LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often more read,and therefore more effective, than those which fill treble the space.]
"FACTS NOT FICTION."
(To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOIL."1 SIR,—I should be obliged if you would afford me the opportunity to say a few words in answer to the letter signed " Facts Not Fiction" in your issue of October 8th. To begin with, I should like to say that I did not give the same meaning to the word "absolutely " as the writer. I admit that the fault was mine and that his terminology is a more accurate one. I was not taking the Income Tax-into account. By " relatively" I meant in relation to the average incomes of other professions; by "absolutely" I meant making every allowance for the extra cost of living and all direct losses due to the war, but not for the deductions the State might make for Income Tax. My feeling was that the Income Tax, being universal and repre- senting that part of the direct burden of the war which it was inconceivable that the State should remit in favour of any one class, might be left out of account. But I see that this ought to have been explained and that it makes the use of the word "absolute " unfortunate. I have therefore no right to object to the construction which the writer of the letter put upon my words, and much of the criticism in his opening paragraphs is valid against such an interpretation of them. I should like, However, to register a protest against his taking the cost of living index figures as true in actual fact, and making deduc- tions•from them. They are most misleading and arbitrary, as everyone recognizes. If the cost of living as a whole was really 120 (and had been 140) per cent. above the pre-war figures, many of the unfortunate Middle Class, who have never received either increased salaries or bonuses but only the privilege of paying higher taxation, would have almost ceased to exist. Taking everything into consideration, the cost of food, clothing, rent, education, travelling, and assuming that people have some common sense in modifying certain wants and using reasonable substitutes, I doubt whether the actual rise need be regarded
as more than 40 to 70 per cent. Most men, I am confident, would feel that they could do considerably more with £2,040 in 1921 than with £930 in 1913.
As regards the facts, the public no doubt have to take them where they can find them—that is to say, in authoritative state- meats in Parliament and the Press; and some of them present a rather different aspect from those given by my critic. " The Permanent Under-Secretary," he says, " for the Colonies (say) now receives £3,000 inclusive as against £2,000 in 1914." Exactly. But until the public criticism which he deprecates so strongly the holders of these posts -were receiving £3,000 and the cost of living bonus iu addition. It was acknowledged in the House of Commons on April 16th that the secretary to a department whose salary was normally £1,500 was receiving not only an increase of salary of £700, but a war bonus of £750 as well, so that his total remuneration had risen to £2,950. In the Times of May 26th Mr. Geoffrey Drage wrote, and no one controverted his statement, that " the Permanent Secretary. of the Treasury formerly received .22,000, and at least one occupant of the post refused an increase on public grounds. his duties are now divided among three officials, each of whom receives a salary of £3,000 with a bonus of £750, which seems to be approximately permanent, and the pensions of those fortunate individuals are apparently to be based on their total salaries of £3,750." In the Times of June 20th Colonel C. Waley Cohen mentions the case of an official at the War Office who had a salary in 1919 of .21,500, but two years later was receiving £3,000 plus a bonus of .£500 to £700 for exactly the same work. The salary of the highest permanent official at the Treasury, as Whitaker's .41manack shows, was raised from £2,000 to £3,500. These are the kind of statements I had before sue; they went unchallenged at the time, and I contend I Lad every right to rely upon them. The bonus, of course, has now been abolished for all incomes of £2,000, and there have been other cuts, but that again is simply duo to the fact that Parliament at last yielded to persistent outside criticism. The chief objec- tion to all these increases is the time and circumstances in which they were made. "The chief justification for these increases," says the writer of the letter of October 8th, " lay in the fact that previously the emoluments attaching to these posts hnd not been raised for about a century." What a time to choose! For a hundred years, in the days of our greatest prosperity, we are content with the status quo, and then, in the closing years of a terrible and ruinous war, when the country is on the brink of financial ruin and taxation has almost passed the bearable limit, Parliament determines that the proper moment has come to carry through a generous scheme of reorganization.
The bonus theory ought never to have been admitted at all, and this applies just as much to military and naval officers and to munition workers as to Civil Servants. " Bonus " means, I suppose, some extra gain or profit, and the war could only, and ought only to, be not gain but loss. It was not only a calamitous policy, but a most unhappy experiment in nomen- clature. The only class that ought to have received any kind of allowance from taxation were those workers whose remunera- tion was so low that without help they could not have supported existence, and it should have been given as State relief to pre- vent destitution. All other classes should have been expected to bear their fair share of the losses of the war. The notion that men should receive State money to maintain the amenities, the dignities, and the social positions of life should never have been tolerated.
Have the Government over formulated a consistent theory of the financial aspect of the bonus? If they had decided to attempt to put every person back in the position he occupied before the war by a general rise of income all round the result would have been a mere juggling with counters, and no one would have been, except in terms of a grossly inflated cur- rency, one penny the better off. But the proceeding, at any rate, would have been ethically equitable, though intellec- tually fatuous. If only certain classes were to receive the bonus, and for choice those who had the power to hold up the State by strikes, or who had in one way or another a "pull," then these classes have to be subsidized at the expense of their fellows. There aro, I suppose, people who cultivate the conso- latory belief that funds for this particular purpose can be taken merely from the "idle rich." The thing is absolutely impossible. It was calculated in 1920 that the mere increases in wages of railwaymen for that year amounted to £100,000,000. It would, therefore, have required the total confiscation of the estates of a hundred millionaires to make up that sum, which was, as a matter of fact, shared between about half a million people.
My original letter was obviously written in no hostile spirit to the Civil Service. If we were dealing with a normal world and with counsels of perfection I should agree with all the implications of " Fact Not Fiction's " letter last week, viz., that the Civil Service has been underpaid in comparison with
other professions demanding the same great abilities, and that it is good policy to recompense public servants on a generous scale. But I see little recognition in his letter of the fact that the times are entirely abnormal, and that our economic policy must be conditioned by ruinous war losses and a national indebtedness unparalleled in our history. A far larger pro- portion of the community than he admits have had to bear losses without hope of alleviation. They have bad neither the influence nor the power. to embarrass Governments, and so their only bonus has been an extra portion of sacrifice. It is impossible to get away from the fact that struggling profes- sional men and private individuals with incomes of £400 to £1,000 have had to pay more in taxation in order that, to take one of the instances quoted above, an official with the not inadequate income of £1,500 should enjoy a further emolument [We cannot continue this correspondence.—En. Spectator.]
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