THE RISE IN THE REVENUE. T HE hymns of gratulation which
people are singing about the rise in the Revenue are, we suppose, most natural; but they mark a change in national sentiment which will have far-reaching consequences. They are natural because in some details the Revenue returns act as a barometer of national well-being; but yet if regarded by the light of history, they are a little odd. No one seems even to remember that this stream of money comes out of the people's pockets ; that the extra receipt from Death-duties involves a direct reduction of private property that the men who are covering South Africa with profitable pit-holes, pay out of their dividends all the new revenue from Stock Exchange stamps ; that every penny of increase in the Spirit-duty is a penny deducted from the wages of the poor. The old historic notion that a rich Government meant a poor people is dead, or at least would be dead but that some of the ratepayers have not quite forgotten it. So scientifically are the "Queen's Taxes" adjusted, so entirely has the State ceased to be regarded as a dangerous enemy, that the people wish the Treasury to be millionaire, and regard its prosperity almost as their own. If its bags are bursting, they feel their own pockets swell,—one of the strangest illusions which observers of national thoughts have ever had to record. Its first effect, no doubt, is con- tentment, which must, in a world of toil and struggle, be at all events recuperative ; but all its results are not quite so satisfactory to thinking men. One is extrava- gance. The State is spending at a prodigious rate, particularly in the way of grants in aid for popular objects, and nobody cares a jot. People hardly add up what we give in aid of rates, of education, of philanthropic precaution in manufactures, of Irish experi- ments, of Colonial progress ; but praise all outlays, wise or unwise, as if we were only consuming manna, come by without digging or other expenditure of human sweat. Another result is universal begging, everybody arguing that as the State is so rich, it ought to "foster" every good idea, from fisheries on the Irish coast to the endow- ment of biological research. Nobody is content to leave anything to private enterprise, and if £100,000 were voted for the diffusion of novels, nobody would denounce the vote as a profligate wasting of the earnings of the poor. We do actually pay a great deal more than that, in order that newspapers should be sent to distant subscribers very cheaply. And the third result, the one to which we wish specially to call Sir Michael Hicks- Beach's attention, is even more singular than the two former.
No average voter cares one straw what the Chancellor of the Exchequer does with his wealth. If he pays off Debt, that is very proper. If he takes off taxes, that is very nice. If he gives it to ratepayers, that is very wise. The old jealousy of the "favour of the Treasury" is extinct, and with it the old gratitude. The people were not attracted by Mr. Gladstone's offer to repeal the Income-tax' but turned him out. They cared nOthina for Sir Stafford Northcote's repeal of the Sugar-duty---a really enormous "boon "ivhich many sound hygeists believe to be one main cause of the amazing recent improvement in children's health—but turned him out. So far from feeling grateful for Sir William Harcourt's Death-duty, which was also "democratic" and intended to relieve them at the cost of the rich, they kicked him out of his own seat as well as out of power, the moment they got the chance. They will not say "Thank ye" when the T,a-duty is abolished, and if it were possible to make beer cheap, they would. probably ask whether the Treasury had a secret desire to double the work of the police. In truth, outside the trades directly affected, the voters are profoundly indifferent to Budgets, and leave the experts to manage finance for themselves, just as they leave them to manage foreign affairs. From which, what follows? This, first of all,--that a Cabinet dealing with a surplus should obey its own convictions as to the best use to be made of it, and. not go muddling away millions in a profitless hunt for votes. They will not get a vote by any disposition they may make of the national money, and will be far wiser to trust to their own judgments, and either pay off Debt or remove any burdens which they consider press upon the springs of prosperity. Let the journalists and the faddists and the agitators all hymn or howl as they feel inclined, and let the Ministry make its own Budget, disregarding everything except scientific evidence as to the course which will most directly benefit the whole community. No unpopular Budget need be feared.; no popular Budget is of the slightest political advantage; let us, then, have a wise Budget, such as the two Cabinets sitting together, with no members to criticise and. no voters to consult, would probably produce. Of what kind it should be it is not our business to speak, though in any other country than this the position of agriculturists would. be the first preoccupation of statesmen ; our single point is that the Budget should be devised. by thinkers, and not by men who are fearing or seeking an outcry from the populace. The populace is profoundly, even regrettably, indifferent to the whole subject.
One reason for this indifference is well understood. The people no longer perceive the Queen's taxes. It has been for fifty years the object of successive financiers, and of the bureaucracy which keeps them straight, to cease from demanding direct payments from the body of the people, and they have succeeded. in this object to an extent which is really wonderful. A working man never sees a tax-gatherer—often he does not even see a rate-col- lector—hardly knows that such a person exists, a position that, to a European of A.D. 1600, as to an Asiatic of to-day, would seem incredible or absurd. He is not taxed for his Church, not taxed for his children's school- ing, not taxed—we mean in the way of direct pay- ments—unless indeed he is a costermonger—for any- thing he does or leaves undone. He pays, no doubt, enormously on his drink and his tobacco, but he does not know it, and does not connect the prices of those things with the Army, the Navy, and the Civil Service. He is no more likely to be imprisoned or distra.ined on, or even worried, by agents of the Treasury, than a Tartar is, or any other nomad. The process has even been carried too far, so far, that there is danger of the ordinary man forgetting that whatever the Treasury spends, it must in the long-run levy out of him. The national purse is to him the purse of Fortunatus; and when an orator proposes—as was proposed recently—to give every working householder a pension of 10s. a week at fifty-five, he does not laugh with derision, still less feel that here is a solemn proposal to sweat him, him him- self, down to the bone. This ignorance or innocence is understood, but there is another reason for indifference yet, and that is the amazing improvement which has occurred in the relation of the lower middle-class to the Treasury. That is the class which is the most audible ; it is the class from which the workmen derive their facts, and it has, when compared with its forefathers, benefited by prosperity most of all. We have the highest possible financial authority for saying that in 1816 the man of the lower middle-class paid 7s. 6d. out of every pound he earned into the Treasury, and we believe it can be proved that he did not earn, taking inevitable expenditure into account—bread and. clothes, for example—the half of what he does now. Now he hardly feels State taxation at all; while if it were not for the great trouble of the class, the excessive increase of rent in towns, he would be a man, as regards earnings, fairly at his ease. The im- provement in the position of the "poor" man is con- stantly recorded, but it is nothing to the improvement in the position of the classes just above him, who at the time when they were most distressed, controlled the State and produced that healthy, if inconvenient, cry fox economy which has now died away.
Previous page
