§ LORD STANLEY OF ALDERLEY,in rising to call attention to the remarks upon the Financial Reform Association Almanac made by Mr. Goschen at Ripon on the 30th of January, 1884, and to the continued sanction given to these misleading statistics by five Members of the late Government—Sir Charles Dilke, Sir Thomas Brassey, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Mundella, and Mr. Caine, said, circumstances beyond his control had obliged him to postpone and alter the Notice now before the House. He had put it down a considerable time ago in the hope and expectation that at least some of the five right hon. Gentlemen who had given their names and sanction to the Financial Almanac would have withdrawn them, and made it needless to bring the matter 1156 before their Lordships. But the sense of personal honour had been less strong than Party spirit, and they appeared to have preferred the discredit of sanctioning the statements of the Financial Almanac to discrediting that electioneering agency. Mr. Goschen had said at Ripon that the statistics given under the heading of the Aristocracy and the Public Service were such as "to poison the relations between classes." It was not surprising, therefore, that the idea of this compilation should be due to Mr. Bright, and that it should have been introduced with extracts from three speeches delivered by that Gentleman in 1852, 1858, and 1862. It was to be hoped, now that the exaggeration of those speeches had been placed in a tabular form and its absurdity made plain, that that right hon. Gentleman would be ashamed of them. In 1884 27 pages, and in 1885 26 pages, of the Almanac were employed to prove Mr. Bright's assertion that "the Public Service is neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain." In order to do this, lists had been made of the Peers with their relatives who had held offices in the Army, Navy, Civil Service, Militia, and the Church from the year 1850 to the present time; and although a note at the commencement of these tables stated that as all moneys drawn in a person's lifetime were included, the account, therefore, necessarily included some large amounts drawn before 1850, yet the impression given was that the total arrived at was from 1850 to 1883. The total was:—Families, 532; relatives, 7,991; offices, 13,888; moneys received, £108,614,632. A great deal of this £108,000,000 was made up of Army pay. Before the abolition of purchase this was not pay, in the bulk of the cases given in the Almanac, but the interest on the price of commissions. In 1870, in introducing the Irish Land Bill, Mr. Gladstone alluded to—
That immense mass of public duties bearing upon every subject of political, moral, and social interest, without fee or reward, which has honourably distinguished for so many generations the landlords of England."—(3 Hansard, [199] 339–40.)Another note stated that it would be ridiculous to assert that all these individuals obtained preferment through such Peers, as happened to be their rela- 1157 tives, and that in many cases the relationships arose from marriages subsequent to the receipt of some or all of the public money indicated. The singular excuse was then given that though the compilers of the list knew of 10 such cases, they could not be expected to know them all; and if they excepted the cases they knew of, injustice would be done to those that were left, so they gave all, and left readers to use discrimination. In consequence of this, in nine particular cases the sum of no less than £494,000 was credited to the family of Peers, because certain functionaries late in life married some of their relatives; in two cases the connection with the Peerage by marriages took place after the death of the functionary who had earned his money by his industry without any favour or influence. For instance, the salaries of Baron Huddleston, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Mr. David Urquhart, Baron Alderson, Bishop Monck, Admiral Beaufort, were put down to the influence of the Peers with whom they became connected by marriage, in the last two cases, after their decease. Mr. Algernon West's advancement was put down to the influence of a Conservative Peer, when it was obviously due to his having been an efficient Private Secretary to the late Prime Minister. There was a Peer, a Member of the late Government, who was said to have received nearly £200,000, along with his 16 relatives. Of these 16, as a matter of fact, there were only three relatives. One married to a niece by marriage; the other died before this Peer was born; the third had left the Service long beforehebecame a connection by marriage. In his (Lord Stanley of Alderley's) own case, the salary he had received was put at nearly double the amount, and he was credited with the pay of Sir Edward Parry, the Arctic voyager, and of General Scott, who was badly wounded at Talavera, in 1809, both of whom, late in life, married relations of his father. They had put down £76,000 as the salary received by his father during his life; it should have been £50,400. From a calculation made for him in a public office, the error with respect to these two salaries was £29,000 in a sum of £83,500. Now, there were two noble Lords—the late Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Earl Granville) and the late Secretary of State for India 1158 (the Earl of Kimberley)—the whole of whose official career was described in the Foreign Office List; and, following that, he (Lord Stanley of Alderley) found that the salary of the first noble Lord had been overstated by some £35,000, and that of the second by about £25,000. Who would defend these fraudulent statistics? The noble Earl the late Secretary of State for India would not be very anxious to do so, whenhediscovered that he headed the list of those families who had been, according to the Almanac, living on a gigantic system of out-door relief. It was there stated that the noble Earl and 66 relatives had held 127 offices and received above £1,250,000. The noble Earl the late Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Earl Granville) might thinkhehad nothing to defend, because his name was absent from its place in the list of Earls; but that was because he had been put down as a collateral of the noble Duke (the Luke of Sutherland), and as having received £121,000, which had been used to swell the amount to £299,000 put down to the account of that noble Duke. Under the heading of Miscellaneous Facts and Figures, a number of irrelevant details were given with regard to 24 Peers, one of which was untrue, as the Peer mentioned had nothing to do with the transaction, and had not sold an estate, which had never belonged to him, but to his relative. As to the information given, its value and correctness might be judged from the statements, that the trading and mercantile class contributed the major portion of local taxation; that the corn land of the Kingdom might, without any strain, by the application of nitrate, be made to produce an additional wheat crop; if only a 20th part of the corn area were thus sown the loss of the Russian supply would not be felt; if all Europe were closed to them one-tenth of such double cropping would suffice to neutralize the effect. At page 26 of the Almanac of 1885, the total annual ecclesiastical income was said to be probably about £6,300,000, including annual value of palaces, deaneries, and glebe houses. Notwithstanding that, at page 21 it was said that for rating purposes some £8,000,000 per annum of value were freed by tithe from liability to local taxation. This was an astonishing statement, in presence of the frequent complaints of the clergy of the 1159 pressure of the rates on their whole incomes. Whilst tithes did not escape from local taxation, they were assessed and paid Income Tax twice over—first, whilst in the possession of the landowner or occupier; and, a second time, after they had passed into the hands of the clergy. As this Almanac was issued under Government patronage, it was to be hoped that it would publish the Question addressed last year, as to the nature of tithes, to Mr. Gladstone, to the noble Earl the late Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and to the noble Marquess (the Marquess of Salisbury), along with the answers given to that Question. If he might venture to give an opinion, the best answer was that given by his noble Friend the late Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He should like to mention another insinuation against the Church, in page 26, which came with very bad grace from Members of a Government—It may or may not be significant that in Wales, where the State religion has had least success, crime has the most rapidly decreased; in fact, the duties of the Judges of Assize have become almost nil.Under the head of the Civil List (Royal) Pensions, in the Almanac of 1884 (p.62), it was stated that the limit of £1,200 for new pensions every year was placed on the Prerogative at the commencement of the present Feign, that having been computed by the Actuary of the National Debt Office as the equivalent of £19,871 perpetual annuity. It went on to say—How far the computation has proved itself correct, we must leave our readers to judge from the following table.The table gave the annual payments for each year, and the total for 45 years as £712,640; that gave an average for each year of £15,836, instead of £19,871. The difference between the money payments made and the £19,871 calculated by the Actuary was explained by the fact that, taking one year with another, only £1,066 had been given each year as new pensions, instead of £1,200. If grants had been made up to the limit of £1,200 the total amount paid in the 45 years would have been, under the same circumstances, £802,231, which was not so far off the total for 45 years of £894,145 calculated by the Actuary. In the list of Civil Service Pensions a 1160 number of remarks are added, of more or less bad taste, more or loss offensive, and often untrue—as, for instance, where a man had served for 36 years in various climates, and was untruly put down as having got his pension after only about a third of that time. The Almanac List of Royal Pensions mentioned the grant of a pension of £40 to Robert Young, Irish historical and agricultural poet, and gave three specimens of his poetry. In one of them the word "grievous" had been misspelt and italicized grevious, so as to represent the author as a writer of doggerel verse. In the first edition (Derry, 1840) the word was properly spelt. The object of these specimens appeared to be to impugn the grant of this pension by Lord Beaconsfieid, for the pensioner next but one on the list was Sarah Coulton, £75, with the remark that she was—Widow of David Coulton, who reported for a newspaper with which Mr. Disraeli was connected.It was not probable that that remark was printed in the statement made to Parliament of grants of pensions. Neither the Literary nor the Newspaper Fund allowed it to be known what persons they assisted; and it would be bettor taste in the Vice Presidents of the Financial Association not to parade the names of those pensioners, nearly all of whom had been reduced by extreme distress to become recipients of those pensions. He thought he had now placed before the House a sufficient number of false statements contained in the Almanac to justify him in asking whether any Member of the late Government would assert that they were true; and whether, if they were admitted to be false, it was fitting—nay, whether it was not a public scandal— that five Members of the late Government should have participated in and sanctioned their publication by retaining their names in the list of Vice Presidents of the Association published at the beginning of the Financial Re-form Almanac?