The Evening Star THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1915.

Evening Star, Issue 15916, 23 September 1915, Page 4

The Evening Star THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1915.

If there were any among those of the Old

Land who had not yet The Price Of seriously realised that the Wer, nation was at war—and

it is said that there are, or were, many such—the publication of the contents of the most famous Budget in our Imperial history will, not iniprobbring this fact home to them. Where long and almost daily lists of lulled and wounded have failed to malm more than » transient impression, the demands of the tax-collector will succeed, at least to the extent of making clear, alike in cottage and palace, that the world of peace into which their occupiers were born has passed away, and that another, such as in their wildest dreams they never imagined, has taken its place. W-e in these more-favored portions of the Empire axe not called upon to pass judgment on the equities of each and. every tax which the Home Government, in their wisdom, have seen fit to impose, but, speaking broadly, and with the knowledge that every citizen must hear his share, according to the measure of his means, of the cost of the war, it seems to us that Mr Kenna s proposals, which, of course, are those of the Government, have the merit, even though severe, of fairness and impartiality. If the worker earning £3 a week, clear of the exemption, and having no children, has to pay £3 15s 8d a year, as well as more for his tea, coffee, and picture shows (the last two being optional payments), the man earning £5,000 has to pay £1,029, and the man earning £IOO,OOO over £34,000. There are, doubtless, some who, though able, to express sympathy with the £3 a week man, will have none for the £5,000, much less the £IOO,OOO, a year man. Yet it is conceivable that the steady, careful worker will manage to adjust himself to the new order with a minimum of personal loss, if he so desires, and certainly without inconvenience and loss to others-, while the man whose income is cut down from £IOO.OOO to £66,000 cannot hope to keep up the same establishment as heretofore. Servants will have to be discharged, houses given up, subscriptions reduced, hospitality restricted, and so on, for no one nowadays, not even the wildest of hare-brained stump orators, believes that men of large incomes can spend them without some benefit to others being conferred in the process. The Bishop of London, in the course of one of his eminently readable addresses, recently remarked that he had been told by a person who knew that many a man then living in a palace would be living in a cottage before the war was through. Let there be, in these times of war without and distress- at home, a surplus rather than a deficit of charity in our judgments of individuals who to outward seeming are enviably rich. “The wealthy man’s lot is not a happy one,” said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and we may safely accept the statement as something more than a passing commonplace. Meanwhile we direct attention to the stupendous nature of the figures quoted by Mr MTvenna. The average man dislikes figures. He dislikes burdening his mind with the petty details of pounds, shillings, and pence. They do not appeal to him, and too frequently, when he sees a sheet of paper instituting comparisons between one set of figures and another, he brushes it aside. But there are figures and figures, and comparisons and comparisons. What, for example, is more arresting than this bald statement; The revenue for the past year was £272,000,000 the expenditure was £1,590,000,000, and the ! “ dead-weight debt ” at the end of the year would bo £2,200,000,000 ? Such figures are unprecedented—nay, undreamed of in our history. During the 23 years covering the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wavs, which up till August of last year were always regarded as the greatest and most exacting campaign in “our island story,” our great - grandfathers added £501,500,000 to the National Debt; for the period covering the first 17 months only of the present war Mr M'Kenna estimates that the great-grandchildren of the men who fought at Waterloo, as well as of those who stayed at home, will add nearly sixteen hundred million pounds (making a grand total of £2,200,000,000) to the “deadweight debt” of the nation. Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago (the Revolution' of 1688) the National Debt was much under one million pounds (£664,263), and on the eve of the present wax it was less than £662,000,000. The mihd fails to grasp the meaning and bearing of figures such as these. All one can say is that they express in terms of money the price the Mother Land, and, in a less degree, the rest of the Empire, have to pay on behalf of the salvation of humanity. The pity ot it! After nineteen centuries of Christian teaching and the slow development of the peoples of Europe from a condition of savagery and barbarism to a state of material well-being, intellectual enlightenment, and moral ascendancy -that w-a unite to designate as on© of civilisation the world finds itself, through the acts of a criminal lunatic, into whose hands an inscrutable Providence had placed the power and the will so to act, engaged in the most sanguinary and colossal war of its history. The accumulated wealth of the Christian Powers, the garnered fruits of generations of peaceful industry, axe .at this hour feeing drawn upon not for the further advancement and betterment of the people -as a whole, but for the purchase of thoso implements and munitions that destroy and kill. The savings of millions are being dissipated in smoke, while simultaneously the pick and flower ol the manhood of the nations ij- beamr

butchered to make a Kaiser's holiday. It is an infamous, a satanic, pa>S9 to which the world has been brought by the diseased whims of a diseased brain. Yet there can be no holding back. Wealth and life, all that- the Empire has and is, most be thrown into the crucible for the sake of those and that which remain. Civilisation and humanity dare nob lower their standard to the demons of the Pit that are ranged against them, howl they never so fiercely and come they never so persistently. Britain to-day more clearly, more definitely than ever before stands forth as the champion and defender of those things which the plain people of the earth, wherever they may be, claim as their birthright. To Britain the nations look for redemption and protection, and Britain, with her children overseas-, will not fail them.