OLD AGE PENSIONS.

Evening Star, Issue 11895, 25 May 1903, Page 6

OLD AGE PENSIONS.

DEBATED IN THE COMMONS. SECOND READING CARRIED. MB CHAMBERLAIN’S VIEWS. Prew Association—By Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, May 23. An Old Age Pensions Bill, proposing an age limit of sixty-five years, with pensions of 5s a week, provided partly from the rates and partly from the Treasury, at an estimated cost of £6,500,000, was read a second time. Mr Chamberlain, referring to the history of the movement, agreed that there was a possibility of doing something to stimulate thrift, and help in making provision for old age. The question was complicated and the obstacles were great, but not insuperable. It was not impossible to find fnnds for such a deserving object. There would, no doubt, have to be that review at an early date of the fiscal system he had indicated as necessary and desirable. (Cheers.) Mr Long (President of the Local Government Board) admitted that the Bill was an improvement on previous ones, but more precise information was required. Commenting on Mr J. F Remnant’s (C.) Bill, and recalling the demands for remission of taxation, Mr T ong doubted whether a proposal necessitating such large expenditure would be e.oceptable to the nation. The only way to raise the requisite money would be to proceed with the revision of the (real system. He urged that the real difficulty was not the principle of pensions, but the financial foundations, without which the pensions proposals were impracticable. The Bill was referred to a select committee. Mr Chamberlain’s remarks have created a sensation at Westminster. They arc interpreted to mean that he intends pushing frcal revision, believing that the working classes will support duties on forei m products if the money so derived is devoted to old age pennons. A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION. MR CHAMBERLAIN’S MOTIVES. SYDNEY. May 25. (Received Mav 25. at 10.32 a.m.) The * Sydney Morning Herald ’ says, in view of the prospect of a general election shortly in England, that it considers Mr Chamberlain’s tacking of preferential dnties on to an old age pension scheme as more calculated to win the democratic vote for the Government, It seems to be largely an electioneering question, and a statesman of Mr Chamberlain's masterful character having once decided upon a pet theory for the close of bis career is not likely to be long deciding on the means to carry it into effect. The ‘Daily Telegraph’ says that nothing more crude than Mr Chamberlain’s fi cal doctrine had ever fallen from the lip g n f a statesman, tor is the plea upon which he seeks to get in the thin end of the wedge of Imperial tariff changes any better His device for providing funds by means of a protective tariff for old a~e pensions i* merely a plan to impoverish the people by lifelong charges, and afterwards to sustain their declining years by refunding a part of the earning! thus filched from titan*