The N. Z. Times FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1910. THE BUD GET BATTLE

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7020, 7 January 1910, Page 6

The N. Z. Times

FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1910. THE BUD GET BATTLE

mTtt WHICH IB INCORPOBATXD THE "TV*I,I.INOXON INrAPINDa.NT." ESTABLISHED 1845.

Unless Lord Lansdowno can put before the elector something moro satisfactory, than the rhetorical skilly contained in his defence of the House of Lords cabled to us this morning tho Peers will have good cause to be enraged at having to follow the lead he set in regard to the Budget. His Lordship is apparently astonished to find popular resentment of rejection so keen, and cannot understand how it is that his amendment for "submitting the Budget to the country is treated as if it were an Anarchist's bomb sufficient to wreck every institution in the country." This is either tho language of a combatant already tasting the cf defeat, or of one who is startled at the result of bis handiwork. Rejection of the Budget was an Anarchist's bomb, and it exploded beneath a Constitution which can never return to the status quo. Ome legacy cf the Middle Ages was to give the nation a Houso of Commons supreme in finance, and for three hundred years that supremacy has only once been challenged. On that occasion the Commons asserted their power over the purse, and recognition of that power has been as freely conceded by the Crown as by; the leaders of Tory opinion in the country. The Duko of'."Wellington, Lord Salisbury, and evou Mr Balfour himself explicitly declared, upon various occasions, that the discretion of the Commons in the realm of finance was absolute. The wording of every Finance Act passed by Parliament'emphasises this. Tho common form of money Bills iu use for centuries is this:.—

"Most Gracious Sovereign,—We, your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland _'n Parliament assembled, towards raising the .necessary supplies to defray your Majesty's public expenses and making an addition to tlie public revenue; have freely and voluntarily resolved to give and grant unto your Majesty the several duties after-mentioned, and to therefore most humbly beseech your Majesty thut it may be: enacted. . ' ■ *

'. The Throno dare not refuso enactment. The Lords olaim'' authority to do so—to place the Commons in the position of being cowed by an unrepresentative Chamber from which the omnipotence it now lays claim to waß wrested by revolution under arms. The doctrine the Lords have now outraged has 'weathered the centuries through one .reason—that it is tho only doctrine compatible with representative institutions... " Tho .distinction between legislation, and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty," said Bitt a hundred and fifty years ago, and the words are as true to-day as then. For whoever can refuse supplies has the power of life and death, the power, as Lord Salisbury has said, of " paralysing the Executive."

Let the Peers have the power of rejecting money Bills, and, the. "Westminster Gazette" recently pointed out, "every Government must in future exist on their sufferance, which means that no Government they dislike will over in future havo more than one secure year of office or bo 1 able oven to collect revenue in sourity .for that one year." Let the Peers havo that power and the constitutional fulcrum is removed from the representatives of the peoplo to a privileged class of hereditary mandarins. The llouso of Lords would bo supreme—responsible to no one, and the Commons manacled in the discharge of the national services. Lord Lansdowne, professes not to seo how revolutionary the claim of tho Lords really is. Yet his grandfather was under no delusions of the sort, for in tho great controversy over tho Corn Law Kepoal Bill in 1846 he " took the decision of tho House of Commons as ho found it, and received it as the undoubted decision, of the representatives of tho peoplo." Is not the rejected Budget tho decision of tho representatives of tho people? It was carried by a majority of 230 in a House of 528, after exhaustive discussion, in which oven Sir Balfour had admitted i/ho justice of all the revenuo-producdng chiuses—except tho land taxation proposals. It is those which havo moved tho Peers —these taxes on tho increment of land values—to risk their futuro and throw the Constitution into tho melting-pot.

The question of what shall be done •with the House of Peers in future is not the essential question, disturbing though Lord Lansdowne finds it. Whether the public will allow the Government to "turn us over to. the untrammelled mercy of a chance majority on the' Commons " is of secondary importance compared with whether the democracy will consent to its representatives being handed over to the mercy of irresponsible Dukes and Viscounts, armed with authority to govern the country by enforced plebiscites. The nation might, it is true, as Lord Lansdowne says, "find itself with a House of Commons wherein there were over 300 members who had never been in Parliament before," but under no stTetch of imagination, could that be such an evil as having the nation bullied by a similar number of obscure Peers—people whom no one ever hears of unless their names are I published in Parliamentary divisionlists as voting against Liberal measures. Are the British people to tax and govern themselves, or delegate the duty to Peers? That is the kernel of the matter, and Lord Lansdowno has not yet taken it out of the shell.