The Sun.
London, England, 1862-03-28 00:00:00

seeing ones, indeed, of the time, only intended to
aid voluntary efforts till the country, appreciating
the value of education, should be able to " run
alone." Unfortunately a highly-complicated and
highly-paid agency of inspectors, teachers, and
pupil teachers was gradually :developed, till now
we have a perfect army of State stipendiaries, all
directly dependent on a central Government office,
strong enough tobully the Commons, and also to gain
the wistful glances of the party which happens to be
out of office for the hour. It has come to this, as Mr.
OSBORNE observed, that the House of Commons has
" something like a political blunderbuss presented
at its heads, with threats that if they did not vote
these grants, they should be turned out at the next
election." Indeed, in the warfare with educational
ignorance, we seem to be in the position of the horse
in the fable. We have taken on our backs the
schoolmasters and their pupil teachers, for a tem-
porary advantage, and now we find them an incura-
brance, they coolly tell us they are on the Treasury
saddle and they mean to stick there.
We do not much wonder at this. When we
find one sect alone, the Wesleyans, pocketing
£300,000 a year from the grant, it is not
surprising that the central office of that
highly centralized body should issue its orders
to every school in every circuit to petition for what
brings so much grist to the Modist mill. This
is but human nature. It is Methodist
the same with the
Church of England, and also with all the minor
sects. Each looks at what it will lose as a sect,
and the whipping up to petition, and also to assail
members of Parliament individually, has been ac-
cordingly enormous. The Wesleyan Secretary, in
a circular, doubtless not intended to leave confiden-
tial hands, explicitly says that few of the members
understand the subject of the Revised Code so well
as to have an opinion of their own, and that they
would be more likely, therefore, to comply with
the wishes of their constituents, if " plainly
and strongly" expressed. Our Wesleyan Educa-
tionists certainly seem to think Representative
ignorance an advantage for their objects. It pro-
bably is so. We certainly begin to think that the
more the public knows of the subject the less
favourable will it be to the whole system of Govern-
ment grants.

Mr. ADDERLEY'S conclusion was a statement o
alternatives, his preceding speech not leaving i
doubtful to which he leaned. If, he argued, the
Voluntary system had broken down, let it be set
aside, and let the Government take education and
its management into its own hands. But, he con-
tended, and we believe rightly, the two systems
could not go on together. "One must be the basis
the other merely subsidiary." He therefore called
on the House, if they were of opinion that the
" Voluntary system was alive, or could be
revived, to pause in time, and to take
the means to prevent it from, being
overlaid and dwarfed by Government interference!
Mr. ADDERLEY observed justly on the lowered tone
of school managers since they had been in receipt
of Government pay. At first they were reluctant
to accept it, fearing to compromise their indepen-
dence; now, "so far from the great educational
societies being afraid to receive Government sup-
port, they were embracing and hugging the Govern-
ment, and trying to get more and more." The hon.
member observed that he himself had felt the para-
lysing effect of Government grants. He has always
been, as we may all remember, one of our most
intelligent and liberal educationists; but he told
the House that though he had supported schools
for many years, when he found that Government
was ready to do what he himself was doing, "he ab-
stained, thinking he might as well have a large share
of the public purse as others." If Mr. ADDERLEY
could say this, what must be the case with the great
majority of school supporters. Indeed, as he added,
" it is in the nature of things that this should be
so; and it had been the case with every sort of
institution aided by the Government." This is
common sense ; and the country is much indebted
to Mr. ADDERLEY tor uttering it in the House
with the justly influential sanction of his name.
It is also indebted to Mr. OSBORNE for calling
attention to the weighty sentences in the Commis-
sioners report, which express the opinion of the
minority, and which we have all of us too
much overlooked. That minority consisted
of Mr. MIALL and Mr. GOLDWIN SMITH.
The former gentleman is, of course, a pledged
voluntary, like Mr. BAINES, but confessedly
a man of no ordinary intelligence; but the
leanings of the Regius Professor of History at Ox-
ford must be all the other way. He also is a man
of high ability, and as such was placed by,Lord
DERBY on the commission, yet he too concurs in
reporting that the Government has done its work;
that it should only, as a matter of fairness, make
grants for school-building to parishes where it has
yet granted nothing:; that it should gradually with-
draw the annual grants, and confine its efforts to
the improvement of union schools, reformatories,
and schools connected with public establishments;
and that it would be impossible for the Government
to " control the growing expenditure and multiply-
ing employments of a department, the operations
of whicWare regulated by the increasing' demands
of philanthropists rather than by the require-
ments of the public service.
We must repeat that the ferment created by
the forty thousand has forced upon public atten-
tion what might otherwise have been hardly
noticed, and that those who wish to see the other
side would do well to study the speeches last
night of the three able gentlemen to which we
have invited attention.

Mr. HUBBARD'S efforts towards the readjustmen'

of the Income Tax are again about to be renew&

Let us hope—though under the existing regime we
can do so, alas ! but feebly—that those honest
efforts will meet during the, present session with a

trifle more of success than they did during its

predecessor. For several years past the necessity
for some modification in the mode of the assess-

ment of this particularly unpalatable and unpopular
tax, has been growing more and more generally
recognisable. Everyone almost nowadays admits
that " some" change is in the highest degree de-
sirable. The only difficulties have been in the way
of bringing about this wholesome improvement
under the auspices of the Financial Minister of
England, her MAJESTY'S Chancellor of the Exche-
quer—the discerning in the first place of the extent
to which the hoped-for innovation could be car-
ried with safety, and in the next place the solu-
tion of the proper and fitting time in which the
change (when decided upon) might be the most
happily inaugurated. As to the extent of the
modification that ought to take place in the mode
lof assessment, that has hitherto been a problem

towards the solution of which so many sugges-
tions have been thrown out, that the House
°I Commons itself has until now remained
ill its regard in a state of absolute bewilder-
ment. ."
'.. to the fittest season for the change
that—according Exchequer-11 to the present Chancellor of the
as never yet arrived. Interposed
between the
Popular
hope and the imperial require-
ments of her Mia,o,riet3
Treasury—at any rate
during the said right ho
n• gentleman's tenure of

office, according according to his own showing at least—there
has always inopportunely startei forth to view,
scaring back even the most adventurous innovator,
obstacle after obstacle. Now a revolt in
ible Bengal—
a revolt involving at the time the poss disrup-
tion of our whole empire in Hindostan ! Now an-
other treacherous act of barbarity on the part of
our dear friends the Chinese, an act of barbarity,
and of treachery, and double dealing so heinous as
to necessitate the sending forth of a new and costly
warlike expedition, both military and maritime,
and the sending it forth, too, to the remotest
extremity of the Eastern hemisphere. Nay, a
plea for the postponement of the endeavour to
bring about some more equitable adjustment
of the Income Tax, has often enough been found
heretofore, in casualties less formidable of their
kind than an imperial difficulty like the threatened
downfall of our Asiatic dominion, er than the
renewal of a conflict with a distant power, peopled,
according to a :popular computation, by some
400,000,000 inhabitants. What the IRON DUKE so
peculiarly reprobated—a Little War—has again
and again before now been taken as a sufficient
excuse—has been recognised as an adequate impe-
diment. A struggle we will say at one moment
between the might of England and the weakness of
those wretehed Kaffirs ! Or, another while, even, a
contest far away at our antipodes with
the still more barbaric hordes of the
Maoris clad in—nothing! and armed for the
most part with boomerangs ! Anything,
indeed, has been eagerly seized upon by our
Chancellor of the Exchequer as a sufficient reason
for farther and further postponement. And so—
to this very day—the evil exists in its full magni-
tude, undiminished and unmitigated. Still to this
day the familiar words applied so long ago to the
Income Tax (as hitherto assessed) are strictly and
literally applicable to it. It has the same triple
atrocity branded upon it. It is iniquitous, inquisi-
torial, and unjust !
Again, however, in 1862, as formerly in 1861,
Mr. HUBBARD is about to revive this question as
to the possibility of bringing about at last
the long-looked for change in the present harsh
and unequal mode of assessing the Income Tax. Last
evening the Income-tax Association meet again
under the presidency of Mr. R. W. CRAWFORD,
when Mr, HUBBARD took occasion to move the
following very admirable resolution :—" That
the Property and Income Tax Act, which expires
on the sth of April next, operates with great in-
equality ; that it in many cases taxes at the same
time income and the property which yields the
income; that it charges alike the products of capi-
tal and the industrial earnings of intelligence and
skill, and tends to provoke on the part of the
aggrieved fraudulent self-assessment, as the remedy
for the injustice of the tax. That in any re-enact-
ment of an income tax the charge on the products
of invested property should only apply to the net
income; and that an abatement should be made of
at least one-third of the amount derived from the
profits of trades, professions, and salaries, pre-
vious to their assessment." While expatiating
upon thehr
his
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last evening illustrated by the subjoined remarks,
the singular injustice inflicted upon those whose
incomes were just about the limits of £lOO and
£l5O respectively. Observing that, "upon the
£lOO income £2 10s. was charged, while the
persons whose income was but is. under, paid no-
thing; and while the £l5O income paid £5 10s., or
9d. in the pound, the £149 income paid only
£3 14s. 6d., or 6d. in the pound, He proposed," he
said, therefore, " that the rate of the tax should be
equal upon all incomes under schedule D, but with
regard to the lowest class of incomes, his proposal
was that no less deduction should be allowed than
£6O, which would be the one-third from £lBO, leav-
ing the tax-payer to pay upon £120; and the man
whose income, was £lOO would pay upon £6O or
305." A perfectly practicable plan this in the view
of Mr. HUBBARD, and of many others who think
with him. Before many more days of the ses-
sion shall have elapsed, we shall have an oppor-
tunity of observing how far Mr. GLADSTONE is dis-
posed to coincide in that opinion.