The Sun.
London, England, 1852-05-01 00:00:00

formed that majority by coalescing with Mr. Hume and with
that Mr. eupppisorrateledi
a section of the House professedly attached to the principle
of direct taxation. The great party which carried all the
directreformstaxation; a xin a
ttihoen C; uasntdo m
its
iand
oExcise`tim prabl
hitherto,improbable that,
may still continue, as at present, to avail himS If o f th e suc-
cessful policy of his opponents.
ADVERTISER—People looked forward" to /aSt night, in
the House of Commons, with an anxiety far exceeding the
interest with which the proceedings in that Assembly "are
usually regarded. The budget was to be produced immedi-
ately after the time for public business had arrived. Ise-
cordingly the House and galleries were, by that hour, seve-
rally crowded with parsons on the tiptoe of .ekpectation to
learn the leading features of the financial scheme Of file new.
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nor can we wonder at the
intense anxiety. which was felt to become acquainted with
the principal points in the Disraeli Budget. The new Chan-
cellor of the Excqequer has the reputation of being a hold,
dashing, and even brilliant man. He has distinguished
himself in various walks of life. lle is a popular novelist, as
expert Parliamentary debater, a man of no inconsiderable ori-
ginality as a politician, and one, moreover, who has acquitted
himself, on the whole, in a very creditable manner since he was
raised to the rank of a Cabinet Minister. It would, there-
fore, have been surprising had not the public felt more than
the average amount of anxiety to become acquainted, at the
earliest possible moment, with the contents of the Disraeli
Budget. And, if these considerations had not been sufficient
to work public curiosity up to the proper pitch of intensity,
the morning journal which is presumed to be the organ of
the Conservative Cabinet yesterday dealt in some strange
and mysterious speculations as to what the budget might be
expectedto be. The impression which our contemporary
sought to create in the public mind was, that the develop-
ments of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in unfolding his
financial scheme, would be of a decidedly bold character,—
so bold as to dazzle, if they did not startle, men of more
common-place minds than the Right Honourable Gentleman,
himself. Well, the budget is now before the country; Or
rather the speech of Mr. Disraeli is—a speech which lasted
upwards of two hours in the delivery, and which was one of
the most elaborate pieces of financial eloquence ever pro-
duced hi the House of Commons. Prodigious was the
flourish of trumpets, and what entered? Tom Thumb? No;
not even that. The budget of the Right Hon. Gentleman is
one in name only. The thing itself is wanting. Canning's
knife-grinder had no story to tell, and the Chancellor of the
Exchequer has no budget to bring before the public. The
difference between the knife-grinder and Mr. Disraeli is this
—that the former did not profess to have any story to tell.
He candidly confessed he had none. Not so with the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer. He kept the expectation of the
House wound up to the highest pitch, for more than two
mortal hours, and all for the purpose of telling them that he
had nothing to say—no budget to bring forward—nothing to
propose, but to ask a vote of 200,0001. for carrying on the
Kafir war, and a renewal of the income-tax for another
year ! Anything more supremely ridiculous was never
before done by a Chancellor of the Exchequer—not even by
Sir Charles Wood. The mountain in labour bringing forth
a mouse, was not a parallel case, because here we had a
financial mountain in labour for more than two terrible hours,
without bringing forth anything at all. Dean Swift, when
ridiculing the elaborate lectures which professors of the sur-
gical art were in his day, as in our own, in the habit of
giving on the most simple facts in surgery,
remarked that
one of those learned professors would take half an hourto
convey the idea that a man's leg was fractured, whereas the
unfortunate man himself would State the fact in four words—
"My leg is broken." Mr. Disraeli far outstrips these wordy
gentlemen. He takes more than two hours to tell the House
and the country, that he has nothing whatever to communi-
cate. The author who wrote fifty pages of a preface to prove
that he did not mean to write a preface at all, because no preface
was necessary, was a very good type of our new Chancellor of
the Exchequer. For ourselves we are not disappointed, be-
cause we expected nothing. We have not attached the
slightest importance to the Disraeli Budget, though almost
everybody else, for some time past, has been in an agony of
anxiety on the subject. We look on the term of existence
allotted to the Derby Ministry as one which will be ex-
ceedingly brief, and therefore any financial projects which
the present Chancellor of the Exchequer may bring forward
will necessarily have to be overhauled by his successor in
office. But, besides that, we shall, within the short space
of two or three months, have a new Parliament. And that
Parliament will have a will and way of its own, in refer-
ence to financial matters generally. It is to the new Legis-
lature that we look for an enlightened financial policy. And
if the electors in the approaching contests only single out
men of intelligence, integrity, and patriotism, from the host
of candidates soliciting their suffrages, they will thereby
ensure financial measures creditable to the Parliament and
beneficial to the country—measures calculated to give addi•
tional stability to the credit of the nation at home and.
abroad. It is on such a Legislature that our .hopes are cen-
tered, and not doubting that the intelligence and judgment of
the constituencies will select such a body of men to
represent them in the coming Parliament, we attach but
little importance to the financial freaks of Mr. Disraeli, or
any one else. To have brought forward any grand financial
scheme—one difieiing in many essential respects from the
budgets of all preceding Chancellors of the Exchequer, at a
time, and under the auspices of a Ministry who can scarcely
yet be said to be warm in their situations, and at a time
when Parliament is notoriously in the throes of dissolution
—would indeed have been an act of surpassing boldness.
It would have been more. It would have been an act of
superlative folly. No man with a particle of judgment
would ever entertain the idea, even for a moment. Mr.
Disraeli urged ,this consideration with a force which the
House evidently felt. But what we complain of, and what
the country will complain of, when the speech of the Right
Hon. Gentleman, without a budget, wings its way through
all parts of the kingdom is, that he should have allowed the
public for weeks past to be in a state of confident
expectation of something bold and dashing in the way of
financial projects. It was in the confident expectation that
Mr. Disraeli's budget would contain something extraordi-
nary, that Mr. Milner Gibson yielded to the Right Hon.
Gentleman's urgent request to adjourn the debate on his
motion for the remission of the taxes on literature until
after his financial scheme should be before the House. What
was this but a piece of downright deception? It was a most
dishonest expedient. And why, besides, tantalise the House
for upwards of two hours, when he did not mean to propose
a single alteration in the existing position of the finances
of the country ? That was a gratuitous outrage on the
House, and an unwarrantable waste of the public time. It
is! to our minds 110 countervailing consideration ,that the
greater part of Mr. Disraeli's speech was a disquisi-
tion on the benefits of free trade, and a eulogiuna
on the enlightened financial policy of Sir Robert
Peel. That was, on the contrary, an aggrava-
tion of the Right Honourable Gentleman's conduct,
for it affords an additional proof to the many before
given of the fact, that the Derby Ministry is a gigantic
organized hypocrisy. The public has not forgotten—the
public
' never will forget—the ferocious personal attacks
which this very Mr. Disraeli made on Sir Robert Peel during
an entire session, solely because of his introduction of free-
trade measures. Nor will the fact ever escape the memory
of the country, that Mr. Disraeli, and the other members of
the Derby Goverment, traded solely on the political capital
which they acquired by'systematicaUy assailing free trade,
until the very hour that they got into office.
come
d yet the
Right Hon. Gentleman has now:the indecency to forward
and proclaim, without a blush on his countenance, that the
commercial
and financial policy which he had thus fiercely
attacked for years, and on the character of whose author he
sysematically heaped the coarsest calumnies, is the most
enlightened and beneficial
policy which ever a
Minister de-
,
I vised! The force of hypocrisy and effrontery could no

further go.
POST.—Certainly, no person with only an ordinary ac-
quaintance with Parliamentary politics and party divisions,
would have gathered from the mode in which the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequr was received by the House of Com-
mons last night, that he was listening to a " provisional
Minister," who was only tolerated because it was a recog-
nised fact that his powers were limited to oiling existing
machinery, and his duty was confined to keeping things
rubbing on till a successor shall be ready to take his place.
So general, indeed, was the cheering which greeted the
Ministerial statement, that it was not easy to decide by
which side of the House the budget and its appended ob-
litshteantinhg
servations were received with most favour,' The House
was evidently under an impression that they
were
to a master in his craft, and persuaded, moreover,
was confiding to them his inmost ideas of financial policy.e
We never get up front ',the perusal of metaphysical
essays without feeling as if our head had become
suddenly stuffed with measureless information,
which, when we attempt to grasp it
into a marvellously little compass. It ipractically, collapses
3a curious phenome-
non, and something of the same sensation we must confess
to having experienced on the hearing of Mr. Disraeli's speech
of last night. We had no conception, till we endeavoured
to condense and analyse what we have got, that the Minister
had only made some very
the
ow
remarks on systems of taxa-
tion, and placed before th 3
financial condition, very country an explanation of its
It must be ow simply, very clearly, and very con-
cisely.ned, that Mr. Disraeli fulfilled this
part of his task in a manner which showed that he had quite
made himself master of his subject; and it is evident, that
whatever be the basis on which he proposes eventually to
organise our fiscal system, the new Chancellor perfectly
comprehends the characteristics of the revenue with which
he has to deal, and the nature of the resources to which he
can have recourse.
As we anticipated in our article of the
day before yesterday, the Budget for 1852-53 is simply
provisional, and its purpose limited to carrying on the
financial machinery till the Government has time to mature
a scheme of a permanent character. The only feasible mode
' in which this could be effected was evidently by taking, as
the Minister proposes, for the limited period of one year, a
renewed lease of the income-tax ; and it was equally evident
that, under existing circumstances, any attempt to modify
its provisions, or to introduce any new principle of assess-
ment or of levy, would have been unwise and ill-timed.
This is comparatively plain sailing; but there are difficul-
ties a head with which the Chancellor will have eventually
to contend, of the most serious character, and he is wise to
do his best to bring Parliament to a temper proper for their
careful and unprejudiced consideration. We have ap-
plild to our present means of raising revenue the
term anomalous. We have said that our existing fiscal
system, if system it be, is full of anomalies, which present
serious and complicated difficulties to a Chancellor of the
Exchequer attempting the suggestion of a Budget which
is to have about it a character of permanency. The
brat great difficulty is, that, for many years now, the Budget,
if not of each year, at any rate of each period of three years.
has been essentially temporary in its character. This has
been the case ever since Sir Robert Peel, in 1842, undertook
to cure the evils which the incompetence of his predecessors
had created. Everybody must remember that time, when
the hapless Whig financiers, angling in the bottomless depths
of a Pool of Despond for a Budget which they never could
catch, appealed in their despair for advice to their skilful
rival, who stood by regarding their futile efforts with calm
and confident contempt. "Call me in, and then I will pre-
scribe," was the reply of the patient and astute poli-
tician, who for years had quietly awaited the inevibt:
result of the bungling Administration of his opportahel
as certain of their ultimate failure
i
easnrvitable
of his own power to cope with the
difficulty. Ilis previsions were justified. The W.hi
'g aid Sir
s brought
the iinansial disorder of the country to a crisis,
Robert Peel, in 1812, was called upon to undertake the so-
lution of their difficulties. The financial schehme of 1842, on
the faith of its limitation, in essentials, to Lem rsBesy2eatros,was
agreed to. It can scarcely be
.necessary, 1
lb tdd • enter
upon an explanation of
the details of thins remission
e ra e evice.
The idea of its eminent author was, by s. remission of taxa-
tion in particular directions, to give such a stimulus to con-
sumption as to create an ultimate increase of revenue to an
imposition emoment,
period,t voats
tthoatbiehe filled
income
extent exceeding the amount thenh in deficiency, while the
gap necessarily consequent, at
up by thetax with which, after successive re-
newals, for a limited
and property
newels, it has become the duty of Mr. Disraeli
now to deal in 1852. Events justified Sir Robert Peel's
anticipations, and the result showed that he had not over-es-
timated the elasticity of the revenve. At the expiration of the
perm
• d which he had calculated would be sufficient for the re-
invigoration of the vital system, and for the creation of new
blood requisite to restore it to its full powers of production,
his expectations were fulfilled. The ordinary resources of
revenue became equal to the provision for the expenditure
of the country, and the extraordinary resource which had
been temporarily called in to its aid might have safely been