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Sir, I have now completed the usual and necessary comparison of the past year with that immediately preceding it, but I hope I shall not be detaining the Committee at too great length if on this occasion I make a more distant comparison. ["Hear, hear!"] In a few weeks the nation will be celebrating a great anniversary of a great reign. [Loud cheers.] It will be interesting to all of us to look back on the extraordinary change which has come over the condition of the country during the past sixty years, but I doubt if in anything the extent of that change can be better realised than by a comparison of the altered requirements of the community as reflected in the revenue raised and the expenditure provided for by the State in the year 1836–37, before Her Majesty's accession, and the year just closed. The Committee will be pleased, to remember that in the figures I shall give adjustments have been made in order to provide for the alterations—the very useful alterations—in the national account-keeping that have come into use during that period. Now, the total revenue of the nation in the year 1836 was £52,500,000. In the year just closed it was £112,000,000. In the first period, 71.8 per cent., nearly three-quarters, of the revenue was raised by taxes on commodities. ["Hear, hear!"] In the last period 44.3 per cent, was so raised. In the early period almost everything was taxed. ["Hear, hear!"] I wish my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield had lived in those days—[laughter and cheers]—because I do not think he would now ask us to imitate that period. ["Hear, hear!"] There were 1,135 separate rates of Customs Duties. There were duties on exports, there were bounties on various articles, and yet the whole net produce of the Customs in the year 1836 was only three-quarters of a million more than we raise now almost
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entirely from duties on three articles— alcohol, tobacco, and tea. ["Hear, hear!"] I do not want to dwell on the effect of that system upon the industry of the country. I do not want to discuss how much the price of articles grown in this country on which there was no Excise duty may have been raised by duties, often prohibitive, on similar articles imported from abroad, but I should just like to give the Committee a single small, concrete instance of the effect of the Customs Duties at that time upon, a few articles of ordinary consumption in a poor labourer's household. ["Hear, hear!"] I quote from a Report addressed in the year 1841 by Mr. Carleton Tufnell to the Poor Law Commissioners. He frames a household budget of a labourer with four children, earning on the average 13s. 2d. a week. He puts down the number of articles that would be consumed in that household, and the annual quantities of each. I have taken only five of those articles—sugar, tea, tobacco, soap, and pepper. Taking the quantities suggested by Mr. Tufnell, and taking the taxation of that day, I find that a labourer would have paid £2 3s. 5d. a year—three and a-half weeks' wages—in taxation on those articles alone. ["Hear, hear!"] Now he would pay on the same articles 12s. 5½d. How has this change been effected? Of course it has been effected by. an increased amount of taxation on property; 39.7 per cent, of our revenue now is raised by direct taxation; 23.2 of it was so raised in 1836. But what has been the result of the change on the industry of the country? In 1836 our total foreign trade amounted to a value of £125,000,000; last year it amounted to about £738,000,000 [Cheers.] My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield is not very fond of foreign imports. It may comfort him—I do not know whether it will or not—to know that in 1836 our foreign imports were only £67,000,000 in value. I am glad to know that they have now increased to nearly £442,000,000. [Cheers.] But what were our exports of home produce? It is desired to encourage home produce. Has that home produce been encouraged? The exports of home produce were £42,000,000 in 1836; they were £240,000,000 last year. [Cheers.] And, Sir, out of this enormous extension of industry has come
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great and permanent benefit to the working classes of the country, and I know of no way in which that can be better testified than by the increase of deposits in the savings banks. In 1836 those deposits amounted to £18,750,000, placed there by 598,000 persons. Last year they amounted to £155,000,000, placed there by no less than 8,396,000 persons. ["Hear, hear!"] In 1836, out of every 43 men, women, and children, only one was a depositor in the savings banks; now there is one out of every five. [Cheers.] There is one other point in which a comparison of the revenue of the two periods is instructive, and that is the great advance in the receipts from non-tax sources in the present day. [At this point Sir H. VINCENT entered the House and walked to his seat amidst general cheers and laugher.] In 1836 only £2,500,000— 5 per cent, of the total revenue—was so derived. In 1890–97 nearly £18,000,000, 10 per cent, of the total revenue—came from non-tax sources. Of course, this has come mainly from the great expansion of our postal service. I do not think we can overestimate the extraordinary advantage to the country from the expansion of that service. ["Hear, hear!"] In 1836 it cost 4d. to send a letter 15 miles in the United Kingdom, it cost 1s. to send a letter 300 miles, it cost 10d. to send a letter to France, it cost 1s. 8d. to send a letter to Germany, and it cost 3s. 6d. to send a letter to South America. No wonder it was said that—
Letters were sent when franks could be procured,
And when they could not, slience was endured
[Laugher.] For every letter sent in those days we now send 22, and for every newspaper or packet sent in those days we send 28. There was no telegraph in those days, but we send more telegrams in a year now than post-paid letters were sent at the time of the accession of the Queen; and with that great accommodation, to the public there has been an increase in the profit to the Exchequer. In 1836 the Post Office produced a net profit, of £1,481,000; last year it produced £3,936,000. ["Hear, hear!"] I now turn to the expenditure. That in 1836 was £50,500,000: last year it was £109,750,000. Under three great heads
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there has been an enormous increase in our expenditure. The expenditure on the Army, Navy, and civil administration has risen from £16,464,000 in 1836 to £70,377,000 now. We expend nearly four-and-a-quarter times as much. Our Army cost us in 1836 £8,000,000, now £18,250,000. Our Navy cost in 1836 £4,000,000; it now costs £22,000,000. [Cheers.] Sir, that increased expense is necessary from the enormous expansion of our Empire, from the great expansion of our commerce, from the greatly incrased cost of the armaments of modern times, but most of all from the great increase in the naval and military strength of other nations and the fact that it is concentrated in fewer hands. But we get, I think, a good return for our money. We have double the number of regular soldiers at home now that we had then. Our soldiers are better paid, better armed, and better housed. We have 70,000 more Militia, we have 80,000 Army Reserve, and 236,000 Volunteers. We have three-and-a-half times as many men and boys in the Navy. We have double the number of Marines, nearly double the number of ships, three times the tonnage, and I do not know how great an increase in offensive and defensive power. Sir, there has been an increase in the cost of civil administration from £4,500,000 to nearly £30,000,000. Our education estimates are now £9,500,000; then that expenditure by the State was unknown. Our grants to local taxation in aid of the taxpayers are £11,500,000; then they were but a few hundred thousand a year; and we spend £4,500,000 more to secure a more efficient administration of the law, in the better protection of the people and of life and property, in the encouragement of science and art, and in a large number of multifarious wants due to our modern civilisation, which were never dreamed of by the people when Her Majesty acceded to the throne. ["Hear, hear!"]