THE "LIGUE DES CONTRIBUABLES."
"pEACE, Retrenchment, and Reform." The old Liberal cry has fallen upon evil days. Reform, in the political sense of the word, is won. No armed bands from Birmingham are ever likely to march upon London to wrest from an unwilling Parliament that last best boon of " One man, one vote." Peace is still valued, but in a strictly academic fashion. There are Liberals enough to applaud the Czar's proposal, but when we look nearer home these same Liberals are usually found denouncing Lord Salisbury's pusillanimity, and longing for a Rosebery to send the hosts of England to the war. Still, of each of these two an occasional mention may be heard, but of retrenchment the very name has been forgotten. The recent financial achievements of the Liberal party have all been in the other direction. They have increased old taxes and invented new ones, and their boast is that they have placed in the hands of their successors the largest surplus ever known. Nay—a greater triumph still—they have infected these successors with a kindred unwillingness to abandon the taxes handed down to them. We doubt whether a candidate of any colour could possibly find a worse cry than reduction of expenditure. The way to be popular is to suggest at every turn new objects on which to lay out public money. There is a comfortable conviction that no matter how the burdens grow, the back of the State is broad enough to bear them all. Nobody seems to ask where the money it is proposed to spend is to come from. The State is a convenient abstraction behind which there is no need to go. It is rich enough for everything that is demanded of it,.and how can its wealth be better disposed of than in redressing the inequalities of fortune, or in giving employ. ment to young men and women who otherwise might have difficulty in finding it P The same thing may be seen on a still larger scale in France. There the growth of taxation has been so uni- form that some of the taxpayers have at length grown alarmed. They have formed a Ligue des Contribuables, the object of which is to defend the taxpayer against the encroachments, not of the Executive as formerly, but of Parliament. It is in this distinction that the pinch of the situation lies. Time was when the main function of Parliaments was to impose such checks as they could devise on the extravagance of the Executive. They had, as they have now, to vote the money needed to carry on the government, and the object they chiefly set before themselves was to vote as little as possible. Each elector knew that his representative would before all things con- sult, or profess to consult, economy. If at the next dis- solution he had been charged with neglecting this duty, his defence would simply have been that he had performed it so far as circumstances had permitted. In both coun- tries this state of things has passed away. From every quarter of the House of Commons or of the Chamber of Deputies come cries of various meaning, but one and all having this common feature, that they ask the Executive to espouse some fresh scheme that costs money. This is why a Ligue des Contribuables has become a necessity. The sheep has no longer any natural protector against the shearer. His old protector now hands the shears to the operator and complains that he has left too much wool on. Whether the new League will be able to devise any substitute for Parliament may be doubted ; but it is at least conceivable that it may do something in the way of rousing the electors to a sense of the risks they are running when they treat the national Exchequer as inexhaustible. In this way the Government would in the first instance be spared many of the requests with which. it is now beset, and might come in the end to forego some of the undertakings upon which at present it is willing and eager to embark.
It may seem strange that the taxpaying worm should have turned in France while in England he is still patient. Probably the classes which compose the Ligue des Con- tribuables roughly correspond to the classes which pay In ome-tax in England. But in England these classes are specially taxed. The payers of Income-tax are the constant resource of an embarrassed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Whenever he is in any unexpected difficulty he puts on another penny, and it is very seldom that this penny is taken off. We do not know that there is any class in France which is subject to a similar disability or is regarded by a Finance Minister or a Budget Committee as the one to which the State must look for help in every emergency. We know pretty well what the French think of an Income-tax, how they denounce it as inquisitatorial, and as only tending to general perjury. Yet it is in France, where the well-to-do classes do but share in the burdens of their fellow-citizens, that the first symptoms of revolt have appeared. The reason probably is that the gross taxation of France is much heavier than the gross taxa- tion of England, and that it is spent in a very differ, nt fashion. With us an appreciable part of the public Revenue is devoted to reducing the National Debt. How- ever highly we may be taxed, it goes to pay off something which would have had to be paid off some time. In France the Debt is larger now than ever it was. It is not much short of double the Debt of Great Britain,—it is about a third more than it was at the end of the war with Germany. While we have paid off during the last forty years some two hundred millions of Debt—about one- quarter of our entire liability — France, instead of paying off anything, has steadily added to the total. The reason why well-to-do Frenchmen have been moved to take action sooner than well-to-do Englishmen is not that they pay more than other classes, but that they have wits enough to see the end to which France is drifting. They know that taxation is not a process that can for ever go on without check. If it is not kept within bounds by the wisdom of rulers or of people, it will be kept within bounds by national bankruptcy. There will come a time when the mass of the people will refuse to pay their share, when those who are better off will not be able to take the whole burden upon themselves, when re- pudiation, with all its commercial and political disadvan- tages, will be welcomed by one class, and be recognised as inevitable by the other. This is the prospect—distant, no doubt, but still real—that the founders of the Ligue des Contribuables have in view. We call it a distant prospect, because, while things remain as they are, it is distant. But it might easily be brought very much nearer. The few months that the Franco-German War lasted increased the indebtedness by some three hundred millions of pounds. France may not again be caught in the same unprepared state, but even a war for which she was better equipped might end in a defeat, and by the very fact that it lasted longer would be more costly. How would she bear the additional Debt which such a, calamity would involve P No doubt the present position of Great Britain is very much more advantageous than that of France. Her Debt is smaller, her people are accustomed to provision for its reduction as to a regular element in the year's finance. But there are other features in the situation which suggest a less satisfactory comparison. The natural wealth of England is probably less than that of France. She cannot feed herself, she cannot of herself supply her industries with the material they want. If she is far less assailable than her neighbour, she is also exposed to far greater possible disasters in the event of defeat,—disasters which can hardly be realised in advance, for the very reason that we have never been subjected to them. If to-morrow were to be as to-day we might look with indifference upon the steady growth of our expendi- ture. But the identity of to-morrow with to-day is the very thing that cannot be counted on. We will say nothing of reverses in war, because that would lead us into political speculations with which we are not here concerned. But, besides the possibility that we may not always be able to raise with ease our present Revenue there is the certainty—the absolute certainty unless Englishmen become alive to the financial prospect—that the national expenditure will steadily grow larger. The very notion of economy as a virtue in a statesman has died out among the working classes ; consequently there is nothing to keep it alive except the tradition of the Treasury, which is constantly being overruled, and the instincts of the wealthy classes. These are but poor safeguards if they are left to stand alone.
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