§ I am now able to present a balance-sheet showing how I have dealt with the surplus up to this point. The surplus of revenue over expenditure is £3,233,000. If you add to that the addition to the Death Duties of £600,000 you bring it up to £3,833,000. The cost for the year of the proposed change on the income-tax is estimated at £2,000,000. This leaves a still disposable surplus of £1,833,000. The odd figure of £333,000 I will keep in hand for the contingencies of the year—not an excessive amount for the purpose. As regards the other £1,500,000 I propose to add it to the New Sinking Fund, making a fixed provision for the year of £29,500,000. Why do I do that? I have said I am not going to part with revenue, and I think the arrangements I have made are such as to show that I shall not suffer in revenue from the Budget proposals. I cannot part with this £1,500,000. I shall need the money for the future. I shall need it next year. In the meantime I make the best investment I can by diminishing pro tanto our national obligations. We recognise that the income-tax is a fiscal engine with which we cannot dispense. But we shall remove from it its greatest blot by giving effective relief in the form of a lower rate of charge to that class of incomes on which it presses most heavily. We shall have made a substantial, but 1211 not, as I have shown, an excessive addition to the toll which the State exacts from large estates which pass at death. We shall have fulfilled to a degree never attained, or even attempted, before on the same scale in any single year the discharge of debt.
§ Then in regard to the future. There are urgent, long-delayed, and overdue problems of social reforms; and we shall have begun to provide the nucleus of a fund for the relief of necessitous old age. I shall have in hand next year, free and earmarked for the purpose, the £1,500,000 to which I have just referred, together with the uncollected arrears of this year's income-tax, amounting to £750,000, which will make a total of at least £2,250,000, and an additional sum from the increased estate duties. I count with confidence on further economies in expenditure; and let me add, as time goes on, nowhere with more hope than in the department of expenditure for the relief of the poor. And if I expect economies from my colleagues I appeal for them with still more emphasis to this House. You cannot have everything at once, or everything together; but if you have set your purpose, as I believe you have, and as we have, on this greatest and most urgent of social reforms, you must be willing to sacrifice, or, at any rate, to postpone other forms of useful and even beneficent expenditure. Nor are the resources of taxation, within free trade, yet exhausted. I make no prophetic estimate as to the future. There must always be in our calculations a place for the unforeseeable and the unforeseen. There are what we call accidents, shiftings, mutations, and vicissitudes of fortune, from which States are no more exempt than are the men and women who compose them. But, subject to those necessary reservations, I ask the House to sanction proposals which are intended to open the gate and straighten the way to a better and brighter future for our people.