§ My final balance-sheet will therefore be as follows—Expenditure, after suspending the Sinking Fund, but including the addition of £18,500,000 beyond the present Estimates, £188,469,000. Revenue—Customs. £35,450,000; Excise, £32,700,000; Death Duties, £13,200,000; Stamps, £8,700,000; Land Tax and 187 House Duty, £2,500,000; Income Tax, £38,600,000, making a total tax revenue of £131,150,000. Add the non tax revenue of £21,785,000, and the total revenue will be £152,935,000. Deducting this from the estimated expenditure, there will be a deficit of 35½ millions, to be provided for by a loan of 32 millions and by a draft on the Exchequer Balances, to which I have already referred.
§ I have endeavoured to explain, to the best of my ability, and under somewhat difficult circumstances, the proposals which I have to make to the Committee for the financial arrangements of the coming year. I hope that these proposals may receive their favourable consideration. I have felt it my duty not to prophesy smooth things. I have felt it my duty to put the worst, rather than the best, before the judgment of the Committee. It would have been a much more agreeable task to have fallen in with what was almost the suggestion of the Leader of the Opposition, and have made my Budget depend upon hopes which possibly may not be realised.
§ SIR H. CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN (Stirling Burghs)I did not suggest that.
§ * SIR M HICKS BEACHWell, that was what I thought was the suggestion. It may be felt that my demands are too large for the circumstances of the case. It may be felt that what I have asked for may never be required. But, Sir, I venture to say it is always best to choose the disagreeable task. It is not agreeable to me to feel that this year again I am to some extent undoing the good work which my predecessors have done, and which I imitated in more prosperous times, in the reduction of the National Debt. It is even more unpleasant to be obliged to ask a limited class of the community—those who pay income tax—to bear an additional burden, and to restore to our tariff an article of universal consumption which has been free from taxation for a generation. But, Sir, I remember something winch Mr. Gladstone said when, in the early days of the Crimean War, after a series of Budgets in which article after article 188 had been freed from taxation, he had to propose new taxation for war expenditure. I remember he then warned the Committee whom he was addressing that, in the vista of expenditure opening before them, it was impossible to say how long a continuance of exemption from taxation would be accorded to the articles which he had himself freed from it, among which, it will be remembered, corn and flour were not included.