The Sun.
London, England, 1854-05-16 00:00:00

Why, obviously the mercantile and manufacturing—the
class engaged in foreign interchange, which war, in pro-
portion as it spreads, must impede and cripple. (Hear.)
The produce of land which is consumed at home, not ex-
ported, the domestic exchange in retail trade, the profits
of professions, are not so vitally interested in the suppres-
sion of a distant war as those sublime departments of in-
dustry which distance itself the more developes, and which
enrich the manufacturer and merchant wherever they can
find a friendly shore and an open sea. (Hear, hear.)
One might suppose, then, that the Government, if
it bo unhappily compelled to call upon any class more
than another to contribute to the expenses of war, would
look naturally to that class to whom the restoration
of peace is so essentially important. And it would do
so, in this case, the more reasonably, not only because of
the comparative wealth of those great members of the cor-
porate state, but because no class during the 40 years'
peace thus abruptly terminatel has been so largely bene-
fitted by fiscal reductions. (Hear, hear.) No one can
deny that the main spirit and effect of all our reliefs since
the Reform Bill, and even before, have been to favour our
mercantile and manufacturing interests in reference to any
other. The class which has most benefitted by the reliefs
afforded in peace may well be expected most willingly to
co-operate in the means necessary for the termination of
war. Yet it is not to this class the Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer looks for the burdens he resolves to impose. Out
of the whole community he selects for a special infliction
the special class which has had the hardest struggles, has
had the slightest share in the mitigation of taxes, has re-
cently been mulcted of a large portion of its capital for an
experiment, mainly intended to promote the success of
manufactures, and, according to frank avowals of the Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer himself, frank avowals by the noble
lord who leads the Government in this house, was entitled
to some compensation, if compensation could be found.
Now, this is the compensation you give them. They asked
you a year ago to reduce the malt tax ; your reply is to add
to the malt tax two millions and a half. This is not all ;
besides money, there is something else which a people must
contribute to the dreadful necessities of war. They must
contribute their sinews and their blood. The heaviest tax
of all is that of human lives. Now, of all classes, which are
here spared the most? It is surely the population of great
mercantile and manufacturing towns. It is not there that
the recruiting sergeant beats for recruits. It is in the agri-
cultural districts, it is in the rural population, that you
principally find the soldiers that man your armies ; it is
there that fathers will most mourn their children. But this
is the class to whom the Chancellor of the Exchequer goes
hand in hand with the recruiting sergeant. The one asks
for money, the other for life. In the ordinary laws of con-
scription for military service, if the man decline service,
ho is bound to find the money that provides a substa-
tate. But these laws you reverse ; you press into the
military service the inhabitants of the rural districts, and
from the rural districts you take, again, the money that is
to find substitutes for the denizens of manufacturing towns.
(Cheers.) I cannot conceive a greater injustice than the
one you propose in the malt-tax, nor one that—under all
circumstances, all the recollections, embittering class against
class connected with the repeal of the corn laws— will be
more gallingly felt, both as an injustice and as an insult,
by the agricaltural body, upon whom it will mainly fall.
It will affect that body in all its gradations. 'The hon. gen-
tleman who moved the amendment treated the question
in a very able manner ; but there were one or two points
that he only partially touched upon, with regard to which
I will make a few observation. Of course the increased
price of beer will tend to diminish the demand for barley ;
but it will do something more than that. Already the
high price of bread has diminished the consumption of
beer, and has, therefore, tended in some degree to check
the cultivation of barley ; and now comes your new tax
to discourage altogether the cultivation of the ordinary
barley, for your tax falling alike on all qualities of barley,
the price of the inferior barleys will sink much
below the present proportion to the superior barleys, and
there will therefore be a tendency to cultivate none but
that of a superior quality. Again, your tax necessitates
theincrease of capital by the maltster, and whatever neces-
sitates increase of capital tends to restrict trade and brings
fewer purchtisers into the market. There is another and a
stronger reason against the selection of a special tax bear-
ing so markedly upon a special class. Upon entering into
this war, which, no doubt, does require all our united
energies, it certainly would be wise to forbear whatever
tends to create or reopen all class grievances and all class
contests among ourselves, and this would be the more espe-
cially wise with regard to the agricultural class, because
you know perfectly well that an angry excitement has long
existed in that class in consequence of that change in your
commercial policy as to which I will not now argue whether
it was right or wrong; and you mustremember that the only
boon or mode of conciliation proffered to that class was the
proposition for the reduction of the malt tax. (Hear.)
Upon the failure of that proposition, a party supposed to be
very friendly to the landed interest, came into power, and
now your attempt to add 50 per cent. to this tax, which
the friends of the agricultural interest desire to reduce,
will be regarded as a fresh blow, as a new humiliation ; it
will exasperate those feelings which it was desired to extin-
guish, and, by damping the ardour with which the war
should be prosecuted, it is calling in the exciseman to be
the ally of Russia. (Cheers.) Farmers, like all other
Englishmen, will readily submit to taxes, however onerous,
provided you can convince them that they are fair, but I
ask you whether any farmer can upon any principle look
upon this tax as a fair one? (Hear, hear.) You force on
him free trade, by which you concede that he has been a
sufferer ; you refuse to retrace your steps by a single import
duty, and when he asks you for free trade for himself to
enable him to cultivate that crop which he prefers, you not
only refuse his request, but add fifty per cent. to the tax
upon the only article in which he conceives that free trade
would be desirable to him. (Cheers.) Why did we
decline to proceed with the Parliamentary Reform Bill ?
It was not so much because we could not find time to
deal with it on account of our being occupied with the
details of the war ; it was not so much because the public
mind was distracted from all such considerations by the
idea of the war, as it was because your bill contained pro-
visions affecting agricultural constituencies, which could
not be discussed at a popular hustings without re-awaking
the division of classes, without raising the mischievous
cry of " Town and Country ;" but what you could not
effeet by your Reform Bill you are resolved to effect by
your budget. (Cheers.) For where you proposed to in-
crease the franchise of the great towns, you now propose to
exempt them from all partial burdens, and to throw those
partial burdens upon the agricultural constituencies,
which you proposed by your Reform Bill to enfeeble and
deluge with an inundation of urban voters ; so that it
does seem as if you desired to justify the suspicion that
you have some determined hostility against the agricultu-
rists of the land. (Cheers from Zr. Osborne.) Oh !
you grant that. The hon. and gallant gentlemen has
the courage to avow what his superiors disguise.
(Loud cheers and counter cheers.) You have a
determined hostility against the agriculturalists of
the land, and you carry on a party warfare
against them now against their political influence, now
against their pecuniary interest. (Cheers.) I must say
that the whole proceedings connected with this war and
with this war budget do invite one to inquire whether we
have really gained so much by that stupendous sacrifice of
private inclination which the public virtue of our Ministers
induced them to make when they consented to share among
them the disagreeable seals of office. (Laughter.) Most
Governments have been formed by the combination of
opinions, bat this Government was formed upon the
grander principle of the diversity of talent. Great men,
long rivals and hostile statesmen, consented to act together.
Lord Aberdeen announced himself as a Liberal Conser-
vative ; the noble lord the member for London was a Con-
servative Liberal ; but until we saw these great men
acting together we should no more have supposed that a
Liberal Conservative in one house was the same thing as
a Conservative Liberal in the other, than that a horse-
chesnut was identical with a chesnut horse. (Laughter
and cheers.) But what has this talent done for us—
where and how have these wonderful capacities, this
extraordinary experience of public affairs, been displayed ?
The First Lord of the Admiralty evinces his remarkable
sagacity and foresight by entering office with a vehement
invective against the Emperor oeFrance, whose flag now
sails beside our own. (Hear.) The Ministers who under-
take our foreign affairs can only exonerate themselves from
the charge of having taken in th 6 Emperor of Russia, by
lamentable complaints that they were egregiously taken in
themselves. The domestic genius of this incomparable
Cabinet is shown in the preparation of a Reform Bill, for
which you are compelled, even before war was announced,
to own the ungrateful apathy of the people ; and your ex-
perience in practical affairs is thus evinced by being as
blind to the temper of the Englisn public as you were to
the designs of the Russian enemy. (Cheers.) And now,
in that department of finance, on which the right hon.
gentleman has been so severe a critic upon his predeces-
sors, from William Pitt to Lord Monteagle, from Lord
Monteagle to my right hon. friend the member for
Buckinghamshire—(a laugh)—what have been all your
fiscal operations ? A series either of fallacious promises or
costly blunders. Where was the stateman's prophetic eye
when last year the right hon. gentleman based all his cal-
culations upon the removal of the income tax in seven
years, when he would not listen for a moment to being
told of the possibility of war. What became of that cheer-
ful complaisance with which he replied to that inquisitive
clerk who complained of his income tax; and what was
at least one-half of the right hon. gentleman's speech the
other night composed of ? Why, an eloquent vindication
of what the world still believes to be mistakes. Now, sir,
I do not pretend to be a competent judge of the right hon.
gentleman's financial schemes. But lot mo put an ana-
logous case more in my own way, If I were to publish a
new book, and I prefixed to it a preface that would
occupy three or four mortal columns of the Times
newspaper, tending to show that the three
books I had last written were not the notable
failures which, whether through ignorance or malignity,
the public had been led to suspect—(laughter)—sure I am
that I could not give a greater triumph to hostile critics
or take a course more likely to make the friendly infer that
I had some misgivings on the subject myself. One thing
is clear—success never needs an excuse. (Hear.) The
right hon. gentleman was pleased to flavour the compli-
ments that he bestowed the other night on Mr. Pitt with
a sarcastic reproach on the errors of that Minister. lam
not Mr. Pitt's apologist. Errors he may have committed,
no doubt ; but, of all defects, what is that which the right
hon. gentleman selects for his censure ? Why, that Mr.
Pitt did not see the war at a distance ; that Mr. Pitt was
short-sighted. And this charge comes from a gentleman
who was the only man out of his own Cabinet who could
not foresee the war which he has now to provide for—from
a gentleman who converts stocks, and can't foresee the
results—who has one budget in March, and another in
May—this is the gentleman who sneers at Mr. Pitt as
short-sighted ! Sir, whether Mr. Pitt did or not commit
an error by his system of loans is not that very easy ques-
tion to decide, which the right hon. gentleman presumes it
to be, on Mr. AlTulloch's authority. Mr. M'Culloch was
no authority for the right hon. gentleman with regard to
the malt tax ; but, Sir, whether as a political economist
Mr. 11`Culloch be right or not in censuring Mr. Pitt's
financial policy in the first year of the French war, there
are other and grander views than those of political
kind anYd and
sfinanceafety involved
nations. n
(Hear, Governmenthear
o
lug into warsuapiptohseadfotroidable power, Mr. Pitt mnoayfeinnhtnaevnre:
the people by at it was not wise to discourage
reasonably
I man and a patriot, that may reet thought, as an English-
first instance. Heonerousl.x measuresi of taxation in the
duty was to maintain the
spirit of his countrymen, and
futhat Posterity would pardon
the loans he raised in return ample remuneration
of interest seeured--remuneration an extended em-
pire, to ignieuted commerce, imperishable honour. (Cheers.)
tera•tleieninatthtahteEureose of the war
emergedeoitthr
eretrurnA
EAnngdl an' sew er
had freed and delivered, and to lightly shook Europe
eff fiero armsh
shoulders the burden of these loans you have the ungrateful
feur
arrogance to condemn that every year throughout thea peace
we have increased in wealth and resources, and since 1831
almost every year has seen some vast diminution of
taxes accompany the payment of the debt. (Cheers.) se
much has been said about our not saddling posterity that
it seems as if it were intended to insinuate that this is
not a war to be waged on behalf of posterity, but for some
fleeting and selfish purpose of our own. If that be so, I
call on our ministers to recall our fleets, and to disband our