Austen Chamberlain's first peace-time Budget in 1920. It provided for an immense increase of taxation, and made no adequate provision for rigid economy. Lip-service to economy there was; but the declaration that it was being exercised was unconvincing. It was only after the Budget of 1922 had shown its enormous 'cuts,' that one understood how vain had been the pretence in the Budgets of 1920 and 1921 that no unnecessary expenses were being incurred. Only when angry public opinion was exercising pressure did the Government consent to drop some of its wasteful policy. And, meanwhile, the money spent on well-meant but extravagant schemes of housing, education, war bonuses, increased pensions, and so forth has vanished, with small return of profit to the nation or gratitude from those to whom the money had gone. The immense sums lavished on these altruistic endeavours has been taken out of the working capital of the State: a six-shilling income tax brings inevitable unemployment in its wake. For what private employer can continue to pay for the service that he was wont to require, when about one-third of his income has been confiscated by the State? And what consumer, small or great, but must restrict his purchases for the same reason? It would appear that our statesmen do not understand that in taxation there is a limit beyond which it ceases to be profitable and becomes only destructive. This simple fact was obvious enough in the results of Mr Chamberlain's extra imposts on many luxuries in the Budget of 1919. The consumer-unless he belonged to the small class of Profiteers-ceased to buy the overtaxed article, and the revenue expected from increased taxation on it failed to materialise. In his second Budget of 1922, the present Chancellor of the Exchequer did show some appreciation of the fact that over-taxation means a decrease in the sum which the public has to spend, and that if the public has less to spend unemployment must necessarily increase. But it took two years of discontent, and several surprising by-elections, to make the Cabinet realise this obvious fact. No doubt there has been some beginning of retrenchment since the 'Geddes Axe' fell; but the general opinion is that it was distasteful to the Government, and that it might have been carried further. Conservatives regard the Coalition as essentially wasteful in its finance, and will never believe that any sincere change in its mentality has come, until we shall see a Chanceller of the Exchequer first calculating his revenue and then fitting his expenditure to it, instead of calculating his expenditure and then trying to raise enough revenue to cover it. Fourthly-and this article of our creed is closely connected with the one with which we have last dealtConservatives hold that the multiplication of state officials, and their treatment as a special privileged class, hinders prosperity, threatens freedom, leads to extravagant expense, and tends towards political oppression and corruption. The numbers, power, and functions of this class have been growing under Coalition rule, and ought to be diminished. During the Great War it was necessary that the State should supervise many spheres of national life and expenditure which had hitherto worked in freedom. And for their supervision many new officials had to be created: while in the already existing public departments many additional hands had to be taken on, since the scope of their activities had been enlarged by the necessities of the war. Now the cry which has been most frequently heard of late concerning the extravagant policy of the Government with regard to the Civil Service, is that the wartime officials are not being discharged in sufficient numbers or with sufficient rapidity. There is some truth in the cry; but we do not think that this is the worst part of the Government policy of extravagance. After all, the 'Limpets' as the Press has chosen to name those who stick to posts which have ceased to have any utility-were in very many cases persons who had done honest and zealous service during the war, and every consideration was due to them when their demobilisation became urgent. The real crime of the Government with regard to the Civil Service has been the inordinate amount of money spent on additions to the salaries of individual persons, not only by way of war bonuses and percentages, but as permanent increments to the fixed remuneration attached to their posts, which are to endure when all bonuses have passed away. There are departments in which the number of persons employed has got back to something near the pre-war figures, but where the salaries paid to them are now more than double the pre-war figures. It is no doubt very hard for a minister to withstand the silent and continuous pressure of the body of his subordinates in favour of the creation of new posts with high salaries, as well as for general shifting upward of all rates of payment for low grade as well as for upper grade officials. But what we do not like is to hear a minister openly avow in the House of Commons, as we have heard several times in recent sessions, that his underlings ought to be paid very heavy salaries because, if they had gone into the world of commerce and speculation, some of them might be earning much greater remuneration. Still less was it decent to hear another minister urging that the higher Civil Service was suffering from post-war prices in its standard of comfort, and that it should receive increment sufficient to allow it to revert to its former scale of living. This amounts to a claim that the Civil Service should be immune from the consequences of the war, though hundreds of thousands or millions of non-official persons, all tax-payers, have been obliged to cut down their expenditure on account of that same war. Neither of the Coalition ministers who made these justifications of extravagance seem to have remembered for a second the basic fact that Civil Service salaries must depend on what the State can afford to pay, not on the intellectual or moral virtues of civil servants. If the State were in a sufficiently bad plight from the financial point of view, it might be even necessary to reduce Civil Service salaries all round to pre-war figures, however unprecedented and unpopular among officials such a measure might be. As a typical example of the present extravagant expenditure on Civil Service salaries, we may take the figures which the Postmaster-General gave for his department on May 4 last. The total number of his employés, small and great, has considerably decreased. By cutting down the facilities which the Post Office once used to afford to the public, and so raising his charges that the public posted 790,000,000 less letters in 1921-22 than in 1920-21, he has screwed down the number of Post Office officials till it is smaller by no less than 6000 than the staff employed in 1914. The monstrous fact then emerged that the smaller number of postal servants now on the pay list received 45,100,000l. per annum in salaries and bonuses, while the larger number employed in 1914 had only been receiving 15,700,000l. The total wages of the staff had been tripled since the war began, and remained so three years after the war was over. And this despite the fact that by the abolition of Sunday posts, and the fall of the number of letters written owing to high postage, the postal work of the staff had been considerably diminished. Now it is intolerable that in days of falling revenue and national distress a large body of public servants should be receiving thrice as much in wages as it was before the war. This is the sort of thing which causes Conservatives to declare that the Coalition is not only extravagant, but destitute of any sense of financial right and wrong. 'I do not disguise the fact,' said the Postmaster-General at another debate, 'that it is the War Bonus which accounts for our deficit. If I could get rid of the War Bonus I could go back at once to the penny letter and the halfpenny postcard.' What are we to think of a minister who acknowledges that the total salaries of his department have been tripled, and then says that the system is sacred? 'We cannot treat this war bonus arrangement as "a scrap of paper." The men expect the arrangement to be carried out!' Obviously the ministers who by successive increments have raised the pay of their employés in such a monstrous fashion, and defend their action even now, have forfeited all right to be entrusted with the charge of the funds of an over-taxed nation. 6 • The Conservative, however, attacks Bureaucracy not only because it is extravagant, but because it is inquisitorial, dilatory, and shortsighted. Such has been its character in all ages and all states. Great Britain, once a free country, has been for some time tending in the direction of the bureaucratic servitude; but the War-to some extent of necessity-hastened the progress of the plague. We have got rid of the food-controller and the coalcontroller and many other pests, but the influence of bureaucracy is still with us-as every income-tax payer knows. On this topic-an inexhaustible one-we shall not linger, having one more indictment of a general sort to make against the Coalition Government. Fifth, and last of the unpardonable offences by which we hold that it has violated a cardinal tenet of the Conservative creed, is that of having worked for the disintegration of the British Empire. Of its doings in Ireland we have already spoken-no one can deny that the once United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland can no longer retain its old title: it is a farce to see the phrase still repeated in official documents. Now, we do not charge Coalitionism with having been the originator of the present disastrous state of affairs beyond St. George's Channel. The most guilty party was the Asquithian Ministry of 1906–1916, which received a prosperous and peaceful Ireland from its Conservative predecessors, and handed it over to the charge of Mr Birrell. We cannot set worthily in order the proper series of epithets to apply to the Irish administration of that now forgotten individual. Among them would certainly figure the adjectives timid, frivolous, cynical, purblind, and insincere. It required a peculiar combination of unhappy qualities in a Chief Secretary to produce the progressive chaos of the Birrellian régime. But of course the Cabinet which placed such a man in such an office must take the blame-qui facit per alium facit per se. It was Mr Asquith and his then colleagues, not Mr Birrell in particular, who plotted the armed attack on loyal Ulster, and stultified by maundering humanitarianism the lesson that might have been taught to rebels after the Dublin insurrection of Easter 1916. All this we grant, and concede that the Coalition took over a very difficult and dangerous problem in Ireland, for which it was not responsible. But Conservatives hold that the dealings of the present Government with that problem were feeble and illogical. It promised that Law and Order should be restored, it began a policy of half-hearted repression of murder and outrage, in which full power was never granted to the commanders of its police or its soldiery, though a very doubtful system of 'Reprisals' was intermittently practised. It declared repeatedly that it 'had rebellion by the throat' and that success was at hand within a few Vol. 238. No. 473. 2 E |