WHY BUDGET SECRETS ARE SO WELL KEPT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 69, 17 April 1909, Page 3

WHY BUDGET SECRETS ARE SO WELL KEPT.

Tt -would foe worth hundreds of thouI sands of pounds to some people to know at this moment the exact details ; of Mr. Lloyd George's forthcoming 'Budget (says Tit Hits). There are speculators on tile Stock Exchange who could make a fortune-out of the knowledge. To holders of brewery stocks, let us say, a hint or a 'whisper from the Chancellor of the Exchequer before he begins to "rob the henroosts" would be a boon anil a blessing. But happy is he who expectcth nothing, for he shall nut be .disappointed. With Mr. Lloyd lleorge, as with other Chancellors 'of the Exchequer, ''mum's the word." How he will provide for an estimated deficit of £10,000,000, aad raise the wind, as the saying goes, for the national housekeeping next year, is a secret which will be locked in his bosom until the moment he stands up in the House of Commons and draws the veil aside.

PEW MINISTERS ARE "IX THE KNOW." No doubt the man in the street often wonders how it is that, with so many members of the Government and so many officials necessarily in the confidence of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, his secret is always so well kept. The fact is that the actual details of any Budget are known to very few people in advance. It may be questioned whether, even now, there are more than flto or three members of the Cabinet who could tell a public audience, if they were invited to do so, precisely upon whose hard-earned money the Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to exercise his art. Certainly the members of the Coverament outside the Cabinet have not much more than a general notion as to what is likely to happen, and it may turn out that a material part of their general notion is wrong. One might go farther and say that even the Cabinet as a whole arc not yet in possession of the details of the current year's Budget. For within the Cabinet is always an inner Cabinet —the Finance Minister's personal friends and supporters, the men from whom he often seeks counsel and assistance, or who, by right of their intimacy, proffer him counsel and assistance. These are the Ministers to be counted on the hand, who could tell more tales out of school than any others. By carefully choosing their brokers and covering their operations they could, if they liked, make large additions to their fortunes through their knowledge of the facts, and none would be the wiser. Yet everyone can be perfectly certain they will not use their official knowledge for any private purpose of this sort. An American politician might say this is foolish. The answer is that it is honest, and that it is British, and no case has ever been known of a Cabinet Minister failing to observe .this unwritten law.

THE CHANCELLOR'S CONFIDENTIAL MEN.

But there are two—or, say, threemen who know more of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's secret than anybody else, the Permanent Financial Secretary and the Permanent Administrative Secretary at the Treasury, and the Chancellor's own private secretary. The two Permanent Secretaries know tho Budget as a mother knows her baby know it through all its phases and all its figures; know it in its early promise and its later disappointment; know it through all its train of worries, anxieties, and perplexities. All the year, in fact, they are fixing up the Chancellor's financial scaffolding for him, so* that for nine months he has practically nothing to do in financial matters except dream and hope and scheme. Not until he knows what his deficit or surplus is through the labors of these men can he seriously start work on his Budget and display to the world his talents as a financial genius or otherwise.

HONOR Al THE TREASURY. Of course, there are dozens of officials and clerks at the Treasury who get a glimpse of the Budget ;n quarter lights and half lights before it is actually unfolded to t'b; House. Hundreds of memoranda pass from Department to Department, hundreds of letters arc drafted, corrected, examined, and copied. Withal, the Chancellor keeps his golden secret. Everybody who has the smallest responsibility with respect to it at the Treasury is on honor to be faithful to his trust. DO SECRETS EVER LEAK OUT?

Yet Budget secrets have leaked out from lime to time, nevertheless. The' first instance which comes to mind con-1 cerns one of the famous Budgets of the most famous of England's Finance Min-1 istcrs Gladstone. His private secretary, connected with a noble family,! consciously or unconsciously betrayed the secret of his chief. It was, indeed, said that he had been "got at." Iu any case, his career was ended. Gladstone was not the man to forgive a secretary who failed to recognise that a still tongue makes a 'wise head, and he "fired him out" without more ado. It was said, too, the Budget intentions of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, with respect to stripped tobacco were accidentally anticipated by a certain firm of tobacco manufacturers, and in the beat of debate the Chancellor had to face the charge that somebody at the Treasury had "blabbed." Naturally the charge was hotly repudiated. Nobody supposes that Mr. Chamberlain himself risked his reputation by showing his hand before the Budget night. Nevertheless, there is the fact that this particular firm of tobacco manufacturers had been far - seeing enough to divine 'what was about to come to pass and to act upon their belief.

LOUD RANDOLPH'S BUDGET. The stow of a famous Budget which never saw the light, that of the brilliant-ly-meteoric Lord Randolph Churchill, is worth retelling, because it proves that the secrets of a Budget arc largely guarded by the faet that the proposals may not take flndl shape until almost the' eleventh hour. Lord Randolph had gained the half-hearted consent of the . Cabinet to a draft of his scheme. Afterwards Sir Algernon West, then Permanent Secretary, spoke to him on some matter of detail in connection with it. "There in that box." replied Lord Randolph, ''are all the materials of our Budget. They are unpqlished gems. Put the facets on them as well as yQU can, but do not speak again to me on the subject till the end of the financial year." When that time came and tlio gems had been polished, the Cabinet was di--1 vided. Lord Randolph saw he could not get his proposals through. Some correspondence between Lord Salisbury and himself on the matter gave vise to a misunderstanding, a™ l aw morning the world opened its eyes to find that the brilliant but erratic: Chancellor of the Kxtlienner Spl resigned even before he had made a communication on the matter to the Queen.