The Budget at any rate has been a personal success
for Mr. Baldwin. His clear, decisive, yet unpretentious way of speaking is almost ideal both to impress the House of Commons and to present a financial statement. Mr. Baldwin is the only one of the Prime Minister's Parliamentary team who can be always depended upon to score runs off his own bat. His opponents, indeed, made his task easier by letting their criticisms cancel out. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and his followers were all for debt redemption, and complained only that Mr. Baldwin had not gone far enough, while Sir Alfred Mond, and on Tuesday Sir Robert Horne and Sir Laming Worthington Evans, were all for leaving the debt alone and making further reductions in taxation. Mr. Asquith was in distinctly good form, and made very effective play with Sir Robert Home's illusions in his last year's Budget speech. But almost all these speakers, from their different angles of vision, were constrained to admit that Mr. Baldwin's main outline was sound, whatever they might think of his details.
