MR. CHILDERS ON STATE ECONOMY.
-EVERY good has its drawback, even wise Finance. One would think, reasoning a priori, that wise finance could not possibly produce any mischief ; but it does, at all events, greatly increase one evil. It is not the main cause of the declining desire for retrenchment and economy in State ex- penditure, but it is a principal one. The national taxes have been so carefully adjusted to the shoulders which bear them, they press so lightly on the springs of prosperity and they fall so little on the struggling classes, that except once a year, when three households in every hundred see the Income-tax paper, they are almost forgotten. All householders, including even the rich, fret under the rates, which fall on the profes- sional classes, who are over-housed, and on the lower shop- keepers, whose lives are a struggle, with irritating weight ; but not one man in twenty thinks about or calculates the pressure of " the Queen's taxes." As Parliament spends them, and not the rates, the discussions about them are felt to be dull and unattractive, There is no general eagerness in the House of Commons for reductions. The party leaders do not think of moving abstract resolutions against the Treasury. The demagogues leave the subject alone, or attack classes through talk about pensions and honorary colonelcies. No one takes up the r4le of Joseph Hume, and if he did, he would not be as sure as Joseph was of catching the public ear. • The Treasury itself, instead of fighting for its grants, and learning to regard the advocates of economy as personal enemies, is compelled to protect the public, and dreads the constant accusation of stinginess, as it for- merly dreaded that of squandering. Above all, no Member endangers his popularity with his electors by proposing expen- diture. Whether he asks the House to give more pensions, or more grants-in-aid to Ireland, or a sum of money for old manu- scripts, or a remission of revenue, he makes his proposal with an eye to the House alone, quite fearless of any shower of remonstrances from angry constituents. If Shapira had really found an older Deuteronomy, he would have found a Member also to ask £100,000 for its purchase ; and that Member would have been resisted mainly by Mr. Childers and Mr. Courtney, and would not have been turned out of his seat. Officers of the Army and Navy in particular are held unaccountable for waste to such a degree that, as Mr. Childers told his constituents at Pontefract in his lively speech of Wednesday, in the past three years 556 proposals for expenditure have been pressed by them upon the Exchequer, and only twenty proposals for economy. And though he did not say so, we greatly doubt if the dispro- portion between the efforts to increase and the attempts to reduce civil expenditure is very much less. At all events, the Civil Estimates are always going up—quite rightly, in most in- stances—and nobody fights against them ; while the plans for the reduction of Debt have grown quite to appreciable pro- portions, with no more opposition than is embodied in a growl that we are doing a great deal for posterity, which has done nothing for us.
We cannot say we like this condition of opinion. It will favour some day or other an extravagant Chancellor of the Exchequer, or a Premier who thinks, as M. de Freycinet did, on less plausible grounds, that with the Debt dis- appearing and Two and a Half per Cents, at par, the waste of a few score millions in gigantic philanthropies or half-thought-out experiments cannot matter seriously. It does already encourage very loose thinking about the limits of State action and about the aid which the Treasury could lend to improve the condition of the poor,—looseness which, when the rural householders come crashing into the arena, may have perceptible effects upon the working of the Poor Law. It does weaken the hands of those statesmen who see that, well adjusted as taxation is, the total amount deducted from volun- tary expenditure, and therefore from the wages fund, is very large; and, above all, it does prevent that form of penuriousness which historians are convinced tends to the efficiency of States. It is not the Bourbon with his millions of pensions, but the Hohenzollern, with his grudging allowances to his servants, who is well served. It is a hard thing to say, but it is a truth that a well-paid Army is an army cumbered with impedimenta ; that a well-paid Navy,—well, no one ever heard of one ; that well- paid diplomatists think of social rather than diplomatic successes ; that under-paid civilians in fourth-floor lodgings do notgrumble, if they work sixty hours a week. Hard management helps efficiency, and the Prussian bureaucracy works on crusts, as the English Civil Service, though it, too, in its way, is effective, does not work on full dinners. We should like to see the cheeseparers in the House again, and this the more because we are convinced that Democracy, in countries naturally wealthy, has a distinct inclination to waste. Nobody is more . careful of his cash than an American freeholder, but his repre- sentatives in Congress positively play chuck-farthing with millions, till the officials are compelled to tell them, as they have done this week, that it is not the business of the National Government to raise revenues to be scattered in grants among the States, and to suggest that, with the Navy in ruins for want of "appropriations," it is not wise to offer premiums of millions to those States in which the largest number of children can- not read. There really was a danger for a minute of that lunatic proposal being accepted by the House of Representa- tives. No one is quite so mean as the average French peasant ; yet in France, though the Government, warned at
last by its difficulty in keeping down the floating Debt, begins to contend with the Deputies, nothing can resist the tendency to spend. The transaction of Tuesday was exactly typical. The peasantry wish education to be free, so school fees have been abolished by a vote. The loss ought to have been made good by the Communes, but as that might have made Deputies unpopular, the majority of the Chamber asked for a State grant, and, after a fierce fight, this was whittled down to £560,000 a year, and conceded. The Communal Councils were not contented, however, or the Deputies, so on Tuesday they carried, by 260 to 240, an increase of the grant to
£760,000 a year, the peasants thus saving their school fees, and getting an allowance in all from the Treasury of 2s. per house in addition. That is only a sample of what is going on in France, and what will go on here, if, when the suffrage is extended, we cannot revive the old, healthy grudge against Treasury expenditure. In this very Depart- ment of Education, it would be most popular to waste millions, if they did not come from the rates ; and there are 20,000 influential persons in daily intercourse with electors and electors' wives whose direct interest it is that the State should be "liberal," and who, moreover, conscientiously believe that its "liberality " must do good. We should like to know what sort of a grant in aid of rates Mr. Bromley- Davenport would think extravagant, or why we are so certain that the rural householder will not agree with that very pleasant story-teller. Local people still think the Treasury a sort of oil-well, a free-flowing fountain of wealth, issuing no one knows whence, and resent an economy as they would the withdrawal of a right of way. Mr. Childers fought the local magnates the other day to save £30,000 a year in the collection of the Income-tax ; but they thought £30,000 mattered nothing to the Treasury and a great deal to their patronage, and he was conspicuously defeated. He will be defeated a good many times yet, if the prevalent disregard for expenditure, so long as new taxes are not suggested, is not changed. The money flows in BO easily that the people feel like speculators who have "struck oil," as if expenditure came from some place outside their own pockets. So strongly do we dread this tendency, that we should be by no means sorry to see the Estimates referred to a Grand Committee, even if it were necessary, to prevent the exhaus- tion of the House, to reduce that Grand Committee to thirty. Thirty men, all interested, and all familiar with the subject, would subject the Estimates to a searching criticism which would be felt even more by the spending Departments than by the spendthrift Members. The items as well as the totals would be examined, a group of economists would be formed, and we should be spared the discreditable spectacle of Estimates voted en bloc in such a hurry, that if Mr. Childers had inserted half a million to be sent to Rome as Peter's Pence, nobody would have perceived the audacity. We suppose the House is for the moment overloaded, especially if the Muni- cipal Bill is to go to a Grand Committee ; but ultimately, if the Treasury is to be protected, we must come either to something of this kind, or to a reference of the Esti- mates to a Standing Committee on Finance. At present, the whole work is left to the Treasury, with the additional aggravation that the Representatives, who ought to be the checking power, wish it to spend more, not less. It is as if the Board of Directors were left to their own discretion, sub- ject only to criticism from shareholders who ask in an angry tone why the business has been so advantageously managed. The natural relations of the Treasury and the nation are topsy- turvied, and we have the Chancellor of the Excheguer with tears in his eyes at the incessant attacks on him for saving the people's money with such disgraceful assiduity.
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