TAXATION AND BORROWING

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1716, 18 January 1905, Page 74 (Supplement)

TAXATION AND BORROWING

Mlt ASQUITH’S VIEWS. Mr Asquith, speaking at a Liberal demonstration at (Cambridge said, if he were asked what he considered to be the most serious burden upon the industry of Great Britain, his answer would he not tariffs, not foreign competition, not dumping, but the enormous and progressive increase in what the State took and was taking by taxation and by borrowing out of the pockets of the people of this oountry. The amount raised by revenue in 1893-4 was £106,000,000, and in 1903-4 £176,000,000, or an addition of 70 per cent. We spent from all sources on the Army in 1893-4 £21,000,000, and in 1903-4 £46,000,000, or an increase of over 100 per cent. The total debt of the State was in 18934 £738,000,000, and in 1903-4 £948,000,000, or an increase of £210,000,000. Did the ©leotors not begin to see in connection with ail this a much more promising means of improving British trade than by the adoption of these new fiscal schemes? He hoped that if a Libeial Government came into power the first duty they would set before themselves would he a reduction in the country’s expenditui-e. If it was the case that Mr Chamberlain’s scheme lay at this moment discredited in the judgment of this country, discredited for its bad history, for its inaccurate figures, for its falsified prophecies, for its gaping contradictions, if it Lay a torn and mangled bit of chaos, what wasi it due to? It was due to twelve months of argument and open discussion before the forum of a free people. Let Mr Balfour show us a case iu which lie could carrg out this doctrine of retaliation in such, a way that it would do more harm to our neighbour than to ourselves. He could not do it. The term retaliation was empty as the wind. As to piefetenoe, let a concrete case be shown in which this policy could be carried out without doing harm to the people here and the people in the colonies, financially and industrially, and without sowing the seeds of jealousy and dissension as between the different parts of the Empire, and Liberals would then he prepared to

consider the doctrine. These proposals, it was said, would restore agriculture to its pristine condition of prosperity. The condition of the labourer was one to which no one among us could think of his returning without shame and. humiliation. The condition of the farmer was such as no self-respecting farmer of the present day would be content to occupy, and so far as any profit at all came to anybody from this insensate system for increasing the productiveness of industry by hampering its processes and clogging its wheels, the only persons who benefited were the owners of the soil. Liberals would ameliorate the condition of agriculture bybettering the system of landed tenure, by giving greater security for the investments of the farmer in the soil, by extending the system of small holdings, and by the provision of more decent and habitable dwellings for the labourers.