and if I had been prepared to enter into the debate I should not have done so, feeling that it would have been discourteous and unfair to the right honourable gentleman that I should make an attack upon him on Monday when I had given formal notice that it would be made four days later.

But, Sir, the debate on Monday dealt in great measure with questions of policy, and with the justification which might be alleged for the increased expenditure of the present Government.

I do not, Sir, propose to enter upon any question of policy this evening, and I intend to confine myself to an examination of the figures themselves.

The question of comparative expenditure as between successive Governments is undoubtedly an important one, and will always be of interest to the country; and it always has been, especially with the right honourable gentleman, a favourite weapon of party warfare.

But in order that a fair comparison may be made between the expenditure of two Governments, two things are essential: first, that the figures employed shall be accurate; secondly, that they shall be treated upon principles which involve no unfairness to either party.

Now, Sir, when the right honourable gentleman was before his constituents at the Corn Exchange, in Edinburgh, on the 1st of September last, he was undoubtedly in a difficult position. On the 29th of November, 1879, he had, in the very same place of meeting, denounced the enormous expenditure of the Tory Government then in power, and had declared that extravagance was a vice which appeared to be ingrained in the Tory party of the day.'

In 1884 he had to apologise for, and to explain, as well as he could, the fact that he himself had become responsible for an expenditure vastly larger than that which he then denounced-an expenditure which, during the last four years, has reached an average of six and a half millions more than the average expenditure of the late Government during their term of office. I own there was no want of courage in the speech which the right honourable gentleman made in September; there was no hesitation in the words which he used; and I will quote to the House the passage in which he then dealt with the financial question, and ask the House to note the repeated declaration of the right honourable gentleman that no man can shake any one of the figures he then put forward. These were his words :—

I will give you with the utmost exactness a comparative statement which it is quite impossible for them (the Tories) to shake, and which I will convey to you in no very great number of words, avoiding all detail, lumping all large sums of money, and making use of round numbers for the sake of greater simplicity and intelligibility. For the last four years of the late Government the gross expenditure of the country was 320 millions; in the last four years of the present Government-do not be alarmed the expenditure of the country has been 342 millions; that is, apparently, in comparing the two Governments, our account is 13 millions to the bad. Let us look a little further into the matter. I must first of all deduct

the expenses of collection. You know we have vast establishments connected with post-offices, telegraphs, and so forth. To charge them to taxation would be absurd. I do not therefore take the expense of collection, and the two sums then would be -that for the late Government 297 millions, and that for the present Government 3063 millions. There are still 9 millions remaining to the bad against us; but I go further, and I deduct the debt we have paid off, because undoubtedly what you spend in the payment of debt ought not to be reckoned as expenditure. We have paid, as I have told you, 25 millions of debt against 11 millions; and, consequently, when we bring that into account, we are no longer to the bad, but are to the good by the amount of 43 millions.

A little later on in the speech he again said, 'So far I have been dealing with matters of fact, and no man can shake one of the figures I have laid before you.'

This, Sir, was something more than the expression of individual opinion. It was a deliberate statement as to facts made by the First Minister of the Crown, and couched in terms which were intended to induce, and no doubt did induce, the people of this country to accept it as an absolutely trustworthy statement.

I propose to show the House that the figures of the right honourable gentleman are incorrect; that he has treated them in a manner which is unfair to his opponents, inconsistent with his own practice, and with the interests of the public service, and that even if we assumed or admitted that his figures were correct, and his mode of treating them reasonable, he would still have committed the very serious blunder of charging twice over as against his opponents a sum of nearly ten millions of money. And I now proceed to give the House, with only so much detail as is absolutely necessary, the figures and authorities by which I support that specific statement.

The first figures to which I will direct attention are those contained in the following sentence:For the last four years of the late Government the gross expenditure of the country was 329 millions; in the last four years of the present Government it has been 342 millions.' These figures, Sir, are not correct: the gross expenditure of the last four years of this Government was not 342 millions, but at the very least 345 millions. If members will consult the Statistical Abstract' for the last fifteen years, issued by the Board of Trade in June of the present year, they will find a column giving the total gross amount of the actual public expenditure of the United Kingdom, and they will find that that column gives the gross expenditure of the last four years at 344 millions.

But they will also find that that figure needs correction. Down to the year 1882 the payments on account of the Military and Naval services which were defrayed out of Extra Receipts were included in the total of the national expenditure. But in 1883 only the arrears, about 500,000l., of those payments were so included, and in 1884 they were omitted altogether. This change in the mode of keeping the public accounts was authorised by an order of the Treasury issued VOL. XVI.-No. 94. 4 A

in 1881 in consequence of a Report made in that year by the Committee of Public Accounts. But that Committee is certainly not responsible for the way in which their recommendation has been carried out.

I find at paragraph 13 of their Report the following words:"Your Committee learn with satisfaction that the Treasury have in view the adoption of independent measures by which Parliament may be duly informed of any material variations in the state of the balances of the stocks of those departments.' It is obvious that if no such information is given to Parliament it will be in the power of the Military and Naval authorities dangerously to reduce their stock of material in order to defray expenses for which Parliament has given no authority. But so far as I can discover, the independent measures which were then promised by the Treasury have never been taken at all. Again, on the 5th of April, 1883, the right honourable gentleman the Member for Westminster (Mr. W. H. Smith) suggested that it was desirable that the finance accounts should show the amount of the extra receipts now taken in aid of the Army and Navy expenditure; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Childers) said that the suggestion was a very proper one, and added, these amounts will be shown in the return.'

I have, Sir, before me a copy of the Finance Accounts for the year ending March 1884, presented to Parliament in July of this year, and there is no trace in that account of this item of Extra Receipts, and no information given as to the Military and Naval expenditure which has been defrayed out of sums not voted by Parliament. But, Sir, whether the Treasury order of 1884 be right or wrong, there can be no question that payments made for the Military and Naval services out of moneys obtained by the sale of stores or horses, from the purchase of discharges, or from the rents of the lands and buildings which are let by the Naval and Military authorities, are just as much part of the national expenditure, and require just as much to be brought under the cognisance and control of Parliament, as if they were defrayed out of money raised by taxation; and the only way of ascertaining the gross expenditure of the last four years is to add to the expenditure shown upon page 7 the sum which under that order of 1881 has been kept out of the accounts. I do not know how to find out what that sum exactly is, but it amounts at the very least to 1 million. Thus the gross expenditure of those years was 33 millions more than the figures given by the right honourable gentleman.

The fact is, Sir, that the right honourable gentleman has taken the figures for the last four years from the table on page 11 of the Statistical Abstract. But that table does not profess to give the gross expenditure; its heading states that it is revised so as to exclude the

1 Hansard, 277, 1513.

payments made from the Army and Navy extra receipts.' And I need scarcely point out that a table from which payments to the amount of 850,000l. per annum are excluded cannot be a table of gross expenditure.

But the right honourable gentleman having gone to the wrong table does not accept the figures of that table for both sides of his account. The Liberal expenditure there given in the line of 'total expenditure' is rather more than 342 millions, but the Conservative expenditure is given as 3263 millions and not 329. Thus there is a balance against the Liberal Government of 15 millions. The right honourable gentleman reduces this to thirteen millions by adding to the Conservative expenditure the amount which in their four years of office was expended out of loans raised for the erection of Fortifications and Barracks. I dispute, Sir, the justice of charging that against the Conservative Government. The scheme of raising loans for this expenditure was devised by a Liberal Government in which the right honourable gentleman held the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer twenty-four years ago, and it happened that the last year of that expenditure was also the last year of the existence of the late Government.

The Conservative Government were not the authors of the scheme, and the expenditure was in the nature of capital expenditure, which could not with any reason be charged against the accounts of the year in which it is incurred. And it is clear from the mode in which the accounts have been kept, from the fact that at page 7, and again at page 11, those amounts are excluded from the statement of annual expenditure, that it has never been considered reasonable that they should be charged as part of the ordinary expenditure of each year.

But, Sir, as against the right honourable gentleman, I have upon this point the strongest of all authorities, and that is his own declaration and practice.

I have said that the right honourable gentleman was Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Act was passed in 1860 which authorised the raising of these loans. In the year 1861 he, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, made his financial statement to the House, and I find in. it the following passage:

The expenditure which was estimated and provided for in the regular votes for the year, and entirely apart from the Act which was passed towards the close of the session, for erecting with borrowed money certain fortifications, amounted to 73,564,000l.; and, inasmuch as the Act relating to fortifications was by common consent treated as a matter entirely distinct from the ordinary financial arrangements of the year, I shall not further refer to it, except casually on one or two points, or in any manner include its provisions in the statement I have to make to-night.

From that year, Sir, down to the year 1880, the expenditure upon Fortifications and Barracks out of loans has never by any Chancellor of the Exchequer been included in his statements to the House of

Commons as part of the expenditure either of the previous year or of the year for which he was asking Parliament to make provision.

The years from 1861 to 1864 were years of memorable finance. The right honourable gentleman was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his Budget speeches in those years, to three of which I listened from the Reporters' Gallery of this House, were considered so important that they were republished in the volume I now hold in my hands. In neither of those years did the right honourable gentleman include in the expenditure of the year the sum raised for Fortifications, although those sums were considerable; and when at the end of the four years he summed up the result of the finances of that period, he mentioned the 2,070,000l. which had been spent upon Fortifications, and mentioned it as 'special separate expenditure' which he did not take into calculation until he had to deal with the balance of debt. There is a later authority still from the right honourable gentleIn the year 1880 he returned to the Exchequer, and on the 4th of April, 1881, he brought forward his Budget. He said, 'I find that the expenditure for the year 1879-80 was 84,105,000l., and for the year 1881, 83,108,000l.' If honourable members will look at the Statistical Abstract they will find that that amount of 84,105,000l. did not include a quarter of a million which had been spent upon Fortifications, but which the right honourable gentleman at that time, true to the consistent practice which he himself had established and defended, did not include as part of the expenditure of that year.

man.

But, Sir, this expenditure ceased in 1880. The charges, which amounted to 2 millions in the last four years of the Conservative Government, have in the last four years not been raised by loan, and have only amounted in these years to 200,000l., and in the difficulty of making any defence for his great expenditure the right honourable gentleman takes advantage of this, and reversing the practice which he himself had followed during all those years, adds the expenditure on Fortifications to the ordinary expenditure of the years 1877-80 to improve the state of his account against the Conservative party.

But, Sir, even with Fortifications added there was a balance of 13 millions against the right honourable gentleman which in some way he had to get rid of. It happens that during the last four years the cost of what I may call the Revenue Services has very largely increased. During the four years of the Conservative Government the administration of these services cost 31 millions, during the last four years it has cost 35 millions.

In ordinary circumstances the right honourable gentleman would not have been very proud of this result; but in the exigencies of his position, he seized upon it with delight, and proceeded to reduce the balance against him by 33 millions by deducting what he calls the

2 Financial Statements, 1861-4 (Murray).