Lord Lansdowne addressed a large Unionist meeting at Bowood Park
last Saturday evening. He said that all the Budget proposals had a common feature—a violent hostility to capital—and drew a valuable distinction between the taxation of wealth and the taxation of capital. If you taxed the actual wealth which went into a man's pocket year by year, you knew exactly where you were. But if you went and took part of a man's capital away, you passed from the region of facts to that of conjecture. The Government's system of taxing capital amounted to expropriation, which Mr. Asquith had condemned only a couple of years ago. Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse speech was suspect because it was based on appeals to class prejudice, and on rough-and-ready distinctions between wealth and property recalling the Indian examinee's definition : "The rich man swelters on red velvet and the poor man snorts upon flints." His facts were even more questionable than his taste. Finally, while readily admitting that the will of the people must prevail in the end, Lord Lansdowne maintained that the Lords were completely justified in demanding that the people should be given full and sufficient opportunity of expressing that will, with a full and sufficient knowledge of the subject. On that issue they were ready to try conclusions.
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