder of the deficit, if there is any, will be made up by arresting State-saving in some form or other, diminishing the purchases of Consols, or selling the immense inheritance left by Lord Beaconsfield to the nation in the form of the Suez Canal shares,—a reasonable resource, because the additional out- lay on the Navy is not expected to go on for even For anything we know, that forecast may prove to be all nonsense. We do not profess to know a single Treasury secret, not even the reason why the officials doubted the. full collection of the immense sums which have poured in within the last thirty days, but we do know that this is,. in the rough, the popular forecast ; and we should like to know very much whether, if it is in any way accurate, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has rightly gauged the feeling of the masses. As to that of the well-to-do classes, there can be, we imagine, little doubt. Every man of them,1 Gladstonian as well as Tory, who reads a Budget of that kind, will be thenceforward a lukewarm friend or a deadly enemy of the Rosebery Government. They would. stand being heavily " rooked ' to secure a definite upheaval. to the lower class, which would comfort their consciences, as well as allay their fears for the future ; but to be " plundered " in order that old women may have more tea than is good for them, will strike them as the ex- tremity of unfairness. For, be it remembered, it is not only the " idle rich," whom Radicals hate as if they were lilies of the field, on whom the additional burden will fall, but the working rich, who slave like journeymen, the successful barristers and physicians, the directors? of great " works," the managers of great shops, thei owners of fleets which pay, the bankers who find the, money which is the life-blood of enterprise. They know. how to count in shillings, and they will be "sacked is Mr. Disraeli's word—in thousands. The men imme, diately below them, who are just rising to competence, which means as much as you spend, something to save,:. and something to waste—will be no better pleased, and. as they include the whole body of working journalists, will • probably be heard of before the Ministry is dead; but we suppose we may strike out millionaires and professionals. together. They have nothing but intelligence ; and if miners and factory hands and ploughmen and bricklayers. are conciliated, their silent wrath will not signify in the least, except to deepen the chuckles of Sir William Har.., court ; but then, will these masters of the State be con-.
ciliated ? Almost everybody says " Yes," and those who live by wirepulling will be exultant ; but we confess to some uncertainty. There is nothing in the world• more difficult to understand than the feeling of the masses about taxation ; • it is ccmplicated by a thou- sand considerations. They do not, for example,. in. America resent a heavy tariff, though it makes every luxury, including gloves, almost unattainable. It is very doubtful if our own people would have abolished the insane old English Tariff, but that it included corn as:a subject of heavy duties. They did not care one jot when Mr. Gladstone offered to take off the Income-tax,. .and they showed no gratitude when Sir Stafford Northcote swept away the sugar-duties. That immense boon, which was instantly felt in every house, the distributors selling sugar as an advertisement rather than a source of profit, and which is one cause at least of the really extraordinary. change in the physique of children that has marked the last ten years, was enjoyed in silence as one enjoys ,a dinner without thinking of the cook. We honestly think it more than possible that the free breakfast-table so loudly hymned by those who think they know what ithe poor want, will be received without any gratitude at all. If Sir William could give them cheap milk they would be enthusiastic, for they know the value of that, and cannot get it ; but they do not buy coffee because it wants too much milk ; they .do not care about cocoa, which indeed, is a food, not a drink ; and as to tea, the women pay fir that, not the men, and the felicity of giy.ng the wpree9_ a third of a cup more at a meal will not strike the eledieri very strongly. No doubt it is a capital tax to take off, if it can be spared, especially for the Indian tea-planters, who will be wild with delight, and get off all the rougher tea out of their gardens at profitable prices ; but the bribe to the lower English voter will not be a telling one. " Cheap cat-lap. Well, that will please the old lady ; but why don't nobody never double my screw of tobaccy ? I never have half enough ; " that will, we fancy, be the usual comment. But, then, think of the pleasure of seeing the rich taxed ! Where does the pleasure come in ? All France is in the hands of its peasants and artisans, and you cannot get an Income-tax put on ; while in America, the little people insisted on its abolition. That the English masses are anxious for a change in their social conditions, we fully acknowledge ; but they are thirsting to be levelled up, not to be left as they are while somebody else is worried. John Hodge wants a pound a week instead of fourteen shillings ; and whether the man at the castle pays £500 or £750 in Income-tax, he does not care a straw, or rather, he thinks it a hardship that the Parliament men should compel the squire to shut up one of the lodge-gates, keep- ing which, as an old man told us recently, " is better than an almshouse by a sight." We may be quite wrong. but we rather fancy that a bribing policy will turn out a failure, the old taxes, relief from which really added to the comfort of life, being all dead and so nearly forgotten, that if they were reimposed just as they were in 1844, the majority would fancy that they were under some absurd delusion. The world could not be all changed like that in a week. If, indeed, a Chancellor of the Exchequer dared to be magni- ficently unjust, and abolish rates in favour of local Income-tax, there might be a howl of delight, for the relief in cities for a moment would be enormous ; but till that level of audacity is reached, peddling little bribes will not alter opinion much. This problem of taxation, which seemed a few years ago to be fairly settled, is going to bother all Europe very much. " Civilisation," now the ideal of Governments as well as peoples, has turned out expensive, and rulers are at their wits' ends where to get the necessary money. They tax food all over the Continent, but they do not get much by it, the usual result being an increase of internal pro- duction at a dear rate. They are trying Income-taxes ; but, except in Italy, they are not severe, and when they are severe they are evaded. They cannot try the grand device, under which Asia has slept for ages, of claiming all land for the State, leaving two-thirds of the crop to the cultivator, and with the remainder paying State expenses, for the bayonet-wielders own the soil, and will not have the experiment tried. Something new seems to be wanted ; but the minds of financiers are sterile, and in most countries they confess themselves to be at the end of their resources. A Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a new and successful device for drawing money without creating rebels, would have a European reputation, and be hailed besides as a benefactor to the species. We confess we see no clear road out, for we do not believe in the disuse of war, but we can see with a sort of certainty that the peoples will, before they give up their expenditure, try one of three devices. They may use the sponge, and so paralyse credit for a generation,—the effect of that crime dying away with curious rapidity. Or they may revert to monopolies, which, if they included sugar, salt, and liquor, would realise vast sums, and about which there is already much experience. Or they may meet the social and the financial questions together by universal and compulsory State insurance at high' rates against death, fire, disease, acci- dent, and most forms of pecuniary loss,—a system which, if worked with energy and the severity of the conscription laws, would produce gigantic results. We shall see within twenty years what they will do ; and if Sir William Har- court's Budget is anything like the popular impression of it, he will hurry on the solution. He will be imitated everywhere, and the populations will soon learn that the real objection to a graduated Income-tax is that it does not yield enough. The very rich are very prominent, but they are not so very numerous.
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