order for retrenchment given at Westminster affects the wages of the sessional police, which have been reduced because the House only sits three days a week!

Death has been busy among Parliamentarians in the last few weeks. Four have fallen on the field of honour. Two were Liberals-Mr. Harold Cawley and the Hon. Thomas AgarRobartes. The former was a young politician of the serious type who spoke rarely, and as though speaking were rather a toilsome effort. Mr. Agar-Robartes always looked as though he had strayed into Radical company by mistake. Young "bloods" are scarce on the Speaker's right hand, and he seemed somewhat out of his congenial element among the miscellaneous collection of Members with crotchets who sit below the gangway on the Radical side. However, he too had his crotchet, and it was not a little amusing to hear the vehement doctrines of an oldfashioned, middle-Victorian Protestantism issuing from the lips of a Radical dandy. It was this same Protestantism which explained his differences from his party on the subject of Home Rule. The House will retain a very kindly memory of him and also of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart, to whom fell the distinction of wresting from the Welsh Radicals at the last election the representation of Cardiff. He, too, was content with a very modest and unassuming place in debate. The Hon. Charles Mills was the last of the four to fall. He entered the House as its youngest Member, and was well known for his bright, boyish countenance. But not for that only. He came of a well-known banking family, and his maiden speech showed that he had an inherited aptitude for finance. Finance was always his theme on the rare occasions when he spoke, but he spoke well, and would have spoken better and gone further had Fate been kinder. Mr. Keir Hardie has also gone. Of him it is difficult to speak with candour and observe at the same time the old maxim of speaking only good of the dead. But the extravagant and provocative eulogies passed upon him by some of his friends compel a few words of comment. He has been called "the Jaurès of the British Socialist Party "; as to that, it is enough to ask whether Jaurès's friends can imagine him siding with the enemies of France? But the limit was reached when it was claimed for Mr. Keir Hardie that he died of a broken heart and fell for his country "just as though he had been shot in the trenches."

Mr. Keir Hardie's strong qualities were plain to the world. They commanded and they received respect. But who can remember, in all his speeches in the House of Commons, a single kindly or charitable word to a political opponent? He hated

injustice, but that did not prevent him from being grossly unjust to others. He fought hard for the causes which were dear to him, but the weapons he chose were such as soiled his own hands. Who can forget the shameless libels on the King to which he set his name eighteen months ago, and the despicable attacks on Sir Edward Grey which he poured forth week by week after the outbreak of the war? It is not only the good which Mr. Keir Hardie achieved during his stormy career which lives after him. The evil is of still stronger growth. No one did more than he to promote the class war. No one did more to poison the mind of Labour against Capital. No one strove more laboriously and insidiously to destroy in the breast of the workers the grand old ideas of duty to King and country which are implicit in the word patriotism. Mr. Keir Hardie loathed the old-fashioned patriotism. The flag was an abomination to him. He was an emancipated patriot, a cosmopolitan patriot, a patriot who dealt his country treacherous blows in her hour of peril instead of bringing to her succour all his manifold gifts and energies. Controversy with the dead is unseemly, but when a patriot of this spurious growth is held up as a prophet, it is time to utter a protest against the brazen impudence of his friends.

AUDITOR TANTUM.

'It is without precedent, I believe, in the history of the world that in a great war a nation has come forward and literally asked to be taxed. There is no better omen for our final success. Our willingness to bear burdens is a sign of our capacity to stay."-Chancellor of the Exchequer, House of Commons, September 23rd, 1915.

THE Budget proposals constitute a series of revelations which are inspiriting and consoling. They reveal at once the penalty and reward of our victorious sea power, and are a demonstration in the eyes of the world of the immense wealth and the spirit of self-sacrifice of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, and, in particular, of those of England who pay more than four-fifths of the taxation.2 The national income in 1886-7-when Lord Randolph Churchill resigned as a protest against extravagancewas £91,000,000; in 1896-7-prior to the South African Warit stood at £112,000,000; in 1906-7 it reached the sum of £155,000,000; in the ensuing financial year, 1916-17, on the new basis of taxation, it will be £387,000,000-an increase of 325, 245, and 150 per cent. in thirty, twenty, and ten years respectively.

Had it not been for the overwhelming success of the British Fleet, we should not have to submit to the onerous scale of taxation which has been proposed. If the command of the sea had been seriously disputed by the Germans, we should have been in no position to render military assistance to our Allies on the Continent, or to give them the support of our credit and industries. That would have been a policy of economy, if shortsighted economy. On the presumption that national expenditure had remained stationary, we should, on the basis of this year's expenditure, have been in pocket to the extent of £1,390,000,000 in 1915-16, and there would have been a larger saving next year. (1) Owing to the produce of the War Profits tax this total will probably be very largely exceeded.

(2) White Paper, 309 (1915). After paying for local services in England and Scotland in 1914-15 there remained to meet Imperial expenditure £114,648,000 as England's contribution, and £14,564,000 as Scotland's, while Irish taxation fell short of purely local expenditure by £266,500.

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That calculation exhibits the penalty which the overwhelming success of the British Fleet has brought upon us.

It was never the intention of any Government, irrespective of party, to bear this or any such additional burden. It was the traditional policy of the British people to maintain a predominant Fleet, a small regular Army for Imperial purposes, and a volunteer force for home defence. So long as peace was preserved, our high rate of naval insurance kept down to a low level the rate of our military insurance. Over and over again, the nation was assured on the highest official authority that, so long as it maintained the British Fleet in sufficiency and efficiency, it required no such military establishment as that of Germany or Austria on the one hand, or Russia and France on the other. The Navy, in other words, was our protection against the heavy burdens of taxation and service associated with the military systems adopted on the Continent. War dramatically changed the conditions. The very success of the Fleet has involved us not only in as high war charges as those borne by either of our Allies, France or Russia, but in charges very much higher than any country— friend or foe--is bearing. The Navy, which in peace conferred on us all the blessings of insularity, on the outbreak of war bridged not only the English Channel but every sea, and we became, in virtue of our position as the predominant Naval Power, one of the greatest military Powers, engaged in land operations on every continent. That is the astounding paradox of the war. The very completeness of our success at sea has placed upon our shoulders military and financial burdens far greater than this or any other country has ever had to bear in the past.

The change in our condition is reflected in the new Budget proposals. Whereas under peace conditions we devoted approximately one-fourth of our national expenditure to the Navy, under war conditions the proportion has sunk to about one-eighth in the present year, and in future years it will be even smaller. In other words, the cost of the Navy in relation to the expenditure on other services is decreasing, while our other war expenses, owing to the success of the Fleet, are steadily increasing.

It is calculated that during the present financial year we shall spend £1,590,000,000 in the prosecution of the war. It is a colossal sum, so colossal, indeed, that it is impossible to form any conception of the real significance of the figures. Rather over one-eighth of this aggregate represents our normal peace expenditure-£200,000,000-leaving a matter of £1,390,000,000 as the gross sum which is being devoted to the war. The most notable revelation which an examination of this aggregate supplies is the comparatively small sum due to the war charge of

the Navy. Over and above the amount devoted to naval defence in peace, we are in the current year spending upon the force which is to-day literally our "all in all" a matter of £136,000,000. That is the estimate for the whole of the financial year 1915-16; it is equivalent to a tax of 2d. per head per day levied on the whole of the population of the United Kingdom. From this relatively small expenditure flow all the heavy responsibilities which found mention in the new Budget statement; our naval power is leading us into a war expenditure on the Army of £685,000,000 -five times as much as we are spending on the Fleet-and into the making of loans to the Dominions and Allies of £423,000,000— three times as much as the cost of the Navy.

These high charges for the exercise of our military and financial power in the prosecution of the common cause of the Allies represent the penalty of sea power, but they are also its reward. The new Budget, in fact, must convey to all who study its remarkable features confirmatory evidence of the wisdom and foresight exhibited by the British people over a long series of years. With limited funds available for the purposes of defence, they consistently exhibited the highest strategy in the allocation of their available resources. On the eve of the war, the two fighting Services absorbed approximately 40 per cent. of the national income, no mean proportion. The extent of the burden, as many speakers and writers reminded us, was due, in some measure, to adherence to the voluntary principle, which is synonymous with long service and victory afloat, and is the only principle upon which a maritime Power can raise a long-service Regular Army for the defence of a vast oversea Empire. Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to the manner of raising the home defence force, there is not to-day and there never has been, any question as to the Regular Army. The basic principle was well expressed many years ago by the Duke of Wellington, when he declared that "the British Regular Army cannot be raised by conscription or ballot," adding that either of these alternatives might be permissible for home defence, but not for service overseas, whether for defending a settlement or foreign territory or for the purposes of conquest. "Men cannot, with justice, be taken," he remarked, "from their families and from their ordinary occupations and pursuits for such objects; the recruits of the Regular British Army must be volunteers."

Before this war occurred we could not even flirt with conscription for the Regular Army. But now war is in progress and our whole Army has become a Home Defence Army; we have been reminded by a thousand incidents of the character of the we know that the men who are fighting on the

war;