On the motion for the second reading of the Customs
and Inland Revenue Bill on Tuesday, Sir W. Harcourt made an elaborate attack on Mr. Gosehen's finance, which was, how- ever, more elaborate than effective. He maintained that Mr. Goschen had aimed at originality by innovating on the good old rule that the expenditure of the year should be covered by the revenue of the year. And now it had reached this, that in a year of very great prosperity and very large revenue, they had a Budget leaving the taxation of the country exactly where it was before. The -whole time of the Chancellor of the Exchequer was taken up in pressing upon them to draw blank-cheques in favour of Lord Salisbury, on whose,behalf he had formerly refused to draw a blank-cheque. Again, the Chancellor of the Exchequer "had become a money-jobber.'' He went into the market for £2,000,000, and only got 250,000, the terms offered him being such that he could not adeept. them, Again, last year he was to have spent £600,000 in with- drawing light gold. This year, without saying what he bad done with the 2600,000, he proposed to spend 2400,000 on the same object. He supposed the £600,000 had gone "in the muddling way to which the country was accustomed." Again, a sum of nearly a million was reserved for freeing education' in a manner of which as yet they had had no account. Then the Chancellor of the Exchequer had set up an alarmist cry about the deficient reserve of gold in the Banks. But when he cried " Wolf !" he was hound to come forward and make some remedial proposal, and bring the question to debate in that House. Then he had mortgaged the Suez Canal revenue for five years. The present Government would spend the money, and then would leave their successors to pay the bill.
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