Mr. Henry Fowler, speaking to the electors of East Wolver-
hampton on Monday, was not nearly so mere a partisan in his tone as Mr. Bryce. His chief endeavour was to show that Mr. Goschen should relieve the pressure on labour rather than that on property with the surplus at his disposal. Indeed, he charged Mr. Goschen with having taken much more pains in his previous Budgets to relieve property than to relieve labour. We do not know whether Mr. Fowler regards the stamp-duties which Mr. Goschen has imposed, and the increase of the suc- cession-duty, as anything but burdens upon property rather than on labour. It would be difficult, we imagine, to make any other view appear even superficially plausible; but if Mr. Fowler does not hold it, he ought, we think, to have referred to what Mr. Goschen has done in this way as telling against his rather untenable charge. As for the statement that in dispensing with a portion of the Sinking Fund, he relieved the taxation on property rather than that on labour, Mr. Fowler forgot to state that, as a matter of, fact, a greater amount of debt was actually paid off out of the surplus, though it was not provided for beforehand, than the Sinking Fund alone would have can- celled, and that even if the Sinking Fund had actually been used for the extra naval expenditure (which it was not), it was used for a purpose which added at least as much to the wages of labour as to the profits of capitalists. Mr. Fowler hardly showed his good taste when he warned the Commissioners who are shortly to give in their report on Parnellism and Crime, that the Opposition intend to regard them not as Judges, but as Commissioners ; and when he threatened them with sharp Parliamentary criticism. That looks very much as if Mr. Henry Fowler had made up his mind what the report of the Commissioners is to be, and is determined to attack it. It is hardly a wise course to threaten just men with premature reproaches for eagerly anticipated offences.
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