country but made no attempt to apply even a moderate dose of the true remedy. And yet the bad eminence that he then reached as a War Chancellor defaulting in his evident duty was perhaps overtopped by Mr. Bonar Law in 1917 when he brought in a Budget which was expected to add £1,600,000,000 to the debt and added only £6,000,000 to permanent taxation. (He got £20,000,000 more from Excess Profits tax, which was then supposed to be an impost which would cease with the war.) Which of these two efforts was the worse, we may leave the two champions who achieved them to decide. Mr. Lloyd George did not tax at all. But he had an excuse (rather weak on its legs) in that he had taxed a good deal in the Budget that he brought in in the previous autumn, and a still feebler one in the belief, which most of us then cherished, that the war would be short. Mr. Bonar Law, whose contribution to taxation was so pitiful in comparison to his addition to debt, had neither of these excuses. On the contrary, between his rule and that of Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. McKenna had really tried to do all that he could to finance by taxation. The effort that he made was not too heroic, brilliant as it was when compared with those of our other War Chancellors. His Budget
