Sir Robert Giffen estimated some years ago that the addition to the capital wealth of the nation was at least between two hundred and three hundred millions a year.  I notice that the paid-up capital of registered companies alone, which was 1,013 millions sterling in 1893, has grown naturally and healthily to 2,123 millions sterling in 1908.  And, most remarkable of all, the figures I shall submit to you, the gross amount of income which comes under the view of the Treasury Commissioners who are charged with the collection of income-tax, was in the year 1898-9 762 millions, and it had risen from that figure to 980 millions sterling in the year 1908-9:  that is to say, that it had risen by 218 millions in the course of ten years.

From this, of course, a deduction has to be made for more efficient methods of collection.  This cannot be estimated exactly; but it certainly accounts for much less than half the increase.  Let us assume that it is a half.  The increase is therefore 109 millions.  I only wish that wages had increased in the same proportion.  When I was studying those figures I have mentioned to you I looked at the Board of Trade returns of wages.  Those returns deal with the affairs of upwards of ten millions of persons, and in the last ten years the increase in the annual wages of that great body of persons has only been about ten million pounds:  that is to say, that the increase of income assessable to income-tax is at the very least more than ten times greater than the increase which has taken place in the same period in the wages of those trades which come within the Board of Trade returns.

When we come to the question of how burdens are to be distributed, you must bear these facts and figures in mind, because the choice is severely limited.  You can tax wealth or you can tax wages—­that is the whole choice which is at the disposal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Of course I know there are some people who say you can tax the foreigner—­but I am quite sure that you will not expect me to waste your time in dealing with that gospel of quacks and creed of gulls.  The choice is between wealth and wages, and we think that, in view of that great increase in accumulated wealth which has marked the last ten years, and is the feature of our modern life, it is not excessive or unreasonable at the present stage in our national finances to ask for a further contribution from the direct taxpayers of something under eight millions a year.  That is the total of all the new taxes on wealth which our Budget imposes, and it is about equal to the cost of four of those Dreadnoughts for which these same classes were clamouring a few months ago.  And it is less than one-thirteenth of the increased income assessable to income-tax in the last ten years.