Part 12 (1/2)
”The present budget, more than any other budget within our recollection, is a cupboard budget; otherwise, a poor man's budget. With certain very ugly features, the thing has altogether a good, hopeful aspect, together with very fair proportions. It is not given to any Chancellor of the Exchequer to make a budget fascinating as a fairy tale. Nevertheless, there are visions of wealth and comfort in the present budget that mightily recommend it to us. It seems to add color and fatness to the poor man's beef; to give flavor and richness to the poor man's plum-pudding. The budget is essentially a cupboard budget; and let the name of Gladstone be, for the time at least, musical at the poor man's fireside.”
It unquestionably established Gladstone as the foremost financier of his day. Greville, in his ”Memoirs,” says of him: ”He spoke for five hours; and by universal consent it was one of the grandest displays and most able financial statements that ever was heard in the House of Commons; a great scheme, boldly and skillfully and honestly devised, disdaining popular clamor and pressure from without, and the execution of its absolute perfection.”
We reproduce some extracts from this important speech: ”Depend upon it, when you come to close quarters with this subject, when you come to measure and test the respective relations of intelligence and labor and property in all their myriad and complex forms, and when you come to represent those relations in arithmetical results, you are undertaking an operation of which I should say it was beyond the power of man to conduct it with satisfaction, but which, at any rate, is an operation to which you ought not constantly to recur; for if, as my n.o.ble friend once said with universal applause, this country could not bear a revolution once a year, I will venture to say that it cannot bear a reconstruction of the income tax once a year.
”Whatever you do in regard to the income tax, you must be bold, you must be intelligible, you must be decisive. You must not palter with it. If you do, I have striven at least to point out as well as my feeble powers will permit, the almost desecration I would say, certainly the gross breach of duty to your country, of which you will be found guilty, in thus putting to hazard one of the most potent and effective among all its material resources. I believe it to be of vital importance, whether you keep this tax or whether you part with it, that you should either keep it or should leave it in a state in which it will be fit for service on an emergency, and that it will be impossible to do if you break up the basis of your income tax.
”If the Committee have followed me, they will understand that we found ourselves on the principle that the income-tax ought to be marked as a temporary measure; that the public feeling that relief should be given to intelligence and skill as compared with property ought to be met, and may be met with justice and with safety, in the manner we have pointed out; that the income tax in its operation ought to be mitigated by every rational means, compatible with its integrity; and, above all, that it should be a.s.sociated in the last term of its existence, as it was in the first, with those remissions of indirect taxation which have so greatly redoubled to the profit of this country and have set so admirable an example--an example that has already in some quarters proved contagious to the other nations of the earth, These are the principles on which we stand, and these the figures. I have shown you that if you grant us the taxes which we ask, to the moderate amount of 2,500,000 in the whole, much less than that sum for the present year, you, or the Parliament which may be in existence in 1860, will be in the condition, if it shall so think fit, to part with the income tax.”
Sir, I scarcely dare to look at the clock, shamefully reminding me, as it must, how long, how shamelessly, I have trespa.s.sed on the time of the committee. All I can say in apology is that I have endeavored to keep closely to the topics which I had before me--
--immensum spatiis confecimus aequor, Et jam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla.
”These are the proposals of the Government. They may be approved or they may be condemned, but I have at least this full and undoubting confidence, that it will on all hands be admitted that we have not sought to evade the difficulties of our position; that we have not concealed those difficulties, either from ourselves or from others; that we have not attempted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy expedients; that we have prepared plans which, if you will adopt them, will go some way to close up many vexed financial questions--questions such as, if not now settled, may be attended with public inconvenience, and even with public danger, in future years and under less favorable circ.u.mstances; that we have endeavored, in the plans we have now submitted to you, to make the path of our successors in future years not more arduous but more easy; and I may be permitted to add that, while we have sought to do justice, by the changes we propose in taxation, to intelligence and skill as compared with property--while we have sought to do justice to the great laboring community of England by furthering their relief from indirect taxation, we have not been guided by any desire to put one cla.s.s against another. We have felt we should best maintain our own honor, that we should best meet the views of Parliament, and best promote the interests of the country, by declining to draw any invidious distinctions between cla.s.s and cla.s.s, by adapting it to ourselves as a sacred aim to differ and distribute--burden if we must, benefit if we may--with equal and impartial hand; and we have the consolation of believing that by proposals such as these we contribute, as far as in us lies, not only to develop the material resources of the country, but to knit the hearts of the various cla.s.ses of this great nation yet more closely than heretofore to that throne and to those inst.i.tutions under which it is their happiness to live.”
It is seldom that a venture of such magnitude as Mr. Gladstone's first budget meets with universal success. But from the outset the plan was received with universal favor. Besides the plaudits with which the orator was greeted at the conclusion of his speech, his proposals were received favorably by the whole nation. Being constructed upon Free Trade principles, it was welcomed by the press and the country. It added greatly, not only to the growing reputation of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer as a financier, but also to his popularity.
The following anecdote of Mr. Gladstone is told by Walter Jerrold and is appropriate as well as timely here:
”During Mr. Gladstone's first tenure of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a curious adventure occurred to him in the London offices of the late Mr. W. Lindsay, merchant, s.h.i.+powner and M.P. There one day entered a brusque and wealthy s.h.i.+powner of Sunderland, inquiring for Mr.
Lindsay. As Mr. Lindsay was out, the visitor was requested to wait in an adjacent room, where he found a person busily engaged in copying some figures. The Sunderland s.h.i.+powner paced the room several times and took careful note of the writer's doings, and at length said to him, 'Thou writes a bonny hand, thou dost.'
”'I am glad you think so,' was the reply.
”'Ah, thou dost. Thou makes thy figures weel. Thou'rt just the chap I want.'
”'Indeed!' said the Londoner.
”'Yes, indeed,' said the Sunderland man. 'I'm a man of few words. Noo, if thou'lt come over to canny ould Sunderland thou seest I'll give thee a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and that's a plum thou dost not meet with every day in thy life, I reckon. Noo then.'
”The Londoner replied that he was much obliged for the offer, and would wait till Mr. Lindsay returned, whom he would consult upon the subject.
Accordingly, on the return of the latter, he was informed of the s.h.i.+powner's tempting offer.
”'Very well,' said Mr. Lindsay, 'I should be sorry to stand in your way.
One hundred and twenty pounds is more than I can afford to pay you in the department in which you are at present placed. You will find my friend a good and kind master, and, under the circ.u.mstances, the sooner you know each other the better. Allow me, therefore, Mr.----, to introduce you to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer.' The Sunderland s.h.i.+powner was a little taken aback at first, but he soon recovered his self-possession, and enjoyed the joke quite as much as Mr. Gladstone did.”
CHAPTER X
THE CRIMEAN WAR
The Crimean War, the great event with which the Aberdeen Cabinet was a.s.sociated, was a contest between Russia and Turkey, England and France.
A dispute which arose between Russia and Turkey as to the possession of the Holy Places of Jerusalem was the precipitating cause. For a long time the Greek and the Latin Churches had contended for the possession of the Holy Land. Russia supported the claim of the Greek Church, and France that of the Papal Church. The Czar claimed a Protectorate over all the Greek subjects of the Porte. Russia sought to extend her conquests south and to seize upon Turkey. France and England sustained Turkey. Sardinia afterwards joined the Anglo-French alliance.
The people of England generally favored the war, and evinced much enthusiasm at the prospect of it. Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone wished England to stand aloof. The Peelite members of the cabinet were generally less inclined to war than the Whigs. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell favored England's support of Turkey. Some thought that England could have averted the war by pursuing persistently either of two courses: to inform Turkey that England would give her no aid; or to warn Russia that if she went to war, England would fight for Turkey. But with a ministry halting between two opinions, and the people demanding it, England ”drifted into war” with Russia.
July 2, 1853, the Russian troops crossed the Pruth and occupied the Danubian Princ.i.p.alities which had been by treaty, in 1849, evacuated by Turkey and Russia, and declared by both powers neutral territory between them. London was startled, October 4, 1853, by a telegram announcing that the Sultan had declared war against Russia. England and France jointly sent an _ultimatum_ to the Czar, to which no answer was returned. March 28, 1854, England declared war.
On the 12th of March, while great excitement prevailed and public meetings were held throughout England, declaring for and against war, Mr. Gladstone made an address on the occasion of the inauguration of the statue of Sir Robert Peel, at Manchester. He spoke of the designs of Russia, and described her as a power which threatened to override all other powers, and as a source of danger to the peace of the world.
Against such designs, seen in Russia's attempt to overthrow the Ottoman Empire, England had determined to set herself at whatever cost. War was a calamity that the government did not desire to bring upon the country, ”a calamity which stained the face of nature with human gore, gave loose rein to crime, and took bread from the people. No doubt negotiation is repugnant to the national impatience at the sight of injustice and oppression; it is beset with delay, intrigue, and chicane; but these are not so horrible as war, if negotiation can be made to result in saving this country from a calamity which deprives the nation of subsistence and arrests the operations of industry. To attain that result ... Her Majesty's Ministers have persevered in exercising that self-command and that self-restraint which impatience may mistake for indifference, feebleness or cowardice, but which are truly the crowning greatness of a great people, and which do not evince the want of readiness to vindicate, when the time comes, the honor of this country.”