MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS BUDGET.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XIII, Issue 782, 9 May 1860, Page 2

MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS BUDGET.

(From the ' Times,' February 11.)

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has taken a line which we must admit to be admirably adapted to the temper of the British people. Brought to bay by pursuing events, by war and rumours of war, by finances bandied about from one party to another, and by the consequent failure of his own high-wrought expectations seven years ago, he resolves not to be beaten, and turns upon the deficit which threatens to devour him. The Budget is that of a man who will make the success which has not come, and celebrate as a festival the occasion which fate would have turned into woe. Certainly, matters did seem very bad. It is true, as Mr. Gladstone observes, that this was to be; a great year, a year of release. A rare and; singular windfall of more than two millions a-year by the lapse!. of terminable annuities, coincided with the lapse of war duties, including the Income-tax. The jubilee had been forestalled, and all was ready for the festive occasion. Nay, fortune was not utterly unpropitious, for our old Spanish debt, so long despaired of, is actually paid. But the Russian war, the Chinese war, the immense increase of ;our armaments, as well as of our civil expenditure, and the failure of some expected revenue, have left us deficient for next year by near ten millions. Was there ever so hopeless a case ? Two years ago, when Mr. Disraeli was making things as pleasant as he could, it was passed from mouth to mouth that there would soon be a deficiency of six millions. -It is near ten millions. Worst of all, the minister to make it up is the very man who fixed the last hour of the Income-tax, and ordained the future level of the tea and sugar duties. Never was there a worse case; no wonder the man to lead the forlorn hope was taken ill on the very eve, and seems slow to face the breach. But Mr. Gladstone had heard the voice which said, —

' Time cede malis ; sed contra audentior ito.' If his case was very bad, he has come out all the stronger. The hearts of" his best friends failed as they thought of the ninepenny Income-tax, which dire necessity seemed to impose. Not so felt Mr. Gladstone. Eloquent on other points,on this he has acted. Making up for the shortness of his weapon by advancing a step on the foe, he lays on another penny, leaving us to find the reason why. But is not this in order to carry out at least one part of the fair vision, the further deliverance of the poor man's tea' and sugar ? No such thing. The poor, too, must dare to do something. "This was to.be a day of jubilee, and of something more than rejoicing. It was to be a beginning of things, and it shall be. So-the ' war duties' on tea and sugar shall continue a year longer, as well as the , Income-tax; and the year iB6O shall leave its mark on future ages. It shall be known for the Commercial Treaty which brought us in foreign wines and spirits at a reasonable duty, which obliterated the last traces of Protection from the tariff, which struck off every item which was not a matter of revenue, or,which was below the notice of the Custom-house; which at home abolished the paper duty, and remitted a laige part of the timber duties, besides a garniture of smaller remissions. ■

So wills.the Chancellor of the Exchequer, anda]l must admire the courage which. Has not the word 'impossible' in its vocabulary. The appear is to our public spirit. Will we pay now and indefinitely tehpence in the pound, or near four per cent, on our incomes P Mr. Gladstone points out that under the operation of the Income-tax, income has continually increased, —Schedule D vastly more than all the schedules . The more it is pruned, the more income flourishes, and what we render up we still find in our sack's mouth, and more besides. True perhaps, but the wonder is the man who says it. As he evidently could not stand on 9d., he has pushed on to 10d.,for there is a power in momentum. He shows himself capable of more still, for: Mr. Gladstone cannot refrain from dwelling a moment on the charms of a shilling duty,—its succinctness of expression, its facility of calculation, and its perfectly intelligible character. Of course something ought to be done with .this splendid shilling, or franc, as it may be appropriately, called, being chiefly an offering,—a peace offering, shall we call it ?—to France. That is its chief destination. The introduction of foreign wines at a duty which shall admit the cheapest qualities Mr. Gladstone justly considers an epoch that carries us back not only to the early financial, experiments of Pitt, but to the begining of our long unhappy feud with our neighbour at the Revolution of 1688. No doubt, the experiment will be a financial success; but whether it will be also a great social change, and whether the lower, or even the middle classes,will ever, take to foreign wines, is a question on which; we have now. few materials for an answer. A virtual prohibition, of cheap foreign wines for nearly two centuries disposes of the argument drawn .from existing tastes and habits. But there is no point of antiquarian statistics so certain ■ and so prominent as that French and. Spanish , wines were once largely used by classes in this country to whom they are now unknown. All the capabilities are one way) all the. facts another. It is true that in the Mediteranean countries there is wine enough to supply all the world; but will it under any improved cultivation and manufacture;,bear travelling and keeping, and . suit palates habituated to high brandied port or strong heer P. The increased use of home-.nade wines and manufactured Cape wines shows a demand which cheap foreign wines will easily supply. But why need we state the case of cheap, thin-bodied, foreign wines, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, only so recently as July 15, 1856, did it so much more forcibly than we could do; and with the inevitable conclusion, as he then pronounced ex. cathedrA, that nothing but the stronger sorts of wine would ever go down extensively in England? We need only answer Mr. Gladstone'schallenge of Mansard by referring our readers to a speech which exhausts all that can be said against this portion of his Budget. ' .

The restoration of cheap foreign wines to a coun-, try which for two centuries has regarded them with an. almost religious aversion would be itself an event sufficient to. mark the required epoch. But this is" not enough for the ardent financial genius which sends out its legions from a beleaguered city for the conquest of the world. He wishes to make the year 1860 the very last of the,

whole Protectionist dynasty. Protection, expelled from palaces, has been lurking .in comfortable corners, among people "without exception Freetraders, but Freetraders with exception," standing out each for his own little craft, and putting his Protection on the revenue.. A crowd of small manufactures and petty produce, from silk to eggs, are to bo ad■mitted duty free, and henceforth we must equal our neighbours if we would shut them out. This was only- a question of time, for, when so many pay dearly for Free Trade, ifc was out of the question that there should be any favoured classes. It is as well to seize this occasion for finishing the work. The long schedule of proposed remissions will tell its own tale. But Mr. Gladstone proposes to add a third great achievement to the memorable deeds of the year. He accedes at last to the long-urged demand for. a remission of the paper duty. In this, as on the proposed abolition of the newspaper stamp, we are ourselves much, interested, and should probably be heard with a degree of suspicion. There is, however, no,one connected with popular literature —that is, the reading of the middle and lower classes—who does not represent the paper duty as a serious, sometimes ruinous, burden upon trade. When we are paying over a million a-year for the furtherance of education, it seems little else than rid iculou's to extract more than that from the sale of cheap literature. But shipbuilders, and builders in general:are also to remember; this year. We had; omitted the coalowners, and the ironmasters, and all manufacturers of fcxclusively^British commodities, who "will benefit by the French side of the reformed tariff. This is not the whole of this inexhaustible Budget, which reads more like half a dozen budgets, rolled'into one than the solution of a simple difficulty. Mr. Gladstone proposes a diminishing scale for game certificates down to a sovereign for December,— why not for the whole shooting season ? He would also make eating-bouses take out licences conferring a right to sell wine and beer. This and minor alterations mark the prospective;gaze with which Mr. Gladstone watches the rising of a new era. Should his Budget be adopted, we wish it it every success. May fifty thousand f»ame Quicklys put his eifigj over their doors, and supply capons and conserves, with cheap Canary, Sherry sack, Malaga, and even strong Oporto, to better customers than Sir John Falstaff, Bardolph, and his suite. . ;