ved, this country will not be
unwilling, and will certainly not be unable to support.

Well, but what have the Conservative Party got to say about it? Have
they any right to complain of the taxes which are necessary for the
maintenance of our naval power? Do we not see that they are ever
exerting themselves to urge still greater expenditure upon the nation?
He is a poor sort of fellow, a penny-plain-twopence-coloured kind of
patriot who goes about shouting for ships, and then grudges the money
necessary to build them. And when Mr. Balfour tells us that "gigantic
sacrifices" are required, and that those gigantic sacrifices "must
begin now," and then at the same time objects to the taxes by which
the Government proposes to raise the money, he puts himself in a very
queer position.

I have dealt with two of the causes which have led to our demand for
further revenue--old-age pensions and the navy. Upon neither of them
have the Conservative Party any ground for attacking us. What is the
third? Ah, gentlemen, I agree that there is one cause of the
prospective deficit for which we are budgeting for which the
Conservative Party is in no way responsible. I mean the decline in the
consumption of alcoholic liquors. Nothing that they have said and
nothing that they have done has, in intention or in fact, contributed
to the drying up of that source of revenue. On the contrary, by their
legislation, by the views they have taken of the rights of the
licensed trade, by their resistance to every measure of temperance
reform, by their refusal even to discuss in the House of Lords the
great Licensing Bill of last year, by their association with the
brewers and with the liquor traffic generally, they have done all they
could--I do them the justice to admit it--to maintain the Customs and
Excise from alcoholic liquors at the highest level. If the habits of
the people, under the influences of a wider culture, of variety, of
comfort, of brighter lives, and of new conceptions, have steadily
undergone a beneficent elevation and amelioration, it has been in
spite of every obstacle that wealth and rank and vested interest could
interpose.

The money has to be found. There is no Party in the State who can
censure us because of that. Our proposals for enlarging the public
revenue are just and fair to all classes. They will not, in spite of
all these outcries you hear nowadays, sensibly alter the comfort or
status, or even the elegance of any c