TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BUDGET.
MR. CHILDERS made a much greater impression by his Budget speech than he had led his audience at its commencement to expect. There was visible throughout it the genuine financial mind,—the mind which occupies itself naturally with these subjects, to which financial considerations are not mere burdens of official duty, but matters of something like personal fascination. You could see this in the care with which Mr. Childers, in comparing the finance of one year with the finance of another, made allowance for all those smaller considerations which really affect the meaning of the figures. For example, in his comparison to show how the consump- tion of alcoholic liquors had diminished of late years, nothing could exceed the care with which he made, not only, of course, the due allowance for increase of population, but the allowance to be made, as regards the consumption of beer, for the change of the malt duty into the beer duty. The same elaborate care pervaded his discussion,— otherwise perhaps somewhat too militant in tone for a Budget speech, though we fully acknowledge the provocation he had received,---of the amounts of debt imposed and paid off by the two Administrations during the various years which he included in his survey. Everywhere you saw evidence not merely of the accurate financier, but of the financier who is so absolutely determined not to be misled by accurate figures into an in- accurate reconstruction of the facts behind the figures, that he is always on the look-out for possible causes of fallacy in comparing one year's figures with the apparent return for another year. That, however, was but a small part of the interest of Mr. Childers's Budget. Its chief interest was the comparative weight he laid on the different elements of his statement,—the stress with which he insisted on the reduction of Debt, and the arrangements for a serious enterprise in that direction,—the prospect which he held out of taxing the pro- perty of Corporations so as to make it yield a fair equivalent for the Succession duties paid by private individuals whose death transfers property from one to another,—and the anxiety he showed to diminish the cost of the poor man's journeys, rather than to increase the gains of the Railway Companies which carry him. In all these respects, Mr. Childers showed that he had fixed his mind on critical and permanent financial considerations, and that he was actuated by no caprice. Even in his proposition for the abolition of the duty on silver, he was no doubt actuated by the conviction that the ultimate abolition of this duty will be of infinitely greater importance to India than it will ever be to England. There was no vestige of caprice in his statement. Nothing could be more unfair than to call his main proposal—the taking-off of the lid. income-tax imposed last year—the proposal of " a rich man's
Budget." If so, then the putting-on of that 11-d. should have been called the proposal of a poor man's Budget. In point of fact, it is only fair that those who can best bear the burden of war should be the first to feel it. But then, if that is to be so, they should also be the first to feel the relief from it. The State which has taken the cost of a small war out of the pockets of the middle class, clearly cannot be reproached with class-favouritism when it refuses to continue that special imposition on the middle class after the expense of the war has been paid. To call that favouritism to the rich, is like calling it favouritism to the rich to cease extracting from them subscriptions for a charity which has learnt to pay its own way. Mr. Childers was bound almost in honesty to restore to the well-to-do what Mr. Gladstone had extracted from them in order to prevent any sudden pressure on the poor.
Much the most important feature of the speech was that part of it which entails no burden on the finances of the year,—the proposal to pledge the country at once to the disposition of the large resources falling-in in 1885, for the reduction of Debt. To this proposal Mr. Childers led up with great skill. Indeed, we are disposed to think that what Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir R. Cross complained of as the vehemently partisan character of the Budget was due much less to Mr. Childers's wish to vindicate the Government from the perfectly baseless asser- tions of the Tories, than from his desire to vreclude any danger of their objecting to those dispositions of future resources which he was about to make. By showing how little in comparison the Tories had done for the reduction of Debt, he almost shut off the possibility of their objecting to what he was about to
do for the reduction of Debt during the next twenty years_ Any such objection would at once give rise to the cry that they were hoping to return to office before 1885, and desired in that case to make a more immediately popular use of the financial resources at their disposal than any the benefit of which would be reaped chiefly by our posterity. Mr. Childers is so little of a militant politician, that we do not believe he could have administered the various raps and pricks which seem to have told so powerfully on the Front Opposition Bench, if he had not had some object in doing so by no means partisan in character.. That object we suspect to have been to estop the Tories by -anticipation from any attempt to remonstrate against his pro- posal of committing the nation at once to the right use of the financial resources of 1885, before they shall fall in. To stimu- late their pride in Sir Stafford Northcote's honest attempt in the same direction, and to pique them by showing how much less Sir Stafford had been able to do in furtherance of his own policy than Mr. Gladstone had done for that policy, was the very best security Mr. Childers could have taken against any obstructive move. The proposal to extinguish at once seventy millions of Debt by borrowing from the Chancery Suitors Fund and the Savings Bank. Fund, and to replace these funds within twenty years, besides further extinguishing within that time 102 millions of Debt more, through the agency of the termina- ble annuities which Mr. Childers proposes to create, is,. if we may not exactly call it a great policy, at least a strenuous and worthy policy in the right direction, to which the Tories, stung by the comparison between their financial achievements and ours, will hardly find it feasible to object.
Mr. Childers' proof that between the year 1875-76 and the year 1882-3 the people of the United Kingdom have diminished their consumption of alcoholic liquors by an amount the duty on which alone amounts to £5,000,000 a year, is, in our opinion, a very remarkable evidence of the result of compulsory education. It was not till 1875-6 that the first-fruits of the Education Bill were becoming visible, and the seven year& of Mr. Childers' comparison are the first seven years in which we could have expected that policy to have affected v.t all the adult population. We only wish Mr. Childers had shown how far the change in the latter of these years has or has not been pro- gressive, as compared with the change in the earlier years. It would have been a very encouraging thing to be told that it is progressive, and that we may expect this progress to continue. It is clear, at all events, that the change is not due to bad times, for the progress in the consumption of tea shows that it is not want of means which prevents the increased con- sumption of spirits and beer. Mr. Childers showed how truly he understood the meaning of this change, when he devoted £135,000 of his surplus to the abolition of the railway-passenger duty on third-class fares. This is a reduction of duty conceived with the view of encouraging and promoting the very class of social changes which the rapid progress of temperance favours. To make it easier for our poorer class to travel,—whether in pursuit of work or in pursuit of pleasure,—is to give them the means of spending with the greatest profit to themselves' all that they save by their more temperate habits of life. And we believe that this change will have a very great effect on the policy of our great Railway Companies, which must, from this time forth, consider the convenience of their poorest passengers as the most important of all the conditions of their own success. We congratulate Mr. Childers heartily on having- proved,—and this in a year when he had no opportunity of producing a brilliant Budget,—that he knows exactly the critical parts of our finance, that he is prepared to accept all the best precedents of his predecessors ; and most of all, that he is determined, whenever it is possible rightly to reduce taxation, to do justice, first, by taking off the burdens specially imposed for a special purpose, and then by relieving as much as is in his power, the financial pressure which arrests the social progress of the poor.
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