§ Before I answer that question, I will ask the Committee to take a rather larger survey than is usual on these occasions of our financial situation. We are in the first session of a new Parliament, and in the first year of office of a new Government. Let us, before we take any step of our own upon the road, realise clearly whence we have travelled, where we stand, and whither, if we pursue the same path, we are going. Our expenditure, our indebtedness, our taxation, how does each compare with what it was and what it ought to be? I make no apology for the retrospect upon which I am about to enter, and it will not be conceived in any polemical spirit. It may take some little time, but I am not without hope that it may impress upon the House, as it has impressed on me, a much needed lesson.
287§ I go back ten years for my starting point. The population of the United Kingdom, which in the middle of 1896 was 39,600,000, had risen in the middle of 1906 to 43,600,000—;an increase of 10 per cent.