TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND PUBLIC EXPENDITURE. THE King's Speech and the explanatory addresses of the Liberal leaders show that the chief features of the coming Session are to be an extension of the inroads of the tax-collector upon our pockets, and an attempt to deprive the House of Lords of its existing functions in the Constitution. That the increase of public expenditure will be insisted on we do not doubt ; but we are by no means sure that the precedent of last year will not be followed, and that the campaign against the Upper House will end in nothing. The stage army furnished by the Liberal caucuses will march up to the walls of the House of Lords and blow their trumpets very vigorously; but when the walls do not fall down of their own accord, as they certainly will not, we venture to predict that the trumpets will be quietly put away and the army will go home, their retreat covered by a defiant shout that next year, or the year after, they will show "the haughty Peers" what Radicals can do when they are thoroughly roused. What makes us convinced that this will happen to the agitation against the Lords is the daily accumulating evidence that the Upper House is not unpopular in the country, and that the "burning indignation" which is supposed to reside in the bosoms of the electors against that Assembly is a fig- ment of the Liberal wirepullers. The House of Lords may not be looked on with any great enthusiasm by the people, but unpopular it assuredly is not. No one considers it an obstacle to the national will, nor is the party rhetoric about it being a gross scandal that a "handful of lord- lings " should be allowed to trample on the democracy any- where taken seriously. The unwillingness and inability of the Peers to trample upon anybody or anything, an& their almost too great willingness to yield to violent demands, are obvious to all men. To be plain, the House of Lords occupies a very secure position owing largely to the persistent refusal of the House of Commons to propose its abolition. The existing situation can shortly be expressed as follows. The country will not consent to be governed by a single House, where votes secured through the opera- tion of the Closure and the " guillotine " would have the force of law, and over whose acts there will be no sort of control or veto, however mild.
We doubt whether any democracy would put itself entirely at the mercy of its representatives in this way, but certainly the British people will not. They will not let the House of Lords, with its weak and limited powers of revision over legislation, go until they are satisfied that something will be put in its place, either in the shape of a strong and popularly elected Upper House, or else in the shape of a Referendum or poll of the people on enactments of the first importance. But the Lower House is absolutely determined not to sacrifice any of its powers in this way. The plan of forming a popularly elected Senate has no adherents in the Commons, and the Referendum, though it is gaining ground among thoughtful Liberals in the country, commands no support among the representatives of the people. Here, then, is an impasse. The country is determined not to be left with a single Chamber, and the House of Commons, though it would like to get rid of the House of Lords altogether, is determined not to do so if it is obliged to find a more powerful substitute. At first the Liberal leaders imagined that they would be allowed to abolish the House of Lords in fact, though not in name, and thus secure for the Commons a monopoly of power. The nation, however, with its usual political instinct, has come to realise the meaning of the Government proposals for dealing with the House of Lords, and sees that they are only abolition under an alias. No doubt we shall be told that what we have written is pure hypothesis, and has no basis in reality. Our answer to such a line of argument is that the present Government, in spite of their vast majority in the House of Commons, are determined not. to run the risk of Dissolution. If they believed that the country was with them on the question of the House of Lords, we may be quite sure that a Dissolution would have taken place on the first occasion when the Lords were alleged to have opposed the popular will. That there was no Dissolution, but only a flood of vituperative rhetoric, disclosed the true situation. The Government feel no assurance that the country would support them in their campaign against the Peers, and therefore they dare not risk an appeal to their masters. But the Peers have of course realised this fact clearly enough, and it has had a very great effect in making a body of men who are constitu- tionally timid determined to judge for themselves whether the legislation proposed to them is backed by a popular. demand—in which case they know they must yield—or whether it is merely enforced by party combinations.
We said above that the House of Lords is not popular. We are, however, by no means sure that it may not actually become popular, if the Government continue on their present course. Men are beginning to feel a good deal of sympathy and approval for the one deliberative Assembly in the country which is incapable of taxing them. The Parish Council, the District Council, the County and the Borough Council, not a few Boards and Commissions, and last, and worst of all, the House of Commons, are continually dipping their hands into our pockets, and withdrawing from those pockets money which is to be spent very often on useless objects, and almost always under wasteful and extravagant conditions. In the House of Lords the nation sees a body which not only makes no attempt to tax us, but which could not tax us if it would. It can, and every now and then does, by throwing out legislation or by the introduction of amendments, prevent the increase of public expenditure, but it is incapable of adding to our burdens. No wonder, then, that it is growing in popularity, and that the weary Titan, groaning under his load, thanks heaven for a House which, at any rate, will not try to pile Pelion upon Ossa in the matter of taxation.
The fact that the House of Lords is gradually gaining in popular esteem because it does not increase taxation is not an isolated fact. We believe that throughout the country there is a rapidly growing feeling of dissatisfaction with the lavishness of the House of Commons. In old days the House of Commons was looked upon as a body which, though it was obliged to make provision for the needs of the State, always did so with a certain grudging- ness. It had to vote supplies, and adequate supplies, but new expenditure was always regarded by it as per se an evil. That feeling has altogether died out. No one now accuses the House of Commons of niggardliness, and the only body left in the country which is even supposed to represent the case for not spending is the Treasury. Of late years, however, even that Department has ceased to be an effective check upon expenditure, and the advocates of increased outlay will often point with pride to the fact that the Treasury is much more reasonable and easy to deal with than it used to be. The feeling which once kept enterprising Departments in awe, and was represented by the oft-repeated phrase, "You will never get the Treasury to agree to that," is rapidly disappearing. Our legislators have, in fact, adopted the principle of the Labour leader who remarked that how the money was to be found for old-age pensions did not concern him. That was the business of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his view, no doubt, each man was to stick to his own job,—the legislator to advising noble schemes for the amelioration of the lot of the people, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the humble and almost mechanical duty of providing the cash.
Happily, this mad notion that money can be found and must be found when it is wanted, and that Parliament need judge only of the merits of the reforms and not drag in the irrelevant question what they will cost, is beginning to lose popular favour. There are signs everywhere that the nation is getting tired of bloated Estimates, and that retrenchment is once more likely to become a popular cry. Certainly such a cry will not come a moment too soon. As we have pointed out elsewhere, the Government's new legislative programme must, if it is passed this year, involve an additional burden of something like ten or twelve millions, and involve also the mortgaging of any future expansion of the revenue. Universal non-contributory old-age pensions will, as it were, stand at the door of the Treasury ready to swallow any automatic increase in the revenue, and will not be fully fed until some thirty millions sterling a year has been provided for the purpose. Thus the Government scheme not only means additional taxation this year, but, under the luckiest conditions, bars the way for the next ten or twelve years at the very least to any reduction of taxation. Think what this means even if we can assume that the civil wants of the nation do not grow automatically with the growth of revenue,—do not, indeed, grow at a greater rate. The prospect would be bad enough if we could assume that the demands of the Army and the Navy were already fully satisfied and could not increase. Unhappily, however, responsible men on both sides admit that we cannot have our own way in either matter, and especially in the matter of the Navy, for the command of the sea is absolutely vital to the safety, nay, to the very existence, of this country. Our supremacy at sea can only be obtained by the possession of the strongest Fleet in the world,—a Fleet so powerful and so well manned, trained, and equipped that it can defeat any collection of ships that is brought against it. At present our Fleet is just powerful enough to command the sea. If, however, any other nation increases its Fleet and alters its proportional relation to ours, we are bound to follow that nation's lead, and to maintain the present balance of naval power. Our Navy, to give us real security, must be something like twice as strong as that of Germany, and at the present moment approaches that ideal. In order to keep our lead, then, we must continue to build, roughly speaking, twice as many ships as the Germans. Thus our naval expenditure is out of our own control, and can be dictated by Germany. Accord- ingly we are threatened with having to increase, and increase very largely, the premium of national insurance effected by naval expenditure, and in all probability shall also have to increase somewhat that effected by Army expenditure.
As friends of economy, we deplore this expenditure. It would, however, be madness to forego such necessary outlay in the name of economy. The first, the essential, thing is to see that the nation is in a position to survive. To put the matter on the lowest grounds, nothing could possibly be so expensive, or lead to so great a burden of taxation, as defeat and conquest. In the needs of the Navy— needs fully admitted by the present Cabinet—we have, then, a strong incentive to economy and to keeping our civil expenditure within bounds. That is the financial lesson of the international situation. Yet what do we see ? The very men who tell us that in all human probability we shall have to spend a great deal more upon the Navy are pro- posing, not only to add to our expenditure this year, but to mortgage the future. We do nat want to use the language of panic or exaggeration in respect of what must be the financial future unless the Government change their attitude towards public expenditure. We should, how- ever, be failing in our duty to the public if we did not say that the situation is one fraught with the gravest possibilities, and that the problem of fiscal economy is urgent in an extreme degree. We do not doubt that what we have written above will be read by many members of the present Government and by thousands of their sup- porters throughout the country with virtual agreement. But we shall be asked : "What can the Government do ? Their supporters in the House of Commons, not only amongst the Labour Members, but even amongst the Liberal rank-and-file, are pledged to old-age pensions and other measures involving large expenditure, and if such expenditure is not granted, the Government will not be able to go on, but must fall before their enemies." That is a coward's argument, and it is also, like most cowardly arguments, a very foolish one. If the Government, even at the eleventh hour, would have the courage to tell the country that the conservation of the national resources has become a matter of supreme importance, and that for the present they dare not be responsible for any further additions to civil expenditure, we believe that they would gain far more than they lost in popular estimation. Unfortunately there is little possibility of the Cabinet determining to call a halt. The expenditure, we fear, will go on, and with it not only will increase the unpopu- larity of the Government, but the danger of that supreme waste of the national resources which is involved in the abandonment of Free-trade. The Government profess to be laving the foundations of old-age pensions. As we have said. before, and as we fear we shall have very often to repeat, what they are really laying are the foundations of a general tariff, and with it the destruction of our existing fiscal system.
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