Mr. Childers has republished his very able speech delivered on
the 24th April during the debate on the Budget, with an interesting statistical appendix, bringing out the history of the expenditure and taxation ever since the year 1857, after the close of the Crimean war. Thus he shows that while the Army and Navy expenditure, excluding votes of credit for the various small wars, was for the average of the two years 1857-9, £22,616,000, and for the five years 1859-64, £27,106,000, yet during the- last two years of the Liberal Government of that time, the last of Lord Palmerston's and the single year of Lord Russell's. Government, it sank to £24,673,000, rose again with the Tories to £25,352,000 in 1866-7, reached an average of £26,476,000 for the years 1867-9, and then sank again to an average of £24,273,000 for the four years of Liberal Government, 1869-73, an amount below the expenditure of 1859-60, and not very much above that of the two years between the Crimean and the Italian wars. And he also brings out that in spite of the great increase of the Civil Service Expenditure, there has been, owing to the reduction of the Debt by the expiration of termin- able annuities and other smaller reductions, a real decrease in the charge on taxes since 1857, which was then (1857-8) £60,662,000, and in 1872-3, only £59,204,000, or nearly a million and a half less. Mr. Childers's speech, and his pikes justzficatives, certainly show that the actual burden on our vastly increas- ing national resources is itself a diminishing one.
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