MR. GLADSTONE AND THE " IMPOT PROGRESSIF."
MR GLADSTONE'S self-examinations must some- times, we think, take the form of asking himself whether he has or has not played more adroitly than he ought to have done the part of "an old Parliamentary hand" in the House of Commons. To our minds at least, he played that part too adroitly on Thursday night. And if his "reins in the night-watches" do not summon him to regret the partisan skilfulness of his compliments to Mr. Goschen, we should think with less appreciation of his political conscience than we actually do. The matter before the House was Mr. Goschen's proposal to raise a Death- duty of 1 per cent. on all estates, whether personal or real, exceeding in value £10,000. The whole drift of Mr. Gladstone's speech was to fasten on Mr. Goschen the responsibility for having embodied in his Budget the prin- ciple of graduated taxation,—i.e., of a larger tax on large properties than is to be levied on small properties,—but while he congratulated Mr. Goschen on adopting this principle, he expressed anxiety as to the use which might be made of it in future, and asked innocently whether Mr. Goschen had discovered any fixed rule which, in the judgment of the Government, would distinguish between "a moderate and just use" of the inzkot progressif, and an immoderate and unjust use of it. Now, when Mr. Gladstone asked this innocent question, he knew perfectly well what Mr. Goschen would reply, for he had spoken out clearly in his Budget speech. The Govern- ment have not introduced, and do not intend to sanction, any inzpot progressif They have only sanctioned, in its application to property passing under will or by succession or intestacy, the principle which both sides of the House have sanctioned in relation to Income-tax, namely, the par- tial exemption of the poor from a tax to which those who cannot be called poor are liable ; but they have not gone further, and do not intend to go further. -Under the present rules, persons receiving only £400 a year of income are taxed at lower rates than persons with more than £400 a year, while persons with only £150 a year need pay no Income-tax at all. No one speaks of that as the recog- nition of an inapt progressif on income. It is to be just the same as regards the new Estate-duty. It is to be levied on all estates, real or personal ; but small estates which cannot in general yield so much as £400 a year, are to be liable only to the old probate and succession duties, and to be exempted from the new one. That is an attempt to deal with the Death-duties on precisely the same principle as that on which we already deal with the Income-tax. The State aims at taxing all properties which yield income at the same rate, with the exception of those yielding only a very poor income, which are to receive the same sort of special consideration as those poor incomes them- selves. Of course, the thing Cannot be scientifically done. It will not be possible under the new regulations to tax the man who inherits a personal and real estate each coming within the exemption, as much as the man who inherits one large property of a value equivalent to both taken together. And there will be other anomalies which future Chancellors of the Exchequer will doubt- less remove. But the intention of Mr. Goschen's proposal is undoubtedly reasonable, and is entirely free from the charge of being a recognition of the imp& progresszf. The ideal is to tax the inheritance of properties which give rise to incomes under £400 less heavily than properties which give rise to larger incomes. And it is clear enough that if the exemptions from Income- tax, as they have been sanctioned by both parties in the State, are not unfair, this exemption is not unfair. Mr. Gladstone's plea that, if invested in business, properties of £10,000 and less might yield a good deal more than £400 a year, has no substantial force in it. Of course they might. But then, they would compensate by a much greater additional risk for the greater income, which higher income, again, would, of course, be fully taxed under the Income-tax. The Chancellor of the Ex- chequer could only assume that they would yield a safe rate of interest. It would never have done for hiint to assume that they could be made to yield business incomes, since many of the inheritors of such properties would have no means of finding sound business investments for them. But Mr. Gladstone obviously wanted to frighten the Con- servative Party with the notion that Mr. Goschen had. sanctioned the root-principle of an ascending scale of taxation for the rich ; and yet he wanted to obtain Mr. Goschen's authority for a " moderate " recognition of such an ascending scale. And he partially succeeded. Sir R. Lethbridge, indeed, saw through the political stratagem, and warned his brother-Conservatives against it ; but Mr. Chaplin and Sir W. Barttelot were both excited to panic by Mr. Gladstone's speech, and confided their alarm most candidly to the House, to Sir William Harcourt's obvious delight, for he did all in his power to increase that alarm.
Now, if Mr. Gladstone had really cared for nothing but the safe limitation of the principle that equality of sacrifice is the fair ideal of those who are called upon to impose taxation, what course would he have pursued ? He would, we take it, have said that Mr. Goschen need not, in his opinion, have stopped short at the point of exempting the poorest class from some portion of the taxation to which the well-to-do were to be liable, and that he should see with pleasure some extension of the taxation of the richer classes at a higher scale in proportion to the luxury of their lives, if he could only discern any clear limit which, by preventing anything like confiscation, would not dis- courage the accumulation of wealth ; but that it was very difficult to find any such limit of principle, and that while he hoped that financiers would not cease to look for some such limit, he could at least heartily approve Mr. Goschen's carefully guarded proposal, even though he did not think it quite adequate to the needs of the situation. Such an avowal from Mr. Gladstone would have convinced the Conservatives that Mr. Goschen had not overstepped the limit at which the fatal descent towards confiscation begins ; but then, for that very reason it would not have answered the purpose of striking panic into the country gentlemen's hearts, and we greatly fear, from the tone of Mr. Gladstone's speech, that what the " old Parliamentary hand" really cared to do was to strike panic into the country gentlemen's hearts. He was not content with getting a new tax which would not press severely on the poor ; he wanted also to sow amongst the Conservative Party the seeds of discontent with Mr. Goschen. And he succeeded in his purpose.
This seems to us the temptation to which orators even of a very high class, endowed with great tact, are exposed. Even St. Paul reproached himself with having raised a some- what false issue when he set the Pharisees and Sadducees by the ears, by suggesting that he, a Pharisee, was called. in question for his belief in the resurrection of the dead, though it was not really his belief in the resurrection of the dead, but his belief in the inclusion of the Gentiles with the Jews in the promises to Israel, which had en- dangered his life. Mr. Gladstone is exposed to some of the same perils, as a politician, to which St. Paul was exposed as a missionary. He sees very keenly the advantages of embroiling his opponents with each other, and he cannot resist the temptation of so embroiling them. But we think that if he reflects on what he did. on Thursday night, he will feel some of the scruples which St. Paul avowed that he felt when he had succeeded in embroiling the Pharisees with the Sadducees concerning him. Mr. Gladstone wished to support Mr. Goschen, and he wished also to express his approval of a principle which went quite beyond Mr. Goschen's ; and he might have done both without undermining the faith of the Conservatives in Mr. Goschen. But he could not resist the temptation which he felt as leader of the Opposition, to effect his purpose by means of undermining the faith of the Conservatives in Mr. Goschen ; and we suspect that his historical con- science will call upon him, as did St. Paul's under analogous circumstances, to confess that he has something to reproach himself with as regards that "one voice" that it was touching the principle of progressive taxation that Mr. Goschen's scheme might really be called in question. That is a manceuvre of the "old Parliamentary hand" rather than a serious conviction of Mr. Gla,dstone's.
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