116 LOCAL TAXATION 



ment of local taxation has now become absolutely unanswerable. 

 This was strongly urged by Mr. Walter Long, a member of this 

 Committee, and other speakers in the debates on the Finance 

 Bill, and was admitted by the late President of the Local Govern- 

 ment Board (Mr. Fowler), who said in the House of Commons 

 on 17th July: "He was ready to admit that on this question 

 [local burdens on agricultural land] the door was not closed 

 . . . No doubt we had a condition of affairs in which landed 

 property was exempt from Imperial taxation which it ought to 

 bear, and personal property was exempt from local taxation which 

 it ought to bear. He would not say the time had not come when 

 there should be inquiry as to the real incidence of local Taxation, 

 and how that taxation which he could assure the House was 

 not a decreasing quantity, and which he hoped in many places 

 would continue to increase should be borne by the two descrip- 

 tions of property. It would be a great injustice to put that on 

 any particular property." 



A further reference to this Act is made under the head of 

 Income Tax on page 361. 



1895. 



A General Election and the return of an Unionist administra- 

 tion to power was the most interesting event of this session. 

 In their annual report the Committee quoted the following 

 extract from a speech made by Mr. A. J. Balfour at Alnwick, 

 on 19th July, important because it embodied the contention 

 of the Committee on local finance : 



" Then what is the nature of the complaint against Sir W. 

 Harcourt's Budget, to which I especially wdsh to draw your 

 attention ? My complaint is, when Sir W. Harcourt was making 

 a radical change, or a change entirely opposed to all the principles, 

 so far as I know, ever laid down by Mr. Gladstone (one of the 

 greatest financial experts of the age) in his Budgets when Sir 

 William Harcourt, under the name of democratic finance, was 

 upsetting liberal finance, then I say he should have taken the 

 trouble to survey the whole question of public burdens falling 

 upon individuals whether those public burdens were assessed 

 locally, or w r hether they were assessed for Imperial purposes. 

 There is, after all, only a technical, an arbitrary, an unreal 

 distinction between the two. In one case, no doubt, the tax- 

 gatherer is directly under the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and 

 the taxes he collects go directly to the Exchequer, and for the 

 expenditure of which out of the Exchequer the Government of 

 the day and the Parliament of the day are directly responsible. 

 No doubt, also, the local expenditure is collected by different 



