ODESSA.
He had collected £54,025,000 of revenue, or £1,035,000 in excess of what he had counted on. He had spent £51,171,000, which, in spite of military operations, was less by £1,012,000 than he had estimated. His balance in hand from the past year was £2,854,000. For the coming year his estimates must necessarily be increased by additional military outlay,[168] which would bring up his estimated expenditure to £56,189,000. As the revenue he could depend upon from existing taxes was only £53,349,000, he had therefore a deficit of £2,840,000. Had there been no need to increase his estimates,[169] he might have had a surplus of £1,166,000 for the remission of taxation. As things stood, how was the deficit to be met? Not by a loan, answered Mr. Gladstone, because no nation had mortgaged its industry to such a frightful extent as England, whose National Debt of £750,000,000 exceeded that of all countries in the world put together. Without pledging themselves to pay all future war charges out of the revenue of each year, Mr. Gladstone said it was as yet possible for the House of Commons “to put a stout heart upon the matter, and to determine that so long as these burdens are bearable, and so long as the supplies necessary for the service of the year can be raised within the year, so long we will not resort to the system of loans.” The expenses of a war, he observed, “are the moral check which it has pleased the Almighty to impose upon the ambition and the lust of conquest that are inherent in nations.” He therefore proposed to increase the Income Tax by one-half, but to collect the whole of the increase in the first six months of 1854; in other words, he doubled the tax in the first half year. He was assailed on two grounds. The Tories protested against the doctrine of meeting war expenditure out of current revenue, and they taunted him with the failure of his scheme for the conversion of the debt,[170] which, they pretended, had been disastrous. “The next Party conflict,” wrote Prince Albert in a letter to Stockmar on the 18th of April, “will be upon finance. Gladstone wants to pay for the war out of the current revenue, so long as he does not require more than ten millions sterling above the ordinary expenditure, and to increase the taxes for the purpose. The Opposition are for borrowing—that is, increasing the debt—and do not wish to impose in the meantime any further burdens on themselves. The former course is manly, statesmanlike, and honest; the latter is convenient, cowardly, perhaps popular. We shall see.”[171] This is a masterly summary of the great financial controversy that raged throughout the Session of 1854. It leaves nothing more to be said save this, that when Mr. Gladstone explained his second or War Budget (8th of May), after war had been declared, his eloquence carried the country in favour of his policy. He obtained his war expenditure by doubling the Income Tax and increasing the duty on spirits and malt, and he pointed to the rapidly-growing trade of the nation as a proof that it ought not to adopt the course which Pitt found ruinous,[172] and which Prince Albert so justly described as “convenient and cowardly.”
Perhaps the first Budget in February had slightly sobered the country—at all events, the 26th of April was set apart for a day of Fast, Humiliation, and Prayer. Over this a slight controversy had broken out. The Queen was a little offended that Lord Aberdeen had announced, without consulting her, in the House of Lords, on the 31st of March, that such a Fast would be proclaimed. She thought Fasts of Humiliation were resorted to too often, and that it was hypocritical to publicly confess in the stereotyped form that “the great sinfulness of the nation had brought about this war.” Therefore she desired that the Fast should be called a Day of Prayer and Supplication, and urged Lord Aberdeen “to inculcate the Queen’s wishes into the Archbishop’s mind, that there be no Jewish imprecations against our enemies.” Her desire was to adapt the prayer in the Church Service, “To be used before a Fight at Sea,” to the occasion.[173] According to Mr. Greville, bankers in the City pointed out that if the word “Fast” were omitted, Bills would be payable on that day and not on the day before, as Masterman’s Act provides in such cases. The Queen was, therefore, persuaded by Lord Aberdeen to proclaim “a Day of Solemn Fast, Humiliation, and Prayer, to be kept on the 26th.” It was observed solemnly in the United Kingdom, India, and the Colonies, by British subjects of all races and creeds.
When it was found that the object for which the war was undertaken—the evacuation of the Principalities—had been effected by the retreat of the Russians across the Pruth on the 28th of July, there was some fear lest the taxpayers, who were painfully digesting Mr. Gladstone’s War Budget, might consider enough had been done to bring Russia to reason. Russia, it has been shown, was now in such a position that her surrender, under the passive pressure of the Powers, was inevitable, so as a matter-of-fact enough had been done. But the growth of this feeling had to be stopped, for the War Party insisted that Russia must be rendered incapable of again disturbing Europe. It was a curious revival of a policy, the practicability of which Napoleon I. had ruined himself to illustrate. Yet on the 19th of June Lord Lyndhurst invited the House of Lords to preside at its resurrection. The long, virulent, and passionate harangue by which he endeavoured to excite the hatred of England against Russia, his indictment of her as an enemy of the human race, his appeals for her destruction in the sacred interests of liberty and civilisation, drew forth cheer after cheer even from that frigid Assembly of patricians. It produced a prodigious effect on the country, and forthwith Englishmen worked themselves up into a belief that unless a mortal blow were dealt at Russia, Europe would be overrun by Cossacks, and every honest man in England would be buried alive in Siberia. Lord Aberdeen ventured to protest against Lyndhurst’s extravagant and scurrilous abuse of the Czar, and to remind the Peers that in 1829, when Turkey was at his mercy, he had not seized Turkish territory, but had been content with the Treaty of Adrianople. For this Aberdeen was denounced as a tool of Russia, who desired to patch up a hasty and dishonourable peace.
HEIGHTS OF THE ALMA.
