136 LOCAL TAXATION 



sent to Ministers. A deputation waited upon the Chancellor 

 of the Exchequer (Mr. Asquith) to lay the report before him 

 on 20th March. He met them in a very sympathetic manner, 

 admitted the grievances under which agriculture especially 

 suffered, and agreed with the Royal Commission that the 

 services of which the Chamber chiefly complained were national 

 in their character. The report of this deputation is too long 

 to insert here, but it is unusually instructive. Here is an 

 extract from Mr. Asquith's reply : 



" One of the speakers seemed to think that the ratepayer had 

 a peculiar and prior claim to the solicitude and care of the Govern- 

 ment over every other class of the community, but there is another 

 figure besides the figure of the ratepayer that I, at any rate, 

 have to keep steadily in view, and that is the figure of the tax- 

 payer, who is too often forgotten in discussions of this kind and 

 who happens, by the way, not infrequently to be the same person 

 as the ratepayer. That is where the real importance of this 

 question of valuation comes in, because it is the (to a large 

 extent) artificial distinction resulting from the existing law between 

 the class of ratepayers and the class of taxpayers, and also the 

 extreme inequality of rates in different parts of the country arising 

 from the application of totally different systems of valuation 

 and a complete absence of uniformity, which make this problem 

 in some respects the urgent problem which I do not deny that it 

 is. I am not going over again what I said in the House of Commons 

 only a very few weeks ago, that, in my opinion, and that of my 

 colleagues, the question of valuation does lie on the threshold 

 of a satisfactory treatment of this question as a whole. You 

 may dole out a little bit, here or there, but you will never get 

 to the bottom of or really remove these particular grievances 

 which you have come here to urge to-day until you have grappled 

 with the question of valuation. 



" With regard to the case of these so-called national services 

 I prefer to call them services that are both national and local, 

 but they are locally managed the state of the case is this. 

 Taking a period of fifteen years, in 1889-90 they cost, roughly 

 speaking, 19 millions; in 1904-5 they cost, roughly speaking, 

 45| millions. That is the total amount expended upon them by 

 local authorities. The Imperial contribution in the first year 

 which I have mentioned, 1889-90, was 5,850,000, and in the 

 last year, 19,290,000, so although the expenditure has increased 

 undoubtedly, and increased very heavily, so has the Imperial 

 contribution, and in greater proportion. I am only saying that 

 in order to correct a misapprehension, which seems to prevail 

 in many quarters, that the State has been remiss and has been 

 going behind the standard of contribution which fifteen years 

 ago it thought it right to be lived and to be worked up to in ropird 



