News of the Week The Budget TT was a proof
of the closeness with which' Mr. Snowden had kept his secrets that he upset all the prophets by his Budget speech on Monday. - A sixPenny increase in 'Income Tax had on the whole been thought unlikely, yet. Mr. Snowden demanded it. Again, it had been thought that he would- prefer making the Surtax embrace incomes down -to r1,500- a year to, relying entirely upon a steeper. graduation of the tax upon larger incomes. Again the prophets were Nit-rot*. Mt. -Snowden's invincible faith in Free Trade, with its corollary of a hatred of all avoidable indirect taxation, compels the comment that if the Labour Party as a whole agrees- with him quite the worst way of developing the trade Of 'the Empire in the immediate future is to bind it in fiscal shackles. Protectionists: and Safeguarders themselves have not tired of telling . Snowden that '! uncertainty -" is - .killing trade. But what greater_imeertainty could there be than a system. of Empire trade, protected, against the rest of the world, with all the Free Traders at home and in the Dominions wanting to change it ? It should always be the part of' wise men who want to agree but are conscious of their differences to choose the policy that divides them least. No division whatever would be caused by a policy of Empire development without Protection. Believers in tariffs would not, of course, think such development perfect but they could at least find much in it to support and nothing in it which they could actively disapprove.
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