I do not think that there is any great country in the world where there are so many strong forces of virtue and vitality as there are in our own country.  But there is scarcely any country in the world where there is so little organisation.  Look at our neighbour and friendly rival Germany.  I see that great State organised for peace and organised for war to a degree to which we cannot pretend.  We are not organised as a nation, so far as I can see, for anything except party politics, and even for purposes of party politics we are not organised so well as they are in the United States.  A more scientific, a more elaborate, a more comprehensive social organisation is indispensable to our country if we are to surmount the trials and stresses which the future years will bring.  It is this organisation that the policy of the Budget will create.  It is this organisation that the loss of the Budget will destroy.

But, we are told, “it presses too heavily upon the land-owning classes.”  I have heard it said that in the French Revolution, if the French nobility, instead of going to the scaffold with such dignity and fortitude, had struggled and cried and begged for mercy, even the hard hearts of the Paris crowd would have been melted, and the Reign of Terror would have come to an end.  There is happily no chance of our aristocracy having to meet such a fate in this loyal-hearted, law-abiding, sober-minded country.  They are, however, asked to discharge a certain obligation.  They are asked to contribute their share to the expenses of the State.  That is all they are asked to do.  Yet what an outcry, what tribulation, what tears, what wrath, what weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and all because they are asked to pay their share.

One would suppose, to listen to them, that the whole of the taxation was being raised from, or was about to be raised from the owners of agricultural estates.  What are the facts?  Nearly half the taxation of the present Budget is raised by the taxation of the luxuries of the working classes.  Are they indignant?  Are they crying out?  Not in the least.  They are perfectly ready to pay their share, and to pay it in a manly way, and two hundred thousand of them took the trouble to go to Hyde Park the other day in order to say so.

What are the facts about agricultural land?  It is absolutely exempt from the operations of the new land taxation so long as agricultural land is worth no more for other purposes than it is for agricultural purposes:  that is to say, so long as agricultural land is agricultural land and not urban or suburban land, it pays none of the new land taxation.  It is only when its value for building purposes makes its continued agricultural use wasteful and uneconomic, it is only when it becomes building land and not agricultural land, and when because of that change it rises enormously in price and value—­it is only then that it contributes under the new land taxation its share to the public of the increment value which the public has given to it.