M. TRIERS ON FRENCH FINANCE.
IT is unlucky for France that the task of leading the assault on the Budget always falls to M. Thiers. In the present position of French affairs the budget is perhaps the one point upon which the action of the Executive could be re- sisted, upon which the Chamber could take a bold stand without running the risk of provoking a coup d' etat. M. Rouher one day declared that the Imperial Government refused to consider the consequences which must follow its defeat in the Chamber, and it is well understood that such an event would be followed by an appeal to universal suffrage, a plebiscitum intended to nullify the action of the Corps Legis- latif. That body nevertheless has successfully resisted one great project, the Bill for the creation of majorats which it knew well would be as unacceptable to the masses as to itself. It knew well that Napoleon would not venture to lay before the masses a project so opposed to all the instincts of France, and the Emperor, who knew it also, quietly receded from an untenable position. On many financial questions the members ought to be nearly as sure of popular support as they were when they resolved to throw out the Montauban dotation. Frenchmen, though not financiers, are sensitive about finance. The thinking classes have an idea that deficits produce revolution, and the peasantry have an acute dread of any increase in the taxes. The bourgeoisie, again, are dimly aware that if the budget increases too fast the only alternatives will be repudiation, which is impossible, the masses owning the debt, and direct taxation, from which the middle class shrinks with an almost inexplicable dread. M. Gamier Pages in this very debate made the whole Chamber wince by suggesting an income-tax as the easiest way out of the financial scrape, and roused the Government orator to an emphatic repudiation of such revolutionary schemes. All classes therefore will listen to stories of financial danger, and it is not difficult to show that the financial danger of France is really very considerable. The Empire has done great things of a certain kind for France, but it is a serious question whether they have not cost a great deal too much. France has recovered her grand position among the nations forfeited by the events of 1815 and the policy of Louis Philippe, but then her debt has increased by 175 millions of pounds. Her cities have been rebuilt, her railway system completed, her commerce relieved from fetters, her people accustomed to in- dustrial enterprise but then the annual outlay has risen from 60,000,000/. to 90,000,0001. a year. A system of accounts so delusive that, as M. Thiers showed, Government produces no less than five budgets a year—ordinary, extraordinary, depart- mental, rectificative, and final,—has enabled the Government to add 50 per cent. to the expenditure, almost in silence and with- out the possibility of resistance. So complicated is the system that M. Thiers, an ex-Minister, was occupied two months in merely extracting from the different budgets an account of the total expenditure of the year. That extra cost may not be too much to pay for the extra gain, we greatly doubt whether it is too much, whether England, for example, has not wasted more in unnecessary expenditure upon her railway system, but it certainly looks too much. In increase of taxation from ten pounds per heusehold to fifteen pounds seems a heavy price to pay for the Empire, and the incessant iteration of the fact that France is paying it would quicker than any other argument compel average Frenchmen to reflect, might induce them even to urge that reduction must be made, even though progress should be less rapid. The Chamber could if it chose upon this point act, and it was sensibly moved by M. Thiers's picture of the financial situation.
Unfortunately M. Thiers, who touches the sore nerve so exactly, is of all men of the first rank in politics the one least competent to deal with finance. He will repeat the nonsense about a sinking fund, expecting to get more hay out of a field than there is grass in it, will attempt to deal with details instead of adhering to the broad facts, will demand sudden and impracticable alterations of policy, instead of insisting upon those changes in its direction which would in the end restore the equilibrium. He was very happy when he des- crila3d the resignation of a Minister for the sake of a principle as a practice of a past-away regime, but the poisonous epigram will not help M. Fould to restrain his master. The main- springs of French expenditure are the strength of the army, the lavish expenditure on public works, and the cost of ex- peditions to Mexico, Rome, Cochin China, and New Caledonia, and M. Thiers chooses from these the two which, as he well knows, neither will nor can be abandoned suddenly. He would restrict the public works which keep the workmen away from politics, and feed the only population capable of organiz- ing insurrection, and he would abandon Mexico, to which the pride of the Emperor is pledged, but he would not reduce the army. Forgetting entirely that Europe armed to protect herself from France, he declares that while Russia retains Poland, and Austria watches Venetia, and Prussia hungers for annexations, France cannot dispense with an army of 400,000 men. In short France is to keep armed because she has provoked the rest of Europe to arm also, and till they disarm she is to continue the provocation. She is not to abandon her attitude of aggression, but only to allow that aggression in Mexico produces nothing but expense, not to give up the game, but only to throw away its most alluring reward. Public works may have been overdone in France, though the duties there thrown by the people on the State ought to be taken into the account, but public works are cer- tainly more profitable than the maintenance of an enormous garrison, useful only to restrain public liberty at home and tempt the master of legions into acts of high-handed inter- ference abroad. In demanding the surrender of Mexico M. Thiers lost his chance of influencing the mind of the Emperor, while in condemning public works he alienated the working masses, who look upon them as English labourers do upon the Poor Law, the place of which they indeed partly fill. Both mistakes would have been logical had he also insisted upon the reduction of the army, but this he expressly repudiated, and the gist of his speech therefore amounts in fact to this :—M. Thiers does not want reduction so much as to select the objects of expenditure, does not ask the Chamber to perform its own function of keeping the public purse so much as to assume the function which the Constitution expressly refuses, that of initiating public policy. He will not accept the inevitable, and try to make the best of that, but demands that the inevitable,—in other words, the will of the Emperor, —should get itself out of the way as a condition precedent. Of course a speaker who, like M. Thiers, intends first of all to produce a great oratorical sensation is tempted to exagge- rate, and the menace of bankruptcy with which he finished is an exaggeration. Ninety millions is a large figure for the ex- penditure of a nation in a time of peace, but six years ago we were spending very nearly, if not quite as much. Franco has neither county rates, poor- rates, nor tithes, and when these taxes are added to the national outlay, it will be found that in 1854 we were paying eighty-six millions a year, or head for head a little more than France, while we were not devoting one tithe of that sum to public works.
The increase of expenditure has not been met in any con- siderable degree by additional taxation, but by loans, the interest of which has been piovided, and greatly more than provided, by the rise in the normal revenue produced by the increasing activity of the country, which, again, is due in no slight degree to the very expenditure complained of. No doubt it is most absurd that half a million should be spent in building a " Tuileries " for the Prefect of the Rhone et Douches, but empires are not made bankrupt by a little waste on public buildings, else were England long since ruined ; and the mass of the outlay on roads, and bridges, and embank- ments, and above all railways, is just as productive as if it had been incurred by private individuals. M. Thiers says the guarantee to certain railways costs a good deal. So it does, but we venture to say that the loss incurred by the British people in rejecting State control of the railways was in- definitely greater. To make anything like a fair sketch of the case, the addition to the national income should be con- trasted with the addition to the national wealth, and this is precisely what M. Thiers omits to do. He makes one great and serious point that the national expenditure has increased 50 per cent., and there for all political purposes he leaves us. It Indy be that the increase is without justification, but this he does not prove, and the only effect of his speech is to show that the Empire costs a great deal of money. That is an argument against the continuance of the Empire, but it is not advice how to make the Empire cost less, and this is what is wanted from M. Thiers. To accept the inevitable, and in accepting it protect the country from injury, this is the lesson the French opposition seems unable to learn, and till it has learned it all eloquence will be, as that of M. Thiers has in this instance been, unfruitful even of a Parliamentary division.
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