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towards public expenditure would be changed, and long before the first financial year had run out our politicians would have discovered how to save much more than fifty millions a year.

That such a saving is well within the limits of practicability is sufficiently obvious from a comparison of our expenditure today, and our expenditure before the Lloyd Georgian era of "social reform "began. It is interesting to recall the fact that in the electoral contest of 1906 on the free trade issue, which brought the Liberals into power with an overwhelming majority, one of the planks in the Liberal programme was economy in public expenditure. In that financial year, 1905-6, our national expenditure was £140,512,000. The estimate for expenditure in the current year put forward by Mr. Churchill-who was himself one of the Liberal economists in the election of 1906-is £833,390,000.

Needless to say, these crude figures do not by themselves alone constitute a fair comparison. The dominating fact of the Great War affects all comparisons with pre-war figures. The annual cost of our national debt has risen from £28,000,000 to £370,000,000, including sinking fund in both cases. In addition, there is a totally new charge of £61,000,000 for war pensions. But, if we wipe out for the purpose of comparison the cost of the debt in both years and the present cost of war pensions, we are left with an expenditure on all other services of roughly £112,000,000 in 1905-6 as against an estimated figure of £402,000,000 in 1927-8. Of this tremendous increase in our national expenditure, apart from war charges, only a small portion arises out of the changes in the value of money. Even if we allow for a sixty per cent. increase on the 1905-6 figure to cover the rise in prices, we should still be left with an increased expenditure of over £220,000,000.

That is the figure on which the nation would quickly concentrate its attention if the income tax were made universal and the payment of the tax due up-to-date were made one of the conditions of voting. Electors, instead of ignoring problems of public finance, would ask why these two hundred and twenty millions of money were being spent in addition to the total which barely twenty years ago was being denounced as excessive. The war, instead of providing any justification for this increase, provides a condemnation. The very fact that the charges arising out of the war are to-day costing us over £400,000,000

a year, is the strongest possible reason for cutting down other charges. Beyond question, the present burden of taxation is seriously handicapping our industries and diminishing our power to compete in overseas markets. That means in many cases loss of employment for our workpeople; in other cases it means that they have to submit to a reduction of wages. On balance, wage earners would be far better off if, instead of receiving doles from the taxpayer's pocket, they were able to draw higher wages for themselves and to have a better chance of regular employment. But the large majority of voters will never realise this fact until they themselves become direct taxpayers.

Needless to say, these considerations apply at least as strongly to local taxation as to national taxation. Our present system of local taxation is indeed the worse of the two. It consists solely of taxes levied upon houses and business premises, and in a very large number of cases these taxes or rates are paid, not by the occupants of the premises, who alone can be registered as voters, but by the owners, who have no power whatever over the local authority which disposes of their money. It is, of course, true that what the landlord has to pay in rates he generally recovers from the tenant in the form of increased rent; but the tenant is rarely conscious of this fact. Indeed, in many poor districts, rates are popularly regarded as exclusively a landlord's responsibility, with which the tenant has no concern; yet it is the tenant and his wife who, as occupiers of the premises, have the right to vote at local elections; the owner of the premises, though he undertakes the responsibility for the payment of the rates, acquires thereby no title to a vote.

This constitutional anomaly has its origin in the mischievous system known as "compounding for rates." Many owners of small tenements, and also many owners of expensive flats, find that they can make a better bargain for themselves by charging the tenant a lump sum which will cover the cost of rates. This relieves the tenant of the worry of having to meet a half-yearly charge for rates and, to secure that benefit, many tenants in practice pay more to the landlord on account of rates than he pays to the local authority. Thus, broadly speaking, the system is superficially convenient to the tenant and superficially profitable to the landlord. But its political effect is to relieve the local authority from any serious electoral pressure on behalf of economy, with

the result that local expenditure grows without check, and rates rise, to the injury both of landlord and tenant. From the point of view of the permanent interest of both parties and of the whole nation, this system ought to be absolutely prohibited. In the case of weekly tenancies, undoubtedly it is often a convenience to have rates collected at the same time as rents; but where this is done the landlord (or his agent) should be rendered liable to heavy penalties if he fails to state clearly on the rent sheet how much of the weekly charge is due to his own demand as landlord for rent and how much is due to the demand of the local authority for rates. If this reform were carried into effect, the whole attitude of the local authorities in many districts to local extravagance would speedily change.

There would still, however, remain the fact that in some districts a very large proportion-indeed, sometimes even more than one-half-of the local revenue is provided by companies, who are in occupation of premises used for commercial or industrial purposes. At present these companies, merely because they are companies and not individuals, have no representation of any kind on the local authority. There is no serious difficulty in the way of getting rid of this injustice. All that is necessary is to authorise either the directors or the shareholders of the company to nominate a certain number of persons, whose names will be placed on the local register as representatives of the company. It is gratifying to note that the necessity for this reform of the local franchise is now becoming widely recognised, and that it has been formally endorsed by such bodies as the Association of Chambers of Commerce.

The lavish expenditure in districts where the socialists have captured the local authority is the direct result of a franchise which divorces power from responsibility. So serious has the financial situation become in some districts that the Ministry of Health has had to take over the duties of the local authority in order to suppress the extravagance. But this is clearly an unsatisfactory way of dealing with the problem. It represents an

abandonment of the principle of local self-government and the arbitrary extension of bureaucratic rule. The only sound solution of the problem is to reform the local franchise, as well as the parliamentary franchise, and in both cases to give power to those who pay, not to those who spend.

HAROLD COX

RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOKS

NAPOLEON. By EMIL LUDWIG.

Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. With 21 Illustrations. Allen & Unwin. 21s.net. All too seldom may the conscientious reviewer write "this is a great book"; but of Herr Ludwig's "Napoleon" it is true. In the "Envoy "the author sets out what have been his aims. He has made it his specific task to write the history of a great mind upon a strictly historical foundation. "In this book," he tells us, "all the data are recorded facts, except the soliloquies"; and it is clear too that the soliloquies are made dependent on careful observation of Napoleon's character, and are in no sense the imaginative efforts of "impressionist historians," or of writers of "those horrible mishmashes which pass by the name of historical novels.'" Here is an author whose aim is fact, but whose imaginative understanding of his subject illumines the facts, so that there emerges from his pages the character of the Emperor, complete "in the round," vivid but exact. The figures of some of his associates are less convincing; but it is probably because they are drawn as Napoleon himself saw them. For the English or Scottish reader, the author's treatment of the British part in the Napoleonic wars also may appear out of proportion. He treats Waterloo as a battle which Napoleon would have won, had he not been prematurely aged by illness, and which was actually won by the Prussians. As for the Peninsula, the British troops are mentioned only incidentally as helping the Spaniards to annoy the Emperor. If these be blemishes, they are minor ones, with no effect on the value of the whole remarkable story, where the reader follows the Man of Destiny through all the amazing vicissitudes of his career, with ever increasing interest. "Every difference of opinion with his brothers or his wife, every hour of gloom or elation, his outbursts of wrath and his accesses of pallor, tricks or acts of kindness towards friend or foe, every word to his generals or to women (as reported in letters or authentic conversations), seemed more important (writes Herr Ludwig) than the order of battle at Marengo, the items of the peace of Lunéville, or the details of the Continental System." If at the end Napoleon is still an enigma, it is because that is exactly what he was, and so will always remain. The translation is extraordinarily good; tense, nervous English, which evidently reproduces the spirit of the original. This is a book to buy, to keep, and to read again.

BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARIES: 1807-1916. By ALGERNON CECIL. Illustrated. Bell. 15s. net.

This book might be said," writes the author in his Preface, " to take its start as the Foreign Office emerges from the shadow cast by Pitt's greatness, and to take its leave as the Foreign Office disappears again into the whirlpool of Mr. Lloyd George's versatility." Mr. Algernon

Cecil has adopted an unusual but effective method of tracing the history of a century of British diplomacy through biographical studies of the British Foreign Ministers who guided it; Castlereagh, Canning, Aberdeen, Palmerston, Clarendon, Granville, Lord Rosebery, Salisbury ("with some mention of Lord Lansdowne ") and Lord Grey of Fallodon. He shows how the character of the man affected his policy, and in this respect his study of Sir Edward Grey (as he then was) is inevitably of great interest to us, although there will be controversy as to whether Mr. Cecil's portrait is a true likeness in all respects. It is obvious that any view of personalities and events of so recent a period will be coloured by political prejudice, and the author's touch is certainly less sure here than when he deals with earlier Foreign Secretaries, and pre-eminently with Castlereagh, of whom he gives us a picture, both vivid and convincing.

THE CAMBRIDGE BOOK OF LESSER POETS. Compiled by J. C. SQUIRE. Cambridge University Press. 8s. 6d. net. Designed to supplement such collections as "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and "The Golden Treasury," this anthology deals with the work of poets of second rank, and is designed to show "how luxuriant is the English undergrowth." The compiler pleads for indulgence in regard to borderline cases, where the difficulties of inclusion or exclusion are obvious, and where no anthologist can hope to satisfy all his readers; but there is little room for criticism of so admirable a collection as this. It includes many examples of that light verse which is a peculiar flower of the English genius, like the well-known "Jolly Good Ale and Old," of John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who is also represented by a spirited Armada poem, even less episcopal in tone. Most interesting, perhaps, are the anonymous poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which include such lovely things as " Phyllida's Love-Call " and " The Rural Dance about the Maypole."

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Scottish poets are well represented. Beginning with James the First of Scotland's verses from "The King's Quair," various aspects of Scottish poetry are shown, down to "Auld Robin Gray," "The Land o' the Leal," Allan Cunningham's " Hame, Hame, Hame," and 'Sea Song ("A wet sheet and a flowing sea "). There are the two "Braes of Yarrow," one by William Hamilton and the other by John Logan; also that exquisite lyric," I'll never love thee more," by James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, which is familiar to the readers of a distinguished Scots novelist of to-day. Of nineteenth century poets, whose work deserves to be better known, there are included poems by John Clare, Lord de Tabley (whose " Love Grown Old" is curiously "modern" in treatment), and Herman Melville. Amongst so many good things it is impossible to do more than suggest the variety of attractions, and it must not be supposed that the collection consists mainly of well-known poems, for the great majority are little known, and many of them surprisingly so, considering their quality.

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