TOPICS OF THE DAY
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THE PARLIAMENTARY CRISIS.
THE Government is convalescent. After the severe treat- ment of the Ministry in the early part 'of last week, and the exhibition of a drastic black dose by Mr. Cowper Temple and his supporters yesterday week, just as a reminder, that though the danger might be past, it must not for a moment consider itself out of the doctor's hands, the discon- tented Liberals decided on Monday to administer stimulants and tonics once more, lest the patient should slip through their fingers altogether. They made the tonic, of course, acid as well as bitter, to set the teeth on edge while restoring tone to the nervous system, but for the present, at least, the return to stimulants and nourishment has been decided on. And we doubt if the Liberal Members would have got the pardon of their constituencies, in spite of the unpopularity of the Government, had they acted otherwise. For, bad as we have maintained, and do maintain, the financial policy to be of throwing on to a tax which the great majority of the house- holders do not pay,—the income-tax,—the whole burden of new taxation, especially when a part of the need for it arises from the cost of a distinctly democratic and popular measure, nobody can deny that the Government had been distinctly discouraged, not to say almost forbidden, to contemplate an addition to any tax unpopular with the constituencies,—and what tax which all householders pay is not unpopular with the con- stituencies f—by the attitude of the Liberal party itself. As Mr. Lowe very justly said on Monday night, the reputa- tion of a tax ought to be dear to a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he ought to feel it a positive official sin to spoil a tax for the future by bringing it forward at a time when there is a savagely censorious spirit on these subjects awake in the House. The financial temper of the House may be defined indeed as having spoken something in this sense :=You shall not tax afresh the majority of our constituents;—you shall not put any new tax on us which we could not easily hope to have very soon taken off again, and therefore you shall not have the Succession Duty ; but as we can still probably get more out of you than we could out of a Tory Government, you may put 2d on the income-tax, on the understanding that you will never be safe till you take it off again.' Such was the feeling towards the Government ; and such having been the feeling, it would have been absurd to punish the Govern- ment for a financial error forced upon it by the House itself. Nothing was more remarkable than the cheering which ac- companied every statement to the effect that the income-tax was the best resource because its presence was always felt, or, as Mr. Osborne Morgan put it, that it was the toad which had a precious jewel in its head, being the ugliest of taxes, but with this moral beauty that it is always reminding us of "the pain- ful, but inevitable results of a reckless expenditure." In other words, the Liberals virtually said, We will bear the tax, but you (the Government) shall bear the grumbling it causes, and we will hear of no anodynes.' And with such views preval- ent in the House it would, of course, have been absurd for the Liberals to defeat the Government for adding to the income- tax, unless they intended to extinguish it, as Mr. Fawcett, who, alone of the Radicals proper, voted against the Govern- ment on Monday, probably did. As the Liberals had forced the Government into a corner, had they also beaten it for being in the corner, there could havebeen no question but that they had made up their minds to pick a quarrel with it, whether they had one or not. That they were not quite so unreasonable, only shows that they have not yet reached the condition of pure captiousness, but certainly does not show anything like a feeling of respect or con- tent. Had the Government itself proposed in the first instance to raise all the new ways and means by income-tax,—or had there been any sign that after the break-down the House would still have sanctioned any addition to the indirect taxation of the people, whether by the old "registration fee," as it was called,—very improperly, according to Mr. Gladstone,—on corn, or a slight addition to the tea or sugar duties, we should have condemned what the Government has actually decided on, as strongly as Mr. W. H. Smith, or indeed, for that matter, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe themselves. But this was notoriously not so. It was—in the actual state of Liberal tempers—a mere question between tolerating both income-tax and Govern- ment, and tolerating neither. And if the latter branch of the dilemma had been accepted, we should probably have had a Government in every sense worse, — more costly, more dependent on small minorities in the House, more
completely at the beck of unscrupulous sections, and very'- likely also still more anxious to efface itself in all questions of European policy, than the existing one. We can- not but be glad, therefore, that the grumblers decided to vote' straight for the time,—but then it is also true that we cannot help seeing in the principles of the most influential speakers- during the Budget debates, a very serious danger for the future- finance of England.
In every phase of those debates the main characteristic has. been the effort of different parties to underbid each other in relation to the taxation of the country. We do not suppose for- a moment that the Match-tax was proposed, as some speakers cynically hinted, in order to excite popular hostility, and so to. make any other indirect tax impossible ; but that assuredly was the result, and indeed only part of the result. No sooner did the middle and upper classes perceive that they were likely to obtain, a victory for the poor man by defeating the match-tax, than, - they resolved, while running before the wind of popular, favour, to do a little job on their own account as well, and defeat the proposal of a small increase to the tax upon pro- perty in the shape of the additional legacy and succession duties ; while the Tories saw their advantage in also protesting- against the proposition to supply the deficit by a larger talc upon incomes. Thus the Government, which had quite- rightly intended to divide the new burden between income, realized property, and a tax on consumption reaching every class of the people, found themselves utterly foiled at two,. points, and dangerously threatened at the third. In the midst- of such a Dutch auction of parties underbidding each other for popular favour, Ministers could not venture to preach, very rigid economical doctrine themselves, and accordingly, while they stood manfully to their colours concerning the- payment of debt, a chorus of Ministerial voices was heard, proclaiming that, as regarded taxes on the food of the people,. it was impossible for the purposes of a temporary expendi- ture to go back in our free-trade policy, and reimpose a duty,. however trifling, on corn, or add to those on tea and sugar. Mr. Stansfeld was willing to admit that it was a great reason for caution in repealing the few remaining indirect taxes on articles of popular consumption, to know that it was impossible to reimpose them except in the greatest emer- gencies; but he strenuously denied that a penny could be- added to the sugar-duty, or the old "registration fee," as it was called, to the Corn-duty, for the purpose of any tempor- ary expenditure, however popular and democratic. Mr. Lowe- assumed the same doctrine, and Mr. Gladstone urged it. even with vehemence. He exaggerated the shilling duty on every quarter of corn,—or rather, we believe, the 3d.. dutyon every cwt., which was its last shape,—into a 4-per- cent. duty, which at the average price of corn of recent years. it certainly never has been,—and spoke of the reimposition of such a duty in language almost fiery, as an oppression to. the people. No doubt, if you can speak of a duty which could not possibly increase the value of a quartern-loaf more than. half a farthing,—and which probably would in fact act by diminishing infinitesimally the "whiteness" of the bread sold at a given price,—as of grave importance at all, the objection which Mr. Gladstone urged to it, that it raised the cost of cat" corn by that amount, while the Exchequer only profits by the- duty paid on the imported corn, is sound enough, the duty in the case of home-grown corn going, theoretically at least, into the pockets of the landlords as a hardly appreciable addition to rent. But as this argument was just as true in 1864 as it is now, and had not then persuaded Mr. Gladstone to take off' this infinitesimal tax,—nay, in that year he remodelled it into. a tax of 3d. per cwt.,—we do not see how to account by any- thing but his fear of preaching unpopular doctrine, for the in- dignant language in which he spoke of this proposal on Mon- day night. It seems to us that such an evil as he points out, in magnitude hardly appreciable at all, would be far less than the complete exoneration of the mass of the people from all responsibility for new national burdens. And even if Mr. Gladstone's argument applies to corn, it has no applica- tion to tea or sugar, which are not home products at all. It is clear that Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Stansfeld were- speaking under a strong feeling of the necessity of preaching- doctrine as popular as that of their critics. And they had real cause for anxiety. For there were not only the orators against the match-tax, denouncing the Government for their cruelty, and Lord George Cavendish and his- friends, who snatched away the extra succession duties under cover of the popular cry ; but Mr. W. H. Smith and his friends, who were indignant at the proposal of another 2d. in the pound on income, and Mr. McCullagh Torrens and his friends, who cried out with the Time.s that the best plan, after all, was not to worry about debt whenever paying debt imame inconvenient. Mr. Disraeli of course gave as much support as he could to all these cries ; he ridiculed the match-tax ; denounced the succession duty ; spoke out manfully against income-tax, and kept his own counsel about the payment of debt. He did his very best to render it impossible to the Government either to go forward or recede ; and the result practically was, that though the income-tax was voted, it was voted with a threatening mien and a very intelligible warning to the Government, that if it did not disappear next year, the Government itself would have to. fill up the yawning chasm by the old heroic process of leaping into the abyss. We cannot say we like the retrospect or the prospect. Governments which avow in office that they can never again put on a tax on articles of universal consumption for tempo- rary purposes, will certainly hold the same language in Opposition, and render it all but impossible for their oppo- nents to do otherwise. In other words, except for a national war, we never again are to have recourse to taxes which are paid by the whole people,—of which it is a natural conse- quence that even taxes paid by the middle and richer classes will only be granted after bitter recriminations such as we have had this year, and for party considerations supposed to be ade- quate. For if the whole people are never to have an addition to their taxation, no part of it can, or ought, to pay willingly, how- ever great the object in view. In other words, we are, for all purposes requiring additional expenditure, left pretty much to the alternative of loans, for no Government will like to challenge again snch humiliations as those of the last fort- night. Taxes on property and on necessaries of life are refused with contumely, and taxes on income are only bought by those considerations which Mr. Richard referred to as a "lively sense of favours to come." And yet every ten years the area of taxation gets materially smaller through remissions which Ministers tell us can never be retracted, and the nation, in its growing prosperity, shrinks with more and more irritable dis- gust from the prospect of small sacrifices for great ends!
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