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 L100,000 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 L5,000 per year, and hire curates to look after the sheep, at
L50. 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."
[12] A writer in a recent number of the _London Times_, says: "There are
various classes of pensions, but they all agree in this,--namely, that
they are for the most part undeserved, and that the recipients do
nothing for their money. There are pensions given under the pretense of
supporting the peerage, in consideration of parties' circumstances, and
to compensate for abolished sinecures. Others there are that may be
called 'mysterious pensions,' that no man knoweth the origin of. Of the
first sort, Lord Bexley's pension of 3,000_l._ is an example. This man
was found unfit for the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer some years
ago, and therefore was hoisted into the house of incurables. Lord Allen
receives a good fat pension in consideration of his pecuniary condition.
The Honorable Jane Carr receives 1000_l._, nobody knows for what. But
the pensions for abolished sinecures are the most flagrant. Thus Lord
Ellenborough receives 7700_l._ a year as compensation for the abolished
nominal office of chief clerk in the Queen's Bench!--nearly as much as
the Lord Chief Justice's salary!! There are even worse than this,
however. J. C. Beresford receives between 4000_l._ and 5000_l._ as
compensation for the abolished sinecure of storekeeper of the Customs,
Dublin! The Reverend J. Burrard receives as compensation for the
abolished sinecure of searcher of the Customs, Dublin, 1100_l._ a year!"
[13] The writer in the _Times_ gives this "royal" list:--
Per ann.
The Queen eats and drinks L63,000
Ditto pocket money 60,000
Prince Albert 38,000
Queen Dowager 100,000
Natural children of William IV., about 3,000
King of Hanover 21,000
Leopold, King of the Belgians 50,000
Prince of Mecklenburgh Strelitz 2,000
His wife, the Duke of Cambridge's daughter, Augusta Caroline 3,000
The Royal Dukes and Duchesses, about 100,000
The following are a few miscellaneous items:
The repairs to the Pimlico Palace, _estimated_ at 150,000
The Royal Yacht 20,000
Windsor Castle has cost within the present century 3,000,000
The repairs to St. James' Palace were about 30,000
Buckingham Palace, before the present repairs 34,000
The Kitchen Garden at Frogmore 23,000
George IVth's natural children have cost the country 100,000
At the accession of William and Mary, in 1689, the national debt of
Great Britain was L664,000. At the close of the French war, in 1763,
L138,000,000. At the close of the American war, in 1783, L250,000,000.
At the commencement of the Continental wars, in 1793, L240,000,000. At
their close, in 1815, L840,000,000. Thus, it cost England L600,000,000
to put down Napoleon and restore the Bourbons. Some L40,000,000 having
been paid off during the last thirty years, it now stands at
L800,000,000. 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 L30, 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 L25,000,000 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 L3. 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]
[14] I have often been obliged, in this chapter, to get my statistics by
striking _the average_ of a mass of contradictory authorities.
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
L800,000,000, 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]
[15] The author of the "Comic Blackstone," first published in "Punch,"
says:--"The only method of getting rid of the debt would be for the
sovereign to file a petition at the Insolvent Court in the name of the
nation, and solemnly take the benefit of the act, in the presence of the
fund-holders." About eighteen months since, Professor Newman, of the
London University, published an able pamphlet, proposing that the
interest on the debt should be paid for sixty years longer, after which
it should cease. There is a growing disposition in England to get rid of
the debt by some other mode than payment.
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]
[16] Intimately associated with the subject of this chapter, is the
recent unsuccessful, but by no means abandoned movement of Mr. Cobden,
to reduce the government expenditures L10,000,000 per annum. His speech
on that occasion was worthy of the anti-corn-law leader. Those who know
him will need no assurance, that he will not give over till he has
carried a far more radical measure of retrenchment. He bides his time.