• A BUDGET QUESTION FOR THE COUNTRY.
Tan same hazy uncertainty which hangs over the finance of com- merce hangs in a more fatal form over the national finance. Every branch of it is in a state of suspense ; its questions are all consolidated into a species of deferred stock ; only one calculation has been made to wear any air of certainty, and that is nearly the most diiagrebable that could be authoritatively announced. The one event of the future towards which our financial calculations tend is that some future Chancellor of the Exchequer will propose to renew, in a greatly expanded form, the Income-tax. We are well aware that doubt hangs 'even over this possibility ; but the redeeming uncertainty appears at the moment to lie principally in_the fa-et that Mr: Gladstone is opposed to the Income-tax, and on the juItest grounds ; and Mr. Gladstone does his best to render himself an impossible Minister by exhibiting an incorrigible ten- dency never to terminate the hair-splitting of his own casuistical ingenuity ; so that if our salvation from the Income-tax depends upon the chances of his being Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a Premier to trust him, and a House of Commons to support him, commercial men would give but a slight premium on such a pro- bability.
In his endeavour to bring forward an inoffensive Budget, Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer has committed himself, quietly and deliberately, though perhaps unconsciously, to the systematic pre- piratiOn'Of what is vulgarly called an "emergency." He enters office with difficulties which are undoubtedly serious, though he • oinnot charge them against his predecessor any more than against
himself. We have, since the death of Peel, been coquetting with the most important national questions ; we haVe coquetted with the final reform of our Tariff, with the economy Of the public ser- vice, with the revision' of, our expenditure,—the natural comple- ment of income revision,—and with foreign policy ; and our statesmen in office" have at the present day to meet many an action for breach of promise of marriage preferred in the name of financial reform, administrative reform and popular foreign al- liances. The finance Minister of the day is restrained from re- augmenting those taxes, the reduction of which has done so much to expand the commercial income of the country. He is denied the useof the Income-tax because we are not at war, nor are we finishing the revision of our Tariff. He ought to fulfil Mr. Glad- stone's promise of clearing off certain liabilities ; yet he has to keep up immense military and naval establishments, because we have a system of insincere alliances which covers the suspicion of animosity under the gaudy veil of Court friendships and diplo- matic partnerships. He selects the smallest of his•difficulties, and eats his own words in order to follow out the course, which he re- fused to his predecessor, by deferring the repayment of obli- gations. In doing this Mr. Disraeli seeks to incur the least amount of responsibility • and he has some right to do so, since he is but accidentally in office owing to a very pe- culiar and transitional state of the House of Commons, , and- therefore is without a majority, enabling him to carry out his own course, supposing he had a course. He can carry out nobody's views, and he aims at -attempting nothing. The con- sequence is, that he establishes a precedent nearly unknown to our financial history, in asking the House. of Commons to sanc- tion the largest expenditure ,Whichlt has ever known save under press of war, or some extraordinary and obvious demands upon the State. It is a proof how degenerate the representative House has become under the prevailing system of compromises, that it now allows Mr. Disraeli, at the head of a minority, to establish such utterly unconstitutional, unphilosophical, unpractical, un- statesmanlike, and uneconomical methods of finance. He could be prevented in a moment, yet no man's hand is raised against him ; and thus the Opposition, with its majority, with its finan- ciers claiming to possess a superior intelligence, becomes respon- sible for establishing this Disraeli precedent.
The chronic disease in our exchequer is infinitely more alarm- ing, to those who look beyond the immediate present, than it would be in an acute form ; and what are the remedies proposed ? They are, on the one side, retrenchment, on the other, continu- ance or revival of the Income-tax. Mr. Bright is for pulling down our military establishments, and Mr. Cardwell is for re- storing the Income-tax. Now the Income-tax is open to the most serious objections, which Peel parried, rather than answered, on the strength of the important objects which he intended to effect. The reasons are conclusive. While professing to be equal, the tax is totally unequal in its pressure. • When once it has' become permanent, it is a form of taxation which places un- due power in the hands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who can adjust its sliding scale by a delicate machinery, which, while eluding the jealousy of the Commons gives him the range of millions, and so helps him to correct his own financial errors at the expense of the tax-payer. It is a tax too that
must always be levied in the lump, and for that reason it is quite unsuited to a population like ours, which lives from hand to mouth, and not, as the few select of society do, upon large pay- ments, at long periods, which can be well calculated by, the steward. It is a kind of impost well suited to an extraordinary necessity, not unlike the old "benevolences," with which the na- tion helped the Sovereign through a trouble, but proportionately inappropriate for the quiet and, regular finance of our trading days. It is miserable to see that those financiers who profess to be most popular have no better invention than this. Mr. Bright is nearer the mark, but he begins entirely at the wrong end. And he raises an old and exploded cry of poor against rich, to which a man of his intellect should be ashamed to recur. Those controversies are de- funct. And the intelligent members of the artisan class value this declamation of the special representative of the interests of capital precisely at what it is worth. Mr. Bright's demands for retrenchment, founded as they are upon his war-craze, appear to us to provoke additions to the estimates. He would reduce the taxation in order to disarm the Government, and keep it Oa of war, or war-provoking alliances. If he could compel the Government to be straightforward, force it into a frank diplomacy, with sin- cere alliances,' with sincere behaviour to foreign countries, he would make it set an example that might cheek the dangerous in- trigues of those accomplices whom we call allies. • But it is Mr. Disraeli who has got really at the pith of the matter, But, he says that "finance depends upon policy,"—an axiom which he has evinced as little practical capacity, as he has Parliamentary means, of applying. Nor is it only upon foreign policy that finance de- pends; while we have at home a policy of maintaining establish- ments for the sake of the servants that fill them, and abroad a policy of subserving diplomatic allies who are opposed to all the institutions and Public objects of this country, we must pay for it. It is not Mr. Gladstone that established the first cause of the de- ficit, and it will need something more powerful and fundamental than an Income-tax to set our Budget straight.
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