Mr. Asquith went on to denounce what he termed the
nonsense talked about the destruction of capital. The capital taken in taxes did not disappear. It was devoted to public purposes, such as education, sanitation, the preserva- tion of order, "and to those great schemes of social reform on which the mind and heart of the Liberal Party are bent." Here we come to something like an issue with the Socialists and semi-Socialists. All anti-Socialists of course admit that when the Government take our money it is not with the desire of destroying that money or flinging it into the sea. They take it in the belief that they know how to spend it for us better than we can spend it for ourselves. Except for a certain restricted area, such as the preservation of internal peace and defence from foreign attack, we entirely deny this proposition. We anti-Socialists believe that in many cases when the Government spend our money they spend it so badly that they waste the greater half, and that instead of stimulating that energy and enterprise which are the chief producers of wealth, they act as a paralysing influence. We have 'again and again in these pages referred to " the Government
stroke." If Mr. Asquith's contention means anything, it is that "the Government stroke " is as good as the private individual's stroke. In our opinion, as in the opinion of most persons who have had practical experience of the two, " the Government stroke," in spite of the thousand advantages with which it appears to start, has nothing like the same force and power behind it as the stroke of the private person.
