CLASS AGAINST CLASS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXX, Issue 15124, 13 October 1909, Page 6

CLASS AGAINST CLASS.

Tug Conservative newspapers at Home are naturally a little irritated by Mr Lloyd-George's speech at Newcastle. They describe it as " a deliberate, attempt to set class against class," as "incendiary," as full of ■'rhetorical falsehoods," as a deplorable exhibition of " vindictiveness" and as a great many other things that aro not creditable to either the speaker or the cause he is advocating. I®sibly all this denunciation is deserved. The summary of the speech supplied by the Press Association was so fragmentary that wo cannot pretend to know anything about the real character of the speech itself. The Chancellor of the Exchequer appears to have made a. rather flippant allusion to the "slump in dukes," which, perhaps, would have been better omitted, but apart from this there is nothing in our report to suggest that ho was guilty of the slightest impropriety. The assertion of his critics that the speech was "worse" than the one he delivered at Liraehouse some weeks ago helps us, however, to understand their annoyance. Until this last enormity they quoted the Liraehouse speech as tho very depth of Radical depravity. It certainly was a scathing criticism of the political system that was being upheld by his opponents. He wanted to justify his Budget proposals, and he sought his justification in two or three typical cases of land monopoly. We have, looked through the verbatim report of his speech very carefully for the third or fourth time, but we have failed to find a single line half so offensive as some of the charges that have been hurled against himself and his colleagues. Here is the most "vindictive" passage in the whole speech :

The landlords come to us in the House of Commons, and they say, "If you go on taxing reversions we will grant no more, leases." Is not that horrible? No more leases, no more kindly landlords! With all their retinue of good fairies—agents, surveyors, lawyers^—always ready to receive ground rents, fees, premiums, fines, reversions;—no more, never again ! They won't do it. Wo. can't persuade them. They won't have it. The landlord has threatened us that if we proceed with tiie Budget he will take his sack clean away from tho hopper, and the grain which we all are grinding our best to fill his sack will go into our own. Oh, I can't believe it. There is a limit even to tho wrath of outraged landlords- Wo must really appease them; we must offer up some sacrifice to them. Suppose wo offer the House of Lords to thein. You seem ratlior to agree with that. I will make the suggestion to them. Of course these remarks were punctuated with laughter aJid applause by the four thousand people , who subsequently adopted a motion expressing approval of the Budget, and probably the laughter and applause made them more poignant than they appear in cold print; but in this country they would be regarded merely as a passing contribution to the pleasantries of party warfare. Later on in his speech Mr Lloyd-George said that the landlords had called Ministers " thieves," and had turned their "dogs" on to them, " to bark morning," meaning, we suppose, tho Opposition newspapers; but there was nothing in this to excite the journalistic indignation which the cable agent has so carefully recorded. The Chancellor made it quite clear that he had no personal quarrel with tho landlords. "The landlord is a gentleman," he said. "I have not a word to say against him in his personal capacity, but he is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth." And he is not proposing to do anytEing very dreadful to the landlords after all. The tax he is going to levy upon them is only one half-penny in the pound, apart from tho increment tax, and the exemptions make the burden an extremely light one, except to the. very wealthy; hut he is taking care that their land shall be assessed at its true value, and that they shall make their just contribution to the revenue of the State. It is doubtless on this account that the Conservative newspapers are so ready to find fault with his methods of debate.