HC Deb 13 April 1899 vol 69 c1006

I listened the other day to a speech by the honourable Member for Northampton a tacking our naval and military expenditure. I noticed that he carefully confined himself to that; I noticed that when he came to deal with the Education Estimates, with the cost of the Civil Service administration, and with matters of that kind, he said he was anxious, not for a decrease, but for an increase. Sir, I know that that feeling is widely shared. I daresay I am old-fashioned in my ideas, but I lock with alarm on the tendency of the present day, quite irrespective of political opinion—a tendency which is. perhaps, more rife on this side of the House than on that—to look to the Exchequer and the Central Government for superintendence, for assistance, for inspection, and for control in all kinds of departments of life, and in all kinds of relations between individuals, in which, in the old days, the Government of the country was never deemed capable of acting at all. Sir, I fear from what I have seen that whatever general view may prevail in the minds of honourable Members as to the excess of our expenditure and the desire to reduce it, the multifarious matters that press on their attention, all of them tending to increase the expenditure, will be too many for them, and that Parliament will continue in the future precisely as it has done in the past few years, largely to increase its expenditure, and thus, as I have said, if it be possible to save in one direction that saving will be neutralised in another. Well, then, I say that in my judgment, so far as my poor foresight can extend, the expenditure of the present year cannot be looked on as a mere temporary estimate. But there is one hopeful matter to which I hope to direct the attention of the Committee for a moment.