, it may be urged are not
inevitable or indispensable. It is quite true that the taxation which
we seek to impose this year, and which is sufficient, and only
sufficient for the needs of this year, will yield more abundant
revenues in future years, and if at the same time a reduction in the
expenditure on armaments becomes possible, we shall have substantial
revenues at our disposal. That is perfectly true, but is that a reason
for condemning the Budget? When we see on every hand great nations
which cannot pay their way, which have to borrow merely to carry on
from year to year, when we see how sterile and unproductive all the
dodges and devices of their protective tariffs have become, when we
remember how often we have ourselves been told that under Free Trade
no more revenue could be got, is it not a welcome change for our
country, and for our Free Trade policy, to find our opponents
complaining of the expansive nature of a Free Trade revenue? I don't
wonder that Tory Protectionists have passed a resolution at Birmingham
declaring that the Budget will indefinitely postpone--that was the
phrase--the scheme of Tariff Reform.

And upon what objects and policies do we propose to spend the extra
revenue which this Budget will unquestionably yield in future years?
People talk vaguely of the stability of society, of the strength of
the Empire, of the permanence of a Christian civilisation. On what
foundation do they seek to build? There is only one foundation--a
healthy family life for all. If large classes of the population live
under conditions which make it difficult if not impossible for them to
keep a home together in decent comfort, if the children are habitually
underfed, if the housewife is habitually over-strained, if the
bread-winner is under-employed or under-paid, if all are unprotected
and uninsured against the common hazards of modern industrial life, if
sickness, accident, infirmity, or old age, or unchecked intemperance,
or any other curse or affliction, break up the home, as they break up
thousands of homes, and scatter the family, as they scatter thousands
of families in our land, it is not merely the waste of earning-power
or the dispersal of a few poor sticks of furniture, it is the stamina,
the virtue, safety, and honour of the British race that are being
squandered.

Now the object of every single constructive proposal to which the
revenues raised by this Budget will be devoted, not less than the
obj