Well, now, I want to ask you a question.  I daresay there are some of you who do not like this or that particular point in the Budget, who do not like some particular argument or phrase which some of us may have used in advocating or defending it.  But it is not of these details that I speak; the question I want each of you to ask himself is this:  On which side of this great battle which I have described to you, does the Budget count?  Can any of you, looking at it broadly and as a whole, looking on the policy which surrounds it, and which depends upon it, looking at the arguments by which it is defended, as well as the arguments by which it is opposed—­can any one doubt that the Budget in its essential character and meaning, in its spirit and in its practical effect, would be a tremendous reinforcement, almost like a new army coming up at the end of the day, upon the side of all those forces and influences which are fighting for the life and health and progress of our race?

In the speeches which I have made about the country since the Budget was introduced I have explained and defended in detail the special financial proposals upon which we rely to provide the revenue for the year.  You are, no doubt, generally acquainted with them.  There is the increase in the income-tax of twopence, the further discrimination between earned and unearned income, and the super-tax of sixpence on incomes of over L5,000 a year.  There are the increases in estate duties and in the legacy duties, and there are the new duties on stamps; there is the tax on motor-cars and petrol, the proceeds of which are to go to the improvement of the roads and the abatement of the dust nuisance; there are the taxes on working class indulgences—­namely, the increase in the tax on tobacco and on whisky, which enable the working man to pay his share, as indeed he has shown himself very ready to do; there are the taxes on liquor licences, which are designed to secure for the State a certain special proportion of the monopoly value created wholly by the State and with which it should never have parted; and, lastly, there are the three taxes upon the unearned increment in land, upon undeveloped land, upon the unearned increment in the reversion of leases, and then there is the tax upon mining royalties.

Now these are the actual proposals of the Budget, and I do not think that, if I had the time, I should find any great difficulty in showing you that there are many good arguments, a great volume of sound reason, which can be adduced in support of every one of these proposals.  Certainly there is no difficulty in showing that since the Budget has been introduced there has been no shock to credit, there has been no dislocation of business, there has been no setback in the beginning of that trade revival about the approach of which I spoke to you, when I was in Leicester at the beginning of the year and which there are now good reasons for believing is actually in progress.