CHAPTER XXVI.
National Debt of Great Britain—Lavish Expenditures of the Government—Its Enormous Taxes—Will the Debt be Repudiated?—Will it Occasion a Revolution?—Plan of Mr. Ricardo to pay the Debt—Mr. Hume's Efforts at Retrenchment.
Great Britain is the richest and poorest nation of modern times. Her sea-sweeping commerce, her varied and vast manufactures, her fertile agriculture, the millions which flow into her coffers from her colonial possessions, are sufficient, were she free from debt, and her Government economically administered, to make her every son and daughter prosperous. But her huge national debt, and her immense annual expenditures, crush her laboring masses between the upper and nether millstones of remorseless taxation and hopeless poverty. Her debt sits upon the body politic like the nightmare of Erebus, almost stopping the circulation of the vital fluids. Like other high-born bankrupts, she is proud, as well as poor. She maintains the most lavish and expensive Government in the world. Though the interest of her public debt eats out the substance of her people, and the army, the navy, and the church, cling like leeches to her monetary arteries, she annually throws away immense sums in the shape of pensions and sinecures to worn-out heroes and civilians, to generals, admirals, ex-chancellors, judges, and diplomatists, to decayed nobles and knights, and every kind of titled nondescript noodle and nonentity.[12] She lavishes munificent gifts on dilapidated hospitals, schools, and charitable institutions, whose sole recipients of the bounty are the dryer branches of noble families, with long titles and short purses, whose control over the empty establishments is a sheer sinecure. She heaps bounties on numerous squads of imbeciles, whose blood is of that pale, watery kind supposed to indicate royalty, spending, in a recent year, more than £100,000 upon the nurseries, stables, and kennels of her Majesty's babies, horses, and puppies.[13] She pays large annual tribute to her universities, that the sons of her nobility and gentry may riot on good living and bad Latin. She quarters at death's door a myriad army of starving paupers, that her landlords may maintain monopolies in the soil, the grain, and the game of the kingdom. Fond of fight and feathers, she hires the sons of her poor at thirteen shillings a month, to sail and march round the world, and bully and kill all who oppose their progress, while she keeps their fathers at home to work out the expenses at a shilling a day. She lays open the whole kingdom as foraging grounds for a ravenous Church Establishment, whose wardens tithe not only mint, anise, and cummin, but all "weightier matters;" and whose "wolves," clad in broadcloth, hunt foxes at £5,000 per year, and hire curates to look after the sheep, at £50. In a word, the pockets and patience of the larger share of British subjects are so heavily taxed by these imposts and impositions, that loyalty itself cries out in tones of vexation and agony, "Though kings can do no wrong, they have a very expensive way of doing right."
At the accession of William and Mary, in 1689, the national debt of Great Britain was £664,000. At the close of the French war, in 1763, £138,000,000. At the close of the American war, in 1783, £250,000,000. At the commencement of the Continental wars, in 1793, £240,000,000. At their close, in 1815, £840,000,000. Thus, it cost England £600,000,000 to put down Napoleon and restore the Bourbons. Some £40,000,000 having been paid off during the last thirty years, it now stands at £800,000,000. The population of the United Kingdom is 26 or 27,000,000. Consequently, the average debt of each man, woman, and child, is upwards of £30, or $150. The adult male population, with such females as are independent property-holders, does not probably exceed 7,000,000. To discharge the debt, it would be necessary that these persons should pay, on an average, nearly $600. This debt may be repudiated; but can it ever be paid?
Looking only to the records, the debt is owing to some 300,000 persons. It would seem, then, that 27,000,000 of people are enormously taxed to pay the interest on this vast debt to this small number of creditors. The British Government is always laying anchors to windward. Forty years ago, when this debt was rapidly accumulating, it saw that if a revolution should occur, and the issue be made up between the tax-payers and the tax-receivers, the former could easily trample down a class with whom they had no sympathy, and repudiate the debt. Accordingly, it has been the policy of the Government during these forty years to induce the middling and poorer classes to invest money in the public funds, through the medium of savings banks, charitable institutions, and friendly societies. Not long since, there was found to be standing in the names of the commissioners of those associations some £25,000,000 of the public debt, belonging to about 800,000 individual depositors and 16,000 associations—the latter representing probably 1,000,000 of people. Thus the debt is actually owing to 2,000,000 of people, three-fourths of whom are of the middling and lower orders of society—the very class that would be likely, if any, to foment a revolution of the Government. So long as this state of things exists, it is safe to presume that the public debt of Great Britain will never be repudiated, even by revolution.
The taxes upon the people of that kingdom equal those of any other nation on earth. The annual average of direct tax paid to the Government by each man, woman, and child, exceeds £3. It is paid by less than one-fifth of the population, making about $100, on an average, for each tax-payer, rich and poor. Nearly the whole, ultimately, comes directly and indirectly from the poorer classes, not in money solely, but in hard work, high rents, mean fare, and low wages. These taxes are levied on land, meats, drinks, glass, malt, soap, spirits, windows, servants, horses, carriages, dogs, newspapers, stamps, &c., to the last syllable of the record of human wants and uses.
Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review, gives a graphic sketch of this all-pervading system of taxation. He says it involves "taxes upon every article which enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot. Taxes upon everything which is pleasant to see, hear, feel, smell or taste. Taxes upon warmth, light, and locomotion. Taxes on everything on earth, and the waters under the earth; on everything which comes from abroad or is grown at home. Taxes on the raw material; taxes on every fresh value that is added to it by the industry of man. Taxes on the sauce which pampers a man's appetite, and the drug that restores him to health; on the ermine which decorates the judge, and the rope which hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride. At bed or board, couchant or levant, we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road. The dying Englishman pours his medicine which has paid 7 per cent., into a spoon which has paid 15 per cent.; flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid 22 per cent.; makes his will on an eight pound stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is, then, immediately taxed from 2 to 10 per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he is then gathered to his fathers, to be taxed no more."
The annual Government expenditures of Great Britain are nearly $400,000,000. The heaviest appropriation goes to pay the interest on the public debt, which requires $150,000,000. The army and navy absorb $75,000,000. There are 2,000 pensioners, who receive annually $5,000,000 or $8,000,000. The Queen and royal family get some $5,500,000 to supply the royal tables and stables, the royal babies and lap-dogs. Full $2,000,000 go to sinecures, such as the lord groom of the stole, the lord keeper of her Majesty's buck-hounds, the lady sweeper of the Mall, the lords wine-tasters, store-keepers, and packers, not omitting the chief justices in Eyre, who have done nothing for a century, and the Duke of Wellington, who seems likely to live forever. To these governmental expenditures must be added the income of the Established Church, whose Archbishop of Canterbury, pocketing, until recently, his $100,000 per year, mourns over the modern degeneracy which gives her clergy only 42,000,000 dollars annually.[14]
With these facts before us, we may form some estimate of the condition and prospects of the poor of a country where labor is abundant at twenty cents per day. Out on the inhuman policy which would prevent these hungry millions from emigrating to our broad American acres, which stretch westward almost to sundown, and on that remorseless policy which would exclude them from these acres, by blasting the soil with the sirocco of chattel slavery!
Should the number of public creditors in England become limited to two or three hundred thousand, its enormous debt, its immense annual expenditures, and its consequent excessive taxation, might become the occasion of a revolution of its Government. Three of the most important political revolutions of modern times are, that of England in 1644, that of America in 1775, and that of France in 1789. Each happened when an attempt was made to levy taxes upon the people, to relieve the burdens upon the national treasury. That subject is so mixed up with the first demonstrations of revolt, that, from being the mere occasion of the outbreak, it has been often, if not generally, regarded as its cause. But, to assign the resistance to the levying of poundage and ship-money by Charles I, without authority of Parliament—to assign the refusal to pay a tax on tea and paper by the American Colonies, because imposed by a legislature in which they were not represented—to assign the extraordinary assembling of the States General, by Louis XVI, to supply a treasury exhausted by the foreign wars and domestic profligacies of previous monarchs—to assign these as the causes of the mighty convulsions which immediately followed, is assigning as causes those events which proved that the revolutions had already begun. It is referring the terrible explosion solely to the spark which ignited the train which a century had been accumulating—is mistaking the cataracts over which the popular currents fell, for the remote fountains from which they rose. The people were discontented with their Governments—they refused to contribute to their support—coercion drove them to revolt. A people ripe for revolution are apt at making up an issue with their oppressors, and seizing an occasion to smite off their chains, and are quite as likely to avail themselves of an odious tax, which reaches all classes, as of greater outrages, which press only upon single individuals or a limited portion of the community. If England is convulsed with a revolution, it is quite as probable to be occasioned by excessive taxation as any other event.
Anxious to avert dangers, as well as to relieve burdens, the great problem which British financiers have set themselves to solve, since the peace of 1815, has been to devise some means of paying off the public debt and reducing taxation. The boldest proposition to this end was brought forward by Mr. Ricardo, a gentleman of the liberal school of politics, an Edinburgh reviewer, celebrated for his controversy with Mr. Malthus, the writer on the laws of population and national wealth. For the ten years subsequent to the peace of 1815, the financial embarrassments of England more than once drove her to the borders of national bankruptcy. Mr. Ricardo, then being a member of the Commons, proposed, as the best mode of extricating the kingdom from those embarrassments, to tax its capital and property to the amount of, say £800,000,000, and pay the public debt off at once! He defended this scheme on the two-fold ground of justice and economy, contending that what a debtor owes ought always to be deducted from his property, and regarded as belonging to his creditors, and therefore should be given to them—that all estimates of the wealth of the debtor, till such deduction and payment are made, are false and delusive—that the then present generation had contracted nearly the whole of the debt, and therefore ought not to entail its payment upon posterity—and that, by immediately discharging the debt, the expense of managing it, and raising the revenue to pay the interest upon it, would be a large saving to the nation. These propositions he maintained with that vigor of reasoning, fullness of detail, and clearness of illustration, for which he was remarkable, and which won him a high place among the politico-economical philosophers of his time. But his scheme fell of its own weight, having few supporters except himself. It was in advance of an age which never thought of paying, but only of borrowing. Though its author did not convince the Commons of its practicability or expediency, he pretty thoroughly alarmed the capitalists and property-holders of the kingdom.
After many years of labor on the part of Mr. Vansittart, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Peel, Mr. Huskisson, and others, to cipher the public debt into non-existence, the hope of ever seeing it paid off seems to have given place to despair, to be followed by apathy. No sane Englishman now looks to see it discharged till huge monopolies which oppress the industry of the country are abolished, the system of Government entirely remodeled, and its expenses cut down to the lowest point of republican simplicity and economy. To talk of paying a debt of $4,000,000,000, whose annual interest is $150,000,000, whilst $117,000,000 is annually wasted on three blotches of the body politic, the Army, the Navy, and the Church, and 40,000 men own all the land of the kingdom, and every sixth man is a pauper or a beggar, is simply an absurdity.[15]
Taking this view of the subject, the radical reformers of England have struck at the root of the evil—a remodeling of the institutions of the State; and, in the departments of finance and taxation, have confined their efforts chiefly to the work of retrenching the Government expenditures. Foremost among these, and especially in the latter field, has stood the robust Joseph Hume. According to the forms of the British Constitution, the annual appropriations for the supply of the bottomless gulf of expenditure must take their rise in the House of Commons. And there, before they commence their line of march to that bourne whence no shilling returns, they have to encounter the severe scrutiny and determined opposition of clear-headed, honest-hearted, open-mouthed Joseph Hume. He contests all money-bills item by item, fastening upon them like a mastiff upon a gorged bullock.
I was listening, a few years ago, to a debate in the House of Commons on the civil list. Lord Stanley (then a member) had just closed an impetuous speech, when a broad-shouldered, rather rough-looking man, rose, and deliberately taking off his hat, which seemed to be filled with papers, commenced marshaling lazy sentences, under the command of bad rhetoric, to the music of a harsh voice. A pile of parliamentary documents lay on the seat by his side, and he held a bit of paper in his hand, covered with figures. My friend informed me it was Mr. Hume. He realized the portrait my mind's eye had drawn of the man who, by dint of tireless ciphering, had convinced the masses of England that they were the mere working animals of the privileged orders. His brief, plain speech was aimed at some measure supported by Stanley, by which the people were to be cheated out of a few thousand pounds, to pamper some titled feeder at the public crib. Stanley was racy and flowery. Hume's speech resembled his lordship's as little as Euclid's problems do Milton's Paradise Lost. He explained the figures on his paper, and drove the digits into Stanley by a few well-directed blows at "treasury leeches," and sat down. Mr. Hume is a walking bundle of political statistics. No other man will so patiently pursue a falsehood or a false estimate or account, through a wide waste of Parliamentary documents, till he drives it into the sunlight of open exposure, as he. But as to eloquence, he knows no more about it than a table of logarithms. He rarely makes a speech that does not contain a good deal of bad rhetoric, and an equal amount of arithmetical calculations. Entering Parliament thirty years ago, he immediately placed himself at the door of the national treasury, which he has ever since watched with the dogged vigilance of a Cerberus. He has been the evil genius of Chancellors of the Exchequer, worrying them more than the national debt or the public creditors; whilst sinecurists, pensioners, and fat bishops, have received an annual Parliamentary roasting at his hands. Delving among the corruptions of Church and State, he has laid bare the slimy creatures that fatten on the roots of those institutions, and suck out their healthful nourishment. Bringing every proposed expenditure of money to the test of utility and the multiplication table, he has opened his budget of statistics, night after night, and measured off columns of damning figures by the yard and the hour, contesting the sum totals and the details of the appropriation bills, backed sometimes by the whole force of the liberal party, often sustained by only a few radical followers, and not infrequently left wholly alone. Of course, he is occasionally felt to be a bore. But nothing deters him from pursuing the line he has marked out. Sarcasm is lost upon him. Wit he despises. Threats have no terrors for him. Abuse only rebounds in the face of his assailant. The House may try to scrape or cough him down—Lord John Russell's reproaches may salute his ears—Sibthorpe's clumsy abuse may fall on his head—Stanley's fiery shafts may quiver in his flesh—Peel may shower contempt upon him—but there stands clear-headed, honest-hearted, unawed Joseph Hume, entrenched behind a pile of Parliamentary papers, gathering up the fragments of his last night's speech, and displaying fresh columns of figures, for a renewed attack on some civil or ecclesiastical abuse, which has been hidden from everybody's sight but his, by the accumulated dust of a century. Under any other Government than one scandalously extravagant, and whose people are taxed to the last point of human endurance, such obstinacy as he has sometimes displayed, in obstructing the passage of financial measures, would be wholly inexcusable. But every expedient which the wit or pertinacity of man can devise, to defeat or diminish such plundering of the masses as he witnesses every session of Parliament, is not only tolerable, but a sacred duty. The objects of his guardian vigilance gratefully appreciate his services, knowing that no other man has done so much to expose monetary abuses, and pull gorged leeches from the national treasury, and turn them out to get their living from their native earth.
Let it not be supposed that Mr. Hume has devoted himself exclusively to exchequer budgets and appropriation bills. He has taken a leading share in all liberal measures, advocating Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary reform, West India abolition, and has long been an able champion of Free Trade. Nor do I mean it to be inferred from the "free and easy" style in which I have spoken of him, that he is not highly respectable, both as to talents and character. He is one of the best "working-members" of Parliament, and by constant practice and perseverance he has obtained a position amongst its able debaters. He was chosen Chairman of the Reform League, which was organized by Cobden and others, in the present House of Commons, to obtain equal representation and an enlarged suffrage, and he is the nominal if not the real leader of the present movement for Parliamentary reform.[16]