It is no good talking about "holidays from taxation" and imagining you
can get rid of this thing easily; you won't. We are still in the war
financially. There is the same need of the true national spirit and
heroism as there was then. Thus hard facts may ultimately force us to
some such expedient as the levy, but we should not accept it
light-heartedly, or regard it as an obvious panacea. Perhaps in two or
three years we may tell whether economic conditions are stable enough to
rob it of its worst evils. The question whether the burden of rapidly
relieving debt by this means in an instalment levy over a decade is
actually lighter than the sinking fund method, depends on the relation
of the drop in prices over the short period to the drop over the ensuing
period, with a proper allowance for discount--at the moment an insoluble
problem. I cannot yet with confidence join those who, on purely economic
and non-political grounds, commend the scheme and treat it as "good
business for the income-tax payer."




FREE TRADE

BY RT. HON. J.M. ROBERTSON

P.C.; President of National Liberal Federation since 1920; M.P. (L.),
Tyneside Division, Northumberland, 1906-18; Parliamentary Secretary to
Board of Trade, 1911-15.


Mr. Robertson said:--At an early stage of the war Mr. H.G. Wells
published a newspaper article to the effect that while we remained Free