It is quite impossible for us to condense with any
f Fawcett's speech in reply to the Budget, but his point W. impossibility of finding a further method of taxation if we wantea money. No tax could be increased and no new one raised. Mr. Fawcett speaks after cross-examining great Indian authorities, but great Indian authorities are all very timid about taxation, even Lord Dalhousie, when he had only 2.26,Q00,000 in 1850, saying another penny could not be raised. The revenue has been doubled since. We are totally unable to accept Mr. Fawcett's
view, and believe that a tax on betel-nut, which is a tax on a bad luxury of the well-to-do, and a tax on tobacco, by selling the right of sale, French fashion, would produce £4,000,000 a year, and will produce it if opium should ever disappear. On many of his other points, the weight of local taxation, for instance, the gross character of the expenditure for Horse Guards' purposes, and the positive lunacy of the waste on -works of irrigation,—works which have no result at all, except in diminishing internal emigration from the unproductive to the productive districts,—we cordially agree with Mr. Fawcett, whose incessant supervision would do three times the good it 'does if he would thoroughly master the military question, and then strike hard and high. The sources of Indian waste are public works, and the wish to keep a reserve English Staff in high content out of Indian revenue.
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