FAILURE OF SIR ROBERT PEEL'S FINANCIAL SCHEME.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 95, 30 December 1843, Page 380

FAILURE OF SIR ROBERT PEEL'S FINANCIAL SCHEME.

[From the Examiner.']

Precisely as we anticipated, the financial scheme of Sir Robert Peel has proved a huge failure, and it is now confessed that ministers have blundered in all their calculations. Not a single result has corresponded with Sir Robert Peel's confident expectations. He has been wrong even about the income tax, which has exceeded his estimation as much as other taxes have fallen short of it.

The country has been obliged to make a great effort to render its income equal to its expenditure, but so ill directed has the demand upon it been, that the upshot is a deficiency of more than two millions, a sum pretty exactly corresponding with the amount of the income tax received. Does not this indication very much bear out our view, that financial tinkers in stopping one hole make another ? And the income tax has not yet dons its worst. The full effect on the other branches of the revenue are not yet seen, for the returns for the assessed taxes as yet relate to the state of things before the proposal of the income tax, and the reductions which followed it, the consequence of which, will not be completely developed till 1844.

The decrease in the customs on wine may in some part be referable, as alleged, to the uncertainties in the trade arising from pending negotiations with Portugal, but in part, and great part, it is also probably attributable to the income tax, for wine is one of the first retrenchments of persons of slender incomes. The de-^ crease in spirit duties in England is placed to the' account of improved sobriety, but some of it is also referable to the less satisfactory cause of the distresses of the working classes. " Where should we now have been," asks Sir Robert Peel boastfully, " if the income tax had not been imposed ?" Where would Mrs. Hardcastle have been if Tony Lumpkin had not driven her round the house and round the house, and upset her in the horse-pond at her own door, when the good woman fancied herself at the end of a long journey ? In all human probability, without the income tax the deficiency would have been not much more or less than it is with it.

Sir Robert Peel fancies himself carried on by the income tax as the Irish gentleman in the old story fancied himself carried in the sedan-chair which wanted both a seat and a bottom, and which, upon the practical experience of the breaking of shins in shuffling along, extorted from the sufferer, not the Peel exclamation, " Where should I have been without this sedan-chair ?" but " I'faith, another time I had as lieve walk, as ride in this chair without seat or bottom."

Seeing that there is no deficiency, but redundancy, in the income tax, Sir Robert Peel assumes that there can be no fault in it, committing, in this instance, the precise blunder of the simpleton in thefacetitß of Hierocles, who, finding a cask of wine leak, searched for the hole at the top of the cask ; and when asked why he did not rather examine lower down, replied, " That would be folly indeed, for the leak must be where we find the vacancy; and you see that the wine has not left the bottom but the top of the cask."

The income tax part of the financial barrel is full, but it does not thence follow that the leak may not be in that quarter, wasting down to its level what has disappeared from above. Sir Robert Peel, with the partiality of a parent for its own, however vicious and deformed, still professes to have the most preposterous faith in the working of his income tax, and has even the hardihood to assert, against the experience of the public, that there has been a reduction in the cost of living equivalent to the burden. What reduction there has been in the cost of living has been mainly Inferable to a cause, the authoriship of which a minister would not be very much disposed to claim, namely, the distress of the country, which, by diminishing consumption, has lowered prices. ' Sir Robert Peel appears not to be unconscious of this truth in vaguely attributing the reduction to " some cause or other;" but he omits to observe that it is poor comfort to tell people who cannot sell, that they can buy cheap, wanting only the wherewith ; and even the housekeeper with a fixed income will not be rejoiced at saving a portion of the amount of his income tax by the distresses of other parts of the community, which come round to him again in poor rates, and the troubles always in the train of misery. And whenever trade rallies, this compensation for the income tax, on which Sir Robert Peel now lays such exaggerated stress, will disappear. The cry now is, that it is too soon for change ; the argument, three years hence, will be that it is too late, and that as the thing has been borne so long, it may be borne longer. Proof of the failure of a thing is with this Government no reason for its discontinuance. Nay, according to its shown statement, it will obstinately resolve to adopt a measure, foreknowing that it cannot succeed. Thus, the egregious Chancellor of the Exchequer, in defence of his Irish spirit duty, which has revived illicit distillation with its demoralization and crime, and only rendered to the revenue £50,000 in lien of the estimated £250,000, pleaded the very fact that should have forbidden the experiment !

" Why the growing spirit of temperance among that people had led them to abandon the consumption of ardent spirits (hear) ; and I believe that there is no man who was conversant with the west and the south of Ireland in the antecedent years, who would not admit that in that fact there was to be found a sufficient cause for the reduction in the consumption of that particular produce ; and it is only in later times, within the last year or two, that the same desire to discontinue the use of spirits which prevailed in the south has extended to the more northern parts, and has produced there,

quite independent of the reduction of duty, a diminution in that consumption which prevailed there in previous years." And having to do with growing temperance, why, in the name of all that is perverse, did you reckon on a large and steady revenue from dram-drinking ? Why apply a tax to a declining habit ? — unless, indeed, to revive it, which has been the effect, and would be supposed to be the intention of the ministry, if intentions were to be inferred from consequences, or if its enemies were harsh enough to assume that it knew what it was about, either by its own dim lights or by the warnings of wiser and more experienced men. The duty on the export of coal is another specimen of the enormous miscarriage of the Peel budget. The calculation was £140,000, the return is £80,000 for three quarters ; and for this comparatively paltry sum, a thriving trade was interrupted and depressed. But these and all other blunders are to be persevered in. There is to be no change; mischiefs are to run their course, and principles of relief are to have no farther application for the present. For, with an insane perversity, it seems fixed that measures believed and admitted to he remedial, are not to be introduced till the state of derangement has passed away without them, which it can hardly do without a miracle. The physician who at first would not prescribe without his fee, now refuses to administer his specific till the patient is restored to health without it ! It is the case of Sir Abel Handy's housa-en. fire ; all (lie contrivances for extinguishing- conflagrations are rejected, and the sage projector rejoices in the thought that " Perhaps the fire will go out of itself." ** But to proceed with the tissue of blunders. In his Custom duties, Sir Robert Peel, the man of time, caution, and sound practical experience, had miscalculated by above two millions sterling ! ! in the Excise by above another million ! ! and the only excuse that Mr. Goulburn could find for him was, that there had been a great falling off in the malt duty in consequence of a deficient barley harvest in 1841 ; as if that fact might not or ought not to have been just as well known to Sir Robert Peel in 1842 as in 1543. In the Stamps, in the Post Office, and in the taxes he was likewise wrong. But it is in the estimates of the working of his own special measures, which he obtained so much time to mature and render exact, that this safe statesman is most egregiously in error. He changed the law upon the importation of foreign corn, and calculated upon the receipt of little or no duty —he has received above a million and a quarter ! ! He threw away the Canadian timber duty, and calculated upon losing £600,000 — he has lost nearly seven. He was also wrong in his calculation of the effect of the reduction of duty on articles of minor import. Thus, then, Sir Robert Peel is now proved and admitted before the face of the country to have been wrong in all his estimates of the produce of the great branches of our revenue which have been working for years— wrong in the assumptions upon which he called for new taxes — and grossly wrong in the working and estimates which he formed of them. -' And what has been the result ? If eper there was a point on which Sir Robert Peel more pledged himself than upon another, excepting always when he gracefully and piously exclaims, "So help me God !" it was this, that he would, especially eschew carrying on a government with a deficit— and yet, what is the fact ? Why, that this so pledged non-deficit Government has just declared a deficit of two millions sterling for the past year, with an awkward prospect of Another deficit for the next ! Lord John Russell truly said Sir Robert Peel had unsettled everything and settled nothing. There never was a more, overrated man than Sir Robert Peel ; be is an expert debater, and very well understands how to dress up a statement for an occasion, or to fix upon the weak point of an opponent's speech ; but in all the higher qualities which constitute a statesman, foresight and wisdom to apprehend the leading questions of his time, with manliness and ability to avow and apply them, he is lamentably deficient. He is always behind-hand — always too late. Whether upon currency, catholics, reform, trade, education, or finance, he ever begins by opposing, then evading, qualifying, shifting, he ends by adopting them generally, against his professed conviction. He is the very Balaam of politics, cursing in his heart what he praises with his tongue.