§ Now, Sir, as to cost. All estimates, as I have said, either of the number of pensionable persons or the ultimate cost of the scheme, are, on our present materials, in the highest degree conjectural; but we think it safe to assume that, given the above conditions, the maximum number of actual pensioners will not exceed 500,000, and that the maximum cost, after making the allowance I have suggested in the case of married couples living together and so forth, in any year is not likely to exceed, and will probably fall somewhat short of, £6,000,000 sterling. As it will take time 475 and much adjustment of detail to get the necessary machinery into working order, no scheme can be brought into operation until 1st January, 1909, and as, even then, it will not be in full blast, I estimate that the charge upon the actual current financial year will not be more than £1,200,000.
§ Now, Sir, I am well aware that in laying these proposals before Parliament they will be assailed, I will not say in an unfriendly spirit, for, as a matter of fact, I am sure they will not. When I say assailed, I mean in the way of friendly criticism upon different lines of attack. It will be said, on the one hand, by some of my hon. friends that our proposals do not go far enough. They will tell me that the income-limit is too low and the age-limit too high, and that, perhaps, in other respects the conditions are more stringent than they need be, though they are much less stringent than in any system which is now in actual working order. My reply is, and it is a reply which I beg my hon. friends to follow, that you make by this scheme immediate provision for something like half a million aged persons who are at present, to a large degree, dependent on the precarious charity of relatives and in imminent danger of becoming dependent on Poor Law relief, with all its humiliating disqualifications. On the other hand, it will be said, perhaps, by some Gentlemen above the gangway, though I do not think by very many of them, that this is a Socialistic experiment discouraging to thrift; that it is the inauguration of the policy, as I have seen it described in some quarters, of doles and largesses which was fatal to Rome—the first step of an inclined plane of which no one can see the bottom. Our reply is that, if this is Socialism, it is Socialism of a kind for which both parties in this country have made themselves responsible and for which they are equally ready, I believe, to accept responsibility. It stands, in our view, in principle on precisely the same footing as the free education of children. As for the well-worn metaphor of the inclined plane, it has been enlisted in the past against every effort to achieve reform by experiment and by instalment, and I need not dwell upon that. Perhaps, indeed, the most singular of all 476 objections made by way of anticipation against our proposals is that they involve not only a plunge into Socialism but—and here I am on more delicate ground—a return to protection. Old-age pensions, I see, in some much-esteemed quarters are represented as the necessary or the inevitable forerunner of tariff reform. I do not know whether I am suspect in this matter or whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer is suspect. I can only repeat what I said last year—that I would not buy even such a boon as this for the veteran and worn-out workers of this country at the cost of free trade.
§ I must now pass to the concluding part of what I have to say. The charge upon the current year for this scheme of old-age pensions is not estimated to exceed £1,200,000. I am still left, therefore, as far as the current year is concerned, with a balance undisposed of amounting to about £3,700,000. We are making ample, and, indeed, unprecedented provision for the repayment of the Debt. Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer justified in all the circumstances in drawing from the taxpayers £3,500,000, of which the State has no immediate need? In our view, the answer to that question, in accordance with the sound traditions and almost unvarying practice of British finance, is in the negative.