illustration, one industry
alone,--agriculture,--of all industries the most important for the
permanent well-being of any land. Examine the budgets of foreign
lands,--we have the advantage in other directions,--but examine and
compare them with our own, and Honorable Members will be rather
ashamed at the contrasts between the wise and lavish generosity of
countries much poorer than ours and the short-sighted and niggardly
parsimony with which we dole out small sums of money for the
encouragement of agriculture in our country....

"We are not getting out of the land anything like what it is
capable of endowing us with. Of the enormous quantity of
agricultural and dairy produce, and fruit, and the timber imported
into this country, a considerable portion could be raised on our
own lands."[21]

The proposed industrial advance is to be secured largely at the expense
of capital, but for its ultimate profit. The capitalists are to pay the
initial cost. Mr. Lloyd George is very careful to remind them that even
if the present income tax were doubled, five years of the phenomenal yet
steady growth of the income of the rich and well-to-do who pay this tax,
would leave them as well off as they were before. He proposes to leave
the total capital in private hands intact on the pretext that it is
needed as "an available reserve for national emergencies." And as an
evidence of this he refused to increase the existing rate of inheritance
tax levied against the very largest estates (15 per cent on estates of
more than L3,000,000). Though up to this point he graduated this tax
more steeply than before, and nothing could be more widely popular than
a special attack on such colossal estates, Mr. Lloyd George draws the
line at 15 per cent, on the ground that a large part of the income from
such estates goes into investments, and more confiscatory legislation
might seriously affect the normal increase of the capital and "the
available reserves of taxation" of the country.[22]

Mr. Lloyd George does not fail to guarantee to capital as a whole,
"honest capital," that it will suffer no loss from his reforms. "I am
not one of those who advocate confiscation," he said several years ago,
"and at any rate as far as I am concerned _honest_ capital, capital put
in honest industries for the development of the industry, the trade,
the commerce, of this country will have nothing to fea