IMPERIAL POLITICS.

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 March 1907, Page 3

IMPERIAL POLITICS.

READJUSTMENT OE TAXATION. LORD ROSEBERY’S WARNNG. [Br Telegraph —press Association.] LONDON Mar 27. Mr Asquith has acepted the spirit and letter of Mr Bennett’s resolution declaring that it is necessary to readjust the burden of taxation in order to provide urgently needed social reforms. Mr Hills denied that Ministers were able to finance their social programme under a free trade system. LONDON Mar 27. Lord Rosebery speaking at a meeting of the Council of the Liberal League said that although a Government emerging from an election with i great majority was entitled to some thing like a free hand—at any rate for the first year of its existence the Leagues valiant activity was never more necessary than now. He would speak quite frankly regarding the Government. He owed the Government no confidence, had no connection secret or open with it, and was not sure that ho owed it even the common courtesies of life. That made it more incumbent on him to say that ho considered that the Government had surmounted great difficulties with (extraordinary success. The vice-presidents of the League carried into the Government the prin cij:le of the efficiency that the League so loudly demanded in the middle of the Boer war. His apprehension regarding the Government was concerned not with its past of its composition, but lest it should make too many impossible promises. Lord Rosebery declared that the Government had pledged itself to the impossible in proposing this year to do something terrible with the House of Lords; to deal with the temperance question, the land troubles, army reform and the government of Ireland. His second apprehension was lest the party, through some of its members, would be permanently connected to the hostility to property in all its forms. If so, ere long they would be squeezed out between Socialism and Conservatism. Lord Rosebery emphasised the opinion that the rock whereon the Liberal Government would split when defeated at a general election arises from an apprehension of their attacks on property more than from any other cause. This friendly warning would possibly be interpreted as the croakings of a retired raven on a withered branch. Rosebery proceeded to criticise the introduction of the Irish system of dual ownership of land in Britain. Ho also reviewed the Ministerial utterances upon the question of Home Rule, from which he inferred that the Government considered this an open question. Open questions, added Lord Rosebery, were dangerous and apt to produce formidable breaches. There were two things which Britain would never tolerate—a tax on foodstuffs and a. separate Parliament for Ireland. The Tory party was almost entirely identified with one, and the Liberal party too largely with the other. He anticipated that the Government’s Irish Bill would do extreme violence. Probably if a chiefly administrative league were formed he would be able to support it, but not if an independent Parliament was the ultimate goal. He was delighted to see self-govern-ment granted to a colony united to the Motherland only by the Crown, as in the case of Australia and Canada,, but when it was in a contiguous island, priding itself upon the disloyalty of its public declarations, it was a very different matter. He did not think they would hear anything further of the University scheme outlined by Mr Bryce prior to leaving for America. The Times draws a parallel between the positions of Lord Rosebery and the Duke of Devonshire.