for the war, what the fighter needed the people had to provide by stinting.
So it was that our Chancellors of the Exchequer had such examples set them both by friend and foe that whatever they did in the way of war taxation they were able to ascribe to an excess of virtue which made their war finance to that extent sounder than that of Germany or France. Judged by this standard of failure their achievement shone like "a good deed in a naughty world." Judged by what might have been, what ought to have been, and what was actually done in the course of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, when nearly half the cost of the war was met by taxation[1] it was not a great performance. Mr. Lloyd George was our first War Chancellor and his most ardent admirers will probably admit that he is more successful in distributing the contents of the public purse than in calling on the general tax-paying public to stint themselves in order to fill it. It is difficult to exaggerate the evil effects of the economic crime that he committed when in the Spring of 1915 he imposed no taxation whatever to meet the deficit that faced him. Most eloquently he put the facts of the financial position before theNone
- ↑ British Budgets, by Sir Bernard Mallet, p. 201.
