hon. Member for Dudley (Mr. H. B. those lesser taxes in which we propose Sheridan), whose attention I would in- that remissions should be made. The vite, as the subject is so intimately con- duty on hair powder is the first which nected with the discussion on his Mo- presents itself. It yields a revenue of tion next week. He seems to be of £925,000 a year. [A laugh.] I mean opinion that there is great recuperative £925 a year. I beg the pardon of the power in this tax; but he must not Committee, but it is one of the many forget that, if we go below a certain difficulties of the subject that the figures point, new arrangements must be made with which I have to deal are in some for its collection, while the expenses of instances so exceedingly large, and in that collection would not be diminished. others, comparatively speaking, so small, Entertaining these views, and seeing that it is not always so easy for one so the strong feeling that has existed on inexperienced in financial statements as the subject, the Government have deemed myself to bear in mind their relative it to be the best course to pursue to proportions. I believe, however, I am repeal the tax altogether. ["Hear!"] correct in saying that we realize £925 a I am afraid I must moderate the satis-year from the duty on hair powder; and faction of those hon. Gentlemen who the best thing I think which we can do cheer by stating that when the duty was lowered from 3s. to 18. 6d. the reduction did not come into effect until Midsummer, and as we have entered upon this quarter, and as an Act of Parliament will be required to do away with the tax altogether, we propose that its abolition should date from Mid summer next. with that tax is to abolish it altogether. I now come to the tax on armorial bearings, which is a tax which is very singular as well as unsatisfactory. It is of this nature. If a person possesses a carriage, on which he would have to pay at the present rate of duty £3 108. a year, he has to pay for armorial bearings £2 128. 9d.; but if he does not I have now stated three remissions possess a carriage he has to pay only which we propose to make-that of 1d. in 13s. 2d. It is not necessary that he the pound in the income tax, the corn should put the armorial bearings on his duty, and the duty on fire insurance; and carriage. A physician, for instance, who I proceed in the next place to deal with has no carriage may have a seal, for another part of my subject which does which he would have to pay a duty of not involve the mention of such large only 138. 2d., but if he has a carriage and figures, although it is nevertheless ex- drives about to visit his patients he will ceedingly important, and if I mistake have to pay a tax of £2 128. 9d., instead not will be found by hon. Gentlemen to of 138. 2d. for armorial bearings, even be exceedingly interesting. I only hope though he does not put them on his it may in some degree tend to relieve carriage. That is not a very satisfactory the very dry nature of the statement state of things, and I should be glad which it has been my duty to lay before if I could get rid of the duty altothe Committee. I said, as the Commit-gether, inasmuch as I do not think it tee will remember, that it was necessary, is based on any sound or good prinin order to work the system of Excise licenses which we propose to substitute for the present assessed taxes, that we should have recourse to a system of simplification and do away with a great deal of the complexity which attends the payment of these taxes, at the risk of relieving the rich from something which they ought to pay, and charging, I am sorry to say, a little more to the poor. We have deemed it expedient, in fact, to make the duty uniform in order to insure the permanence of the taxes, and to prevent them from becoming an intolerable nuisance to those who will have to send in declarations. Having said thus much, I will go through ciple. But as I cannot get rid of it the best thing it appears to me which I can do is to increase it a little. I propose to alter the present rates of duty, and to charge the £1 18. for armorial bearings and that is for all armorial bearings other than those on carriages, and if a gentleman likes to put his armorial bearings on his carriage, then I propose that he should pay another £1 18.; so that there will be, in fact, two taxes of £1 18. each, which will bring to the Revenue, it is computed, an additional sum of £8,000 from this source. I come, in the next place, to carriages on four wheels. At present, if drawn by two horses, they pay as high as £3 10s. in the shape of duty; but if only by one horse, and the wheels are small enough to make it a case of extreme cruelty to animals, they pay only £1. Now, with a view to secure that uniformity to which I have already referred, we propose to reduce the tax on four wheeled carriages from £3 108. to £2 28. But there is a class of four wheeled carriages, such as those drawn by a pony under thirteen hands-almost too weak to draw at all-and the wheels of which are not more than thirty inches in diameter, which seems to me to demand some consideration at our hands, because they are carriages which are very much used by ladies and invalids and persons advanced in age, and very frequently by persons whose circumstances are comparatively straitened. Now, I should be unwilling to impose upon that class of carriage a heavier rate of duty than is put on a barouche or a landau; and what we propose is that they shall be taxed at the rate of two wheeled carriages-that is to say at 158. and that there shall be no longer a distinction drawn from the wretched pony and wheels, but only from the weight of the carriage, which we propose to take at 3 cwt., so that it shall really be a light carriage for pleasure, and not one of a solid and permanent character. I believe it will be found that almost all pony carriages will come under that weight, and it will, no doubt lead to an improvement in their manufacture, by making the exemption rest on weight rather than on the wheels and the pony. It is proposed to retain the tax of 158. on all two wheel carriages. There are something like 100,000 gentlemen who drive gigs, and I should like to put a little additional charge on them; but, after carefully considering the matter, I thought it better not to interfere with so large an army, and to leave matters as they are. Then comes the tax on horsedealers which is also somewhat anomalous and peculiar. A horse-dealer in London has to pay a tax of £27 in the shape of license duty for the exercise of his trade, while in the country the horsedealer pays only £13 158.-the idea no doubt being, when the tax was imposed, that the business was carried on in London on a larger scale than in the country. That I believe has ceased to be the case. It is proposed therefore to reduce the higher rate of these taxes, to make them At equal, to impose a tax of £12 108. on each horse-dealer, and to abolish the £27 tax. Next, as regards men - servants. present the assessed tax on a man-servant is £1 18.; but there are many exceptions, for one under eighteen years of age it is 10s. 6d., and there are exceptions in the case of under-gardeners and gamekeepers who are not charged at all. With a view of facilitating the filling up of declarations on which licenses are granted we have thought it desirable to make the tax uniform, and we also propose to take a kind of middle course between the present taxes and the exemptions; to impose a uniform tax of 15s. a head on male servants, and to do away with exemptions altogether. Another remission which is suggested by the Government the Committee will easily anticipate-it is the taxes on locomotion. It is unnecessary for me to go into any detailed argument with regard to those taxes; they have been given up by default for a long time; it has always been admitted that whenever they could be reduced or remitted they should be; and I hope the time has now come. I will tell the Committee the principle on which we propose to proceed, and I will then go through the individual taxes and show you how we apply that principle. We propose generally to abolish all exceptional taxes on locomotion, to abolish the distinction between carriages and horses kept for pleasure and those kept for profit, so as to make all persons pay the same duty for the same kind of carriage, whatever use they put carriage and horses to-except, of course, that we do not intend to touch horses kept for husbandry and matters of that kind. Proceeding on that principle, I take first the item of stage carriages-omnibuses and others. They pay now a £3 38. license for a vehicle to carry more than eight persons, and 108. 6d. for one carrying less than eight, and also d. on every mile travelled. We propose to do away with these duties, and leave the stage carriage to pay duty just like any other carriage, according to the number of horses employed to draw them. Then on horses we propose to lower the duty. At present a trade horse pays 10s. 6d. and the gentleman's horse £1 1s. I do not speak of racehorses; they are too high game for me to fly at. We do not see how we can raise the tax upon the large number of to attain. I suppose the right hon. Genhorses. The horse is essential to loco-tleman the Home Secretary will have motion-horses are the very life and soul something so say on the subject I am of locomotion, and will continue to be so until they are supplanted by velocipedes. I think we cannot do more to advance our object, which is to advance the free circulation of Her Majesty's subjects, than we shall do by reducing the duty on horses from £1 18. to 10s. 6d.-excepting, of course, race-horses. I now come to another subject of great interest-that of hackney-carriages; or, as I will call them for the sake of brevity, "cabs." No business in this, and hardly in any other, country has been so much oppressed as the hackney-carriage business. For some reason, which may be explained historically, and which certainly cannot be defended logically or reasonably, they have been picked out by Governments as objects of taxation. It may be saidit does not matter, because whatever you take from the producers or proprietors they will take from their customers, the consumers; but Government has met them here, and limited the amount they can demand, so as to make it impossible for the proprietors fairly to recoup themselves for the taxes levied on them. It is most monstrous in London. Every cab pays a license of £1, and 1s. for every day it goes out. A cab which works seven days a week pays £19 5s., and a cab that works six days, £16 13s. a year to the Government. Of course, as cabs are so heavily taxed, and we limit the demands of the owners on the public, they have only one recourse they take it out in badness. The vehicles are ricketty and dirty, and badly appointed; the horses are bad and miserable; and for all this the poor people are not to blame, but the Legislature that has settled on them an intolerable burden, and precluded them from recouping themselves by the means which are open to others of throwing it upon the consumers. We propose, as a matter of justice, to repeal entirely the present duty on cabs; and the effect of that will be the four wheel cab will pay a duty of £2 28. per annum, and if it employ two horses it will pay £1 18. more, which will make £3 38. instead of £19. The Hansom cab will pay still less, as its carriage duty is only 158.; and the difference is in other respects a sacrifice to that uniformity which we have set up, not as a blind idol, but as an object it is desirable about to mention. Cabs are inspected and looked after by the police in London at a cost of £12,000 a year, which has justly been borne by the Government that made £111,000 out of them; but when we have got rid of the tax I hope my right hon. Friend will introduce a Bill by which a moderate tax of, say, £2 a cab and £3 an omnibus may be imposed to defray the expenses which they render necessary, and which it is obviously expedient to incur. However, having washed my hands of the £111,000 a year, I also wash my hands of the payment of £12,000 a year. Next I must refer to the duty on post horses. The duty on post horses is £5 on every horse a man keeps for hire; he may also for that keep a carriage; and the tax rises by an ascending scale in a complicated manner for so many horses and so many carriages. The duty was, probably, justifiable in its first imposition; it was imposed at a time when it fell almost exclusively on the rich, when every gentleman travelled in his own carriage, and post horses were the means of locomotion. The change in human affairs has brought things round to the contrary; the tax is not paid by the rich at all, it is not paid by people who drive their own carriages-people now seldom drive their own carriages, except with their own horses-the tax is paid mainly by the middle classes by those who travel for the purposes of trade, or who employ flys and carriages for short journeys into the country; and its incidence is most injurious to the railway interest, which has made everybody's fortune except its own. This duty, and that on cabs, has deprived people of access to the smaller railway stations; so that we have presented the absurd spectacle of millions spent on a railway, and the people for miles round its stations cut off from their use by the taxes imposed by the Government. I have known a cab three times set up and three times knocked down, until at last it has been given up in despair, and the station remains inaccessible, except to those who have their own carriages or who can walk to it. We shall gain immensely by abolishing these duties; the railways will be sensibly benefited, and the public still more. I have now gone through - the items except one, which is a small year. When the Revenue is due it ought matter, but one to which I attach much to be collected. If it is an annual payimportance. It is £73,000 realized by ment, then it ought to be collected once tea licenses. There is nothing that tends for the year, and we ought not to be put to check the sale of tea to the poorer to the expense of dunning people over classes more than these licenses, and and over again for these miserable sums. prevents tea being sold near their homes, I can only repeat that it is a great adwhile there is always a public-house ministrative reform that we propose. If close by. Without dwelling on the sub- the House does not choose to accept that ject, I believe the remission of these reform, we must make other provision duties will do something to promote for meeting our position. We cannot temperance. leave things exactly as they are. Meanwhile, there is our plan, and the Committee is free to accept or to leave it. If the Committee thinks that the present state of things should be maintained, we must accept that opinion and act upon it; but supposing-as I hope without presumption for the sake of argument we may-that the House accepts our proposals, just look what we shall accomplish. We shall have paid off in Speaking of these reductions on assessed taxes, and of taxes on locomotion, the effect of all these reductions is this-the amount of the present Revenue is £1,533,900; after reductions it will amount to £1,113,000-that is to say, there is a reduction to £420,000. If I reckon the fire insurance duty, the corn duty, and the 1d. on the income tax, the whole amount of the Revenue dealt with is £14,053,000; after the remis-one year £4,600,000 of unforeseen oblisions it will be £10,993,000; the net remissions come to £3,060,000, and the remissions which will fall within the present year will come to £2,940,000. We will now return to the point which, I fear, I left some two hours ago, when I said that the payments for Abyssinia and the surplus assets for the year established pretty nearly an equilibrium, leaving a balance of £32,000 in favour of the Revenue. If it should be the pleasure of the Committee to agree to the proposals of the Government respecting the change in the manner of collecting these taxes, and thus acquire the sum of £3,350,000, the financial results will be these I add to this sum of £3,350,000 the surplus of £32,000 of estimated Revenue over Expenditure. Then I must deduct from that amount the sum of £2,940,000, which is the amount of the remission that will take effect during the present year, and when I have made that reduction the result will be a surplus of £442,000. The one drawback in this scheme-I mention it because I wish to be perfectly frank with the Committee, and to conceal nothing -is, undoubtedly, that we should have more money than is desirable in one quarter, and less than we desire in other quarters. That, no doubt, is a very considerable mischief; but it seems childish to say that we are to go to extra expense and trouble in collecting the Revenue merely to preserve a balance of equality between the different quarters of the gations, which none of us had the least idea of six months ago. We shall have established, at all events, the nucleus and the germ of a thoroughly sound and sensible mode of collecting taxes-one which will not only yield a much larger sum to the Revenue, but which will be infinitely easier and less troublesome to the tax-payer; and, in addition, we shall have removed one of the most crying social evils of this country-namely, the enormous obstacles that are now placed in the way of locomotion. It is not merely that in our proposals on this head we reduce taxation-we set men at liberty. At present, the taxes upon locomotion are not only exorbitant in amount, but the very essence of their mischief is that a man shall not be at liberty to use his own property in the way that he thinks proper. Say, that I am travelling, and want to go from a railway station to a town; there is no fly, but there is a man in a gig who would be glad to take me, but dares not do so for fear of the tax, so it is obliged to stand doing nothing; and there is in this way an immense waste of the national resources. Everyone must have felt that this requires reform - that the moment the great lines of railway communication were established the other means of locomotion must be brought up to that standard, and enable persons to provide the means of locomotion without undue interference from the State. I look upon our proposal in this respect as an enor mous blessing, and one not to be measured by the £400,000 or so, which is the amount remitted. It will give to locomotion an amount of freedom and of ease which it is impossible, I think, to estimate too highly. Well, then, as good wine needs no bush, I shall say nothing about 1d. off the income tax further than this-that it seems to point to a return to that blessed state of things when the income tax was not quite so high as it now is. Nor will I dilate on the remission of the duty on fire insurance; nor-seeing that I am addressing a number of Gentlemen, every one of whom is, I am sure, anxious to remove the least semblance of hardship to the poor-can it be necessary for me to urge a single additional argument in favour of the taking off the corn duty. I hope the Committee will now see that though I have detained them at some length, it was necessary to do so, and I can only express my hope that I may have been fortunate enough, on behalf of the Government, to make propositions which the Committee will be inclined to accept. Of course, if they are not accepted, we shall have no other resource than to abandon the remissions we suggest, keep the income tax at 6d., and in some other way make provision for the claims upon the Exchequer. One word more as to the floating debt. There is still a sum of £2,300,000 of floating debt in the shape of Exchequer bonds which fall due in this year, and they are the only ones now outstanding. After paying so large a sum as £4,600,000, I feel that we can hardly be expected to go farther in the way of paying debts, and that it is not fair to assume a greater burden in one year. But I have £600,000 in reserve, and I cannot help hoping that some part of the great remissions which are proposed will find their way back into the Exchequer, putting us in a position which will make it unnecessary to take further measures to strengthen our balances and enable us to meet our floating debt as it falls due. There are £5,500,000 of Exchequer bills, so that our whole floating debt is under £8,000,000 -a smaller amount than it has been in the memory of any living man. I say, then, that this proposal of the Government has many and great advantages. It finds us with a deficit; it leaves us with a surplus of £400,000. It finds the Revenue embarrassed and sinking; it gives us the greatest reason to hope that by remissions of taxation we may raise that Revenue again so as to command a considerable surplus. It effects a great administrative reform in the collection of the taxes. By a sort of Parliamentary magic it raises money not anticipated by those who collect it, for the plan dawned upon them by degrees. It does all these things, and, as far as I can see, it has no other corresponding disadvantage than this-that it does make one quarter of the year rather fatter than the rest. These are the recommendations of the measure. I humbly submit it to the consideration of the Committee, and nothing now remains for me but to place in your hands, Mr. Dodson, the formal Resolutions which are necessary for carrying out the proposals of the Government. Motion made, and Question proposed, "That, towards raising the Supply granted to Her Majesty, the Duty of Customs now charged on Tea shall continue to be levied and charged on and after the 1st day of August 1869 until the 1st day of August 1870, on the importation thereof into Great Britain and Ireland: viz. MR. HUNT: There is one point on which we must all agree, and that is that the right hon. Gentleman need not have made any claim on the indulgence of the House. He has placed the matter before us in a way which enables us fully to understand the proposals of the Government. There is a remarkable difference between the commencement of the right hon. Gentleman's speech and the close of it. He opened in a very lugubrious strain. The purport was most mournful; everywhere he saw great financial embarrassment and difficulty; at the close he threw a couleur de rose tint over the landscape, and allured us with large proposals for the remission of taxation. Perhaps that was only the dramatic art of the right hon. Gentleman. He tried to frighten us at first, in order that we might afterwards give the more cordial reception to the boons he had in store. Sir, the right hon. Gentleman separated very fairly the Abyssinian expenditure from the ordinary financial results of the last year; and I think the Committee will agree with me that, considering the great increase that war occasioned, we have reason for congratulation that things are not worse than they are. I have already stated that the |