Chapter XII · THE OPENING OF THE BUDGET

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“Young man, what are your dreams?” If the question were put to a newly-elected Member of Parliament, young and ambitious, as he stood at the Bar of the House of Commons between his sponsors awaiting the invitation of the Speaker to come to the Table to be sworn, he would probably admit—if he could be induced to answer, and if he answered truly—that, while his first design was naturally on the Premiership, should he fail to get that shining post, he would not object to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The office carries a salary of £5,000, and a house in historic Downing Street, No. 11. There is also a gorgeous robe of black silk, heavily embroidered in gold lace. It is never worn in the House of Commons, and outside it is worn only when the Chancellor of the Exchequer sits for his portrait to photographer or painter, or presides over the Court appointed for the annual nomination of Sheriffs for England and Wales. This robe used to pass down from Chancellor of the Exchequer to Chancellor of the Exchequer for a consideration, like the furniture of the official residence in Downing Street. When Gladstone followed Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1853, these supreme political protagonists haggled through the post with some heat over the price that was to be paid for the succession to these effects.

There is a passing reference to the matter in Morley’s Gladstone (1903); but the correspondence is given fully in Buckle’s Disraeli (1914). Gladstone, in his first letter to Disraeli—addressing him as “dear sir”—after dealing with the question of the furniture, adds: “There is, I believe, a robe which passed down under some law of exchange from one Chancellor of the Exchequer to another, and I shall be very happy to receive it from you on the ordinary footing, whatever that may be.” Disraeli was so annoyed by Gladstone’s suggestion that the furniture—which Disraeli had bought from his predecessor in office, Sir Charles Wood—should be revalued and taken over by the Office of Works, instead of being sent a cheque for £307 16s. 6d., as he had requested—that he dropped into the third person form of address, closed the correspondence, and entirely ignored Gladstone’s repeated request for a decision as to the passing of the robe. “The robe,” says Buckle, “descended, or was believed by Disraeli to descend, from Pitt. Disraeli was very proud of the association, and could not bring himself to give Gladstone the option of purchasing what he himself had bought from Wood.” Buckle adds: “He wore it again during his two subsequent tenures of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it remains as an heirloom at Hughenden Manor.”

But the main glory of the office is—to use the old parliamentary phrase—“the opening of the Budget,” when the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes his comprehensive statement to the House of Commons every April, dealing with the income and expenditure of the Kingdom for the ensuing twelve months. The balance sheet of the Chancellor of the Exchequer is based, as regards revenue, upon the returns from existing taxation, and new taxation—if any is proposed—for the current financial year, ending March 31st, and as regards expenditure, upon the Estimates supplied by the heads of the different spending Departments.

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Disraeli was prouder, it is said, of being Chancellor of the Exchequer than of being Prime Minister of England. That, however, is doubtful. He showed unexpected capacity as Finance Minister, but his temperament found its completest expression in the dignity, power, and influence of the Premiership. The Exchequer was the first office he ever filled. When it was offered to him by Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, in 1852, he was reluctant to take it, as he confessed it was the one branch of Government business of which he had no knowledge. Derby’s reply was: “You know as much as Mr. Canning did. They give you the figures”—and that settled it. Old Lord Lyndhurst remarked in a letter of congratulation to Disraeli: “You will, I am sure, evince to the world that addition and subtraction are not the only qualifications for a Chancellor of the Exchequer”; and he did, though the Derby Administration were defeated on his Budget and resigned.

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The greatest Chancellor of the Exchequer was undoubtedly Gladstone, “the man who set figures to music,” as somebody remarked. He was the one statesman for whom the post had an irresistible charm. He told Sir Henry Taylor in 1864 that for nine or ten months of the year he was always willing to go out of office. “But,” said he, “in the two or three that precede the Budget I begin to feel an itch to have the handling of it.” During those two or three months every Chancellor of the Exchequer lives, moves and has his being in an atmosphere of figures. Gladstone introduced or opened as many as thirteen Budgets. The first of the series was the Budget of 1853, when, in his forty-third year, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Government of Lord Aberdeen. The Duke of Argyll gives a graphic account of how Gladstone explained the proposals of this Budget at a meeting of the Cabinet. “He came into the room,” the Duke writes, “with a large, flat, shallow official box, very old and shabby, covered with drab-coloured leather. He sat on a chair nearly fronting the window, whilst we all sat in a kind of loop around him. Opening the box on his knee, so that its lid stood upright and afforded a rest for any paper placed upon its edge, he began a conversational exposition, which endured, without a moment’s interruption, for more than three hours.” A speech of more than three hour’s at a Cabinet meeting! What speculations must have been indulged in at the clubs that evening as to the meaning of this abnormal sitting of the Ministers in council! The Opposition newspapers asserted, no doubt, that Gladstone’s scheme of taxation was fiercely contested. “Not one of us,” says the Duke of Argyll, “could think for a moment of interrupting him.”

But it is not always that the objections and doubts of Ministers in regard to the Budget are thus silenced by the magic of a great financier. Indeed, Gladstone himself declared that no Chancellor of the Exchequer should attend a Cabinet discussion on financial proposals without a letter of resignation in his pocket. Conflicts are inevitable, perhaps, between him and his colleagues who are in charge of the spending Departments. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s desire is for economy. He protests that he cannot meet the claims of a colleague without imposing fresh taxation. The Minister is concerned almost wholly for success in office. He declines to accept a reduction of the expenditure which he holds to be essential to the efficient working of his Department. The difference can be settled, if it is amenable to settlement at all, only by the Prime Minister. He possesses the controlling power in the Cabinet, and in the interest of harmony and stability he exercises it in the investigation and settlement of differences between Ministers. If no settlement is possible, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Minister concerned resigns.

In the House of Commons Gladstone spoke for close on five hours in explanation of the proposals of his first Budget, exactly the same time that Disraeli had taken explaining his the year before. It was in this Budget that Gladstone extended the income tax to Ireland for the first time, and provided that the imposition of the tax over the United Kingdom should be limited to a period of seven years. For two years it was to be sevenpence in the pound; for two years more it was to be sixpence; for the remaining three years fivepence; and after that the tax was never to be heard of again. What an example of the futility of prognostication in political affairs! The income tax is the mightiest of all engines for the raising of revenue, and seems destined to endure for ever. But let us not prophesy, unless we can see the completion of this human scheme of things. Gladstone’s speech, however, was a mighty oratorical achievement. And yet thus modestly is it to be found recorded in his Diary, under the date Monday, April 18, 1858:

Wrote minutes. Read Shakespeare at night. This day was devoted to working up my papers and figures for the evening. Then drove and walked with C. (Mrs. Gladstone). Went at 4½ to the House. Spoke 4¾ hours in detailing the financial measures, and my strength stood out well, thank God. Many kind congratulations afterwards. Herberts and Wortleys came home with us, and had soup and negus.

It took Gladstone four hours to explain the Budget of 1860. The note in his Diary in reference to this speech discloses the nature of the refreshment from which he obtained sustenance in the great mental and physical strain of a long speech. He writes: “Spoke 5-9 without great exhaustion, aided by a large stock of egg and wine. Thank God! Home at 11. This was the most arduous operation I have ever had in Parliament.” I have often seen from the Reporters’ Gallery the curious vessel in which Gladstone carried his favourite refreshment of an egg beaten up in sherry. It was a short but wide bottle, of the kind in which unguents or ointments for the hair are usually sold. Producing it from the inside pocket of his frock-coat and placing it on the table beside the dispatch box—which already contained his notes—before rising to make his speech, he would resort, perhaps, three or four times during the oration to this old pomatum-pot—thus turned to a strange and mighty use—for the glow and the ardour which his voice, so lubricated, gave to his flowing periods.

Disraeli made no secret of the fact that it was brandy and soda that he fortified himself with on Budget nights. Sir William Harcourt found water sufficient to sustain his energies while unfolding his Budgets. Goschen used to introduce his Budgets on port. I remember an amusing incident during his Budget speech in 1890. That year was one of commercial prosperity, and so great was the concurrent consumption of beer and spirits, from which, of course, the State derived a considerable revenue, that Goschen humorously expressed the hope that it would not be known as “the drunken year.” Just then, by an awkward turn of his elbow, the Chancellor of the Exchequer upset the contents of the glass containing his refreshment, and immediately the pungent aroma of port pervaded the Chamber. The awkward pause which Goschen made in his speech, while he dried his soaking documents with a piece of blotting-paper, was filled up by the humorous sally of an Irish Member named Edward Harrington: “The House will soon be as drunk as the year.”

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History, perhaps, will record that the first momentous Budget of the twentieth century—a century which is destined, I think, to see many such Budgets—is that which Mr. Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for the first time, introduced in 1909. It was remarkable for its wide development of our fiscal system, and the novel reliefs from taxation which it afforded. Duties were imposed on unearned land increments, and a special abatement of £10 was given to payers of income tax on £500 and under for every child up to sixteen years of age. Mr. Lloyd George’s speech occupied four hours and a half in actual delivery. The physical effort was too much for him. He became so exhausted that in the middle of the speech he asked in faint tones for the indulgence of the House; and on the suggestion of Mr. Balfour, then Leader of the Opposition, there was an adjournment for half an hour to give him a rest. The Budget was thrown out by the House of Lords. The Liberal Government thereupon appealed to the country, and being again returned to power, they were enabled to carry the Budget triumphantly through the new Parliament in 1910.

But the associations of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer and the Budget are not all so dazzling. There is a most pathetic line in Mr. Winston Churchill’s biography of his father. “He is the only Chancellor of the Exchequer who never introduced a Budget.” As early as December, 1886, Lord Randolph Churchill, just appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Unionist Government under Lord Salisbury, laid before the Cabinet his proposals for the Budget he was to introduce more than four months later in April. He only gained the half-hearted consent of his colleagues to the draft of his scheme of taxation. “They said nothing—nothing at all—but you should have seen their faces!” he remarked on his return to the Treasury. He gave directions that all his figures and calculations should be gone over again with a view to their being carefully checked. “There are all the materials of our Budget,” said he, handing over his box to Sir Algernon West, then Permanent Secretary. “They are unpolished gems. Put the facets on them as well as you can, but do not speak to me on the subject again until the end of the financial year.” Long before the end of the financial year (March 31)—indeed, before that very month of December was out—Lord Randolph Churchill, seeing that the Cabinet would not sanction his proposed reduction of the estimated expenditure upon the Navy, resigned, and the first Unionist Budget was opened in the following April by Goschen.