1. The first principle on which I base my financial proposals is this-that the taxation which I suggest should be imposed, while yielding in the present year not more than sufficient to meet this year's requirements, should be of such a character that it will produce enough revenue in the second year to cover the whole of our estimated liabilities for that year; and, moreover, that it will be of such an expansive character. as to grow with the growing demand of the social programme which I have sketched without involving the necessity for imposing fresh taxation in addition to what I am asking Parliament to sanction at the present time.

2. The second principle on which I base my proposals is that the tax should be of such a character as not to inflict any injury on that trade or commerce which constitutes the sources of our wealth.

3. My third principle is that all classes of the community in this financial emergency ought to be called upon to contribute. I have never been able to accept the theory of a hard-and-fast line of definite income and to say that no person below that figure can be expected to contribute a penny towards the burden connected with the government of the country. In my judg ment all should be called upon to bear their share. No voluntary association or religious and philanthropic body has ever been run on the principle of excepting any section of its membership from subscription. They all expect even the widow's mite, and it is considered not merely the duty but the privilege and the pride of all to share in the burden and the sacrifice.

A Graduated Income Tax.

Mr. Lloyd George proposes to raise £3,500,000 extra this year by increasing the rate of tax paid by rich men. He says:

I propose that the rates upon earned income in the case of persons whose total income does not exceed 3,000 should remain as at present-namely, 9d. in the pound up to £2,000 and Is. in the pound between £2,000 and £3,000. In respect of all other incomes now liable to the Is. rate I propose to raise the rate from Is. to Is. 2d.

In addition to this he proposes to levy a supertax of sixpence in the pound :

I propose to limit the tax to incomes exceeding £5,000, and to levy it upon the amount by which such incomes exceed £3,000, and at the rate of 6d. in the pound upon the amount of such excess. An income of £5,001 will thus pay in supertax 6d. in the pound on £2,001, the equivalent of an addition to the existing income-tax on the whole income of rather less than 24d. in the pound, and an income of £6,000 the equivalent of an additional 3d. The equivalent of an extra 4d. on the whole income (or a total income-tax of Is. 6d. in the pound) will only be reached when the total income amounts to £9,000, and the equivalent of an extra 5d.only when the total income amounts to 18,000. Assessments to the new tax will be based upon the returns of total income from all sources which will be required from persons assessable.

Sir H. Primrose, in his evidence before the Select Committee in 1906, estimated the number of persons in receipt of incomes over £5,000 a year to be 10,000, and their aggregate income to be 121 millions. From this it will be seen that the amount of income liable to supertax would be 90 millions.

The Increase in

Death Duties.

The Estate Duties upon small estates, of which the net principal value does not exceed £5,000, will remain at 1, 2, or 3 per cent., according to value, as at present; but between £5,000 and £1,000,000 I propose to shorten the steps and steepen the graduation. I do not propose to increase the maximum of 15 per cent., but I propose that it should be reached at £1,000,000, instead of £3,000,000. Under the new scale estates from £5,000 to £10,000 will pay 4 per cent., and those from £10,000 to £25,000, 5 per cent. The next step will be £20,000 to £40,000, and the rate 6 per cent.; the next, £40,000 to £70,000, with 7 per cent.; while estates of £70,000 to £100,000 will pay 8 per cent.; from £100,000 to £150,000, 9 per cent.; from £150,000 to £200,000, 10 per cent.; from £200,000 to £400,000, 11 per cent.; from £400,000 to £600,000, 12 per cent.; from £600,000 to £800,000, 13 per cent.; from £800,000 to £1,000,000, 14 per cent.; and above £1,000,000, 15 per cent. upon the whole of the estate.

Increase in the

The Settlement Estate Duty will be increased from 1 to 2 per cent.; and succession duties, where the beneficiary is a brother

Settlement Duties. legacy

or sister, or descendant of a brother or sister, will be raised from 3 to 5 per cent., and in the case of all other persons the rate will be a uniform 10 per cent. instead of ranging from 5 to 10 per cent. The per cent. legacy or succession duty will in future be charged on "lineals" and spouses, in cases where the estate exceeds £15,000; but in cases where the amount of the legacy, or succession, does not exceed £1,000, whatever the size of the estate from which it comes, exemption will be allowed; and it will be allowed if the legatee is a widow of the deceased, or a child under twenty-one years, if the legacy does not exceed £2,000. The rules as to valuation for purposes of Estate Duty are modified. Agricultural property is to be taken at its "market value" instead of at twenty-five years' purchase; stocks and shares are in all cases to be valued at their market prices. The period during which a gift inter vivos is liable to duty is extended to five years. Of the increased stamp duties it is not needful to speak beyond saying that they will yield £650,000, and are a very objectionable form of raising revenue

VII. IN CONCLUSION

Mr. Lloyd George may not be able to carry his Budget. He is already threatened with the opposition of the Irish, who object to pay more for their whisky, and he will of course have to encounter the utmost hostility of all the drink and other interests upon which he has laid his hand. If there be any spirit or any real backbone in the Liberal majority, they will endorse the first great constructive measure that they have had a chance of passing. All their other big bills are knifed by the Peers. Here they

have their chance. If they do not make the most of it they deserve the worst that can befall them. Mr. Lloyd George has shown courage, originality, and resourcefulness. If he should be deserted by his followers, farewell indefinitely to any progressive financial legislation. The way would then be opened for the cut-throat suicides of Tariff Reform. It is said, no doubt, that the Lords will reject the Budget and so precipitate a dissolution. If they did it is not. a dissolution they would precipitate, but a Revolution.

Meanwhile it will be well for all those who believe in progress and who cherish courage and initiative in statesmen, to support the demands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. For, as Mr. George said, "the money thus raised is to be expended first of all in ensuring the inviolability of our shores. It is raised also in order not merely to relieve but to prevent unmerited distress within those shores. It is essential that we should make every necessary pro

WALDORF HOTEL

MORMING P2 OFFICES

DWYCH

THEATRE

ALRE

STRAN DCITY

MOWBRAY HOUSE

NORFOLK

TEMPLE STATION

EMBANKMENT

How to find our New Offices.

This little sketch map clearly indicates the position of the new offices of the REVIEW OF REVIEWS. Kingsway, it will be seen, connects Holborn with the Strand and the Embankment. Mowbray House is on the Embankment; Bank Buildings are in Kingsway, between the Waldorf Hotel and the Law Courts.

MA

STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

The close of last month brought as usual the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-on-Avon, which, despite the distractions of a by-election furiously contested between three candidates, was not less exhilarating and inspiring than of yore. Mr. Frank R. Benson and his company, who have presented twenty one plays and have given twenty-eight performances, brought out "Cymbeline" on St. George's Day. Owing to an objection taken to this play by the late Mrs. Flower, it had never before been performed in the Memorial Theatre. A prejudice respected during life may be disregarded after death, so that "Cymbeline" was added to the long list of Shakespeare's plays performed at Stratford. "Titus Andronicus" and "Pericles" are the only dramas included, rightly or wrongly, in Shakespeare's works which have not been played by the Benson company at the Memorial Theatre.

REPERTORY THEATRES.

Stratford deserves special recognition this year, because the ideas which it stands for are now commanding almost universal homage. The ambitious National Memorial Theatre, for which the Committee is asking the sum of £500,000, is but an attempt to do on a Brobdignagian scale in the Babylon on the Thames what the Memorial Theatre has been doing at Stratford for a quarter of a century without flare of trumpets in the newspapers or otherwise. And the two new schemes for founding a Repertory Theatre-those of Mr. Frohman and Mr. Trench-what are they but the echoes of the appeal which Mr. Benson has been addressing insistently to the nation for years past? That Mr. Frohman should propose a Repertory Theatre is natural and satisfactory. The man of business appears when the work of the apostle is accomplished. In things dramatical as in others the time comes when "the multitude makes virtue of the faith it has denied," and dividends are earned by exploiting ideas which in an earlier stage spelt bankruptcy.

PLOUGHING WITH ANOTHER'S HEIFER.

The Repertory Theatre project with which the name of Mr. Trench is associated is a very different matter. Mr. Benson has laboured; why should not Mr. Trench enter into his labours and reap the harvest which Mr. Benson has sowed? There is no law against it, and, moreover, is it not the custom of the world? Mr. Trench is in the fashion, and after

all, as Carlyle once said, "Do we think of Cadmus when we write with letters?" Still, if the inventor of the alphabet were alive, maybe some of the more chivalrous amongst us might sometime, somehow, have acknowledged our indebtedness if only with a passing word. It is idle wasting words over what will probably be as unsubstantial as the fabric of a vision, and perhaps, after all, the cynical coolness with which the efforts of pioneers were ignored in the prospectus was ordained in order to dull the regret with which we shall have to chronicle its passing.

THE SOUTHWARK COMMEMORATION.

We owe to Dr. R., W. Leftwich the boon of a new form of Shakespeare Commemoration, in the shape of a Shakespeare Day special service in Southwark Cathedral. Shakespeare spent the creative years of his life in the shadow of the church. He was compelled by Act of Parliament to attend its services. His brother Edmund was buried there, as well as the poets Gower and Dyer, and the dramatists Fletcher and Massinger. Dr. Leftwich conceived the idea of commemorating Shakespeare's birthday by a celebration in the Cathedral a couple of years ago. At first his idea was regarded as impracticable; but this year. he had the good fortune of seeing it triumphantly carried out. The success was only marred by the excessive crowding of the public to the first of what will now become one of the most interesting annual Shakesperian functions. Miss Ellen Terry, Mrs. Kendall, and Mrs. Forbes Robertson decorated the Shakespeare window with the flowers of Ophelia and Perdita. The order of service was original. The service began at 3.30 in the afternoon with an organ recital by Mr. E. T. Cook, from Orlando Gibbons and Byrd, Shakespeare's contemporaries. The first hymn was specially written by Mr. A. C. Benson to music from Day's Psalter (1560). After the Collects, a Lesson from Wisdom viii., and an anthem, “Let us now praise famous Men," Mr. Alfred Austin read "An Ode to Shakespeare's Birthday," all of his own composition. After a musical setting by Callcott of Shakespeare's lines "Look how the floor of Heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold," Mr. Forbes Robertson delivered an address from the Lectern on Shakespeare; after which Canon Rawnsley's hymn was sung to the tune of " Ein' Feste Burg" (1530). A collection was taken for the erection of a Shakespeare memorial in the Cathedral. Every one who was present agreed that the Commemoration must henceforth be an annual fixture, of which Dr. Leftwich will gladly take note.

In London the run of "The School for Scandal ” at His Majesty's led Mr. Tree to postpone his usual celebration of Shakespeare's Week till a more con

venient season. Mr. Matheson Lang has been playing "Hamlet" as a popular melodrama at the Lyceum.

SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT SCENERY.

At the Court Theatre Mr. and Mrs. George Laurence are making a bold attempt to present Shakespeare to the public without the more or less adventitious advantages of scenery. The stage is surrounded by dark curtains and the scene is introduced by a pretty page, who precedes the appearance of the actors with the announcement "This is a street in Verona," "This is Capulet's orchard," leaving imagination to do the rest. The experiment began in Easter week and is to be continued till Whitsuntide. The performances are all matinées with the exception of Saturday evenings. Mr. and Mrs. Laurence have got together a competent and painstaking company who have responded splendidly to the increased strain that is thrown upon the actor when he has to create the illusion by his words and gestures without help from scene painter or stage carpenter. They opened with "As You Like It," followed it up with "Romeo and Juliet"-the only one of the series which I witnessed-and then gave in succession the "Merchant of Venice," "Twelfth Night," and 66 Hamlet."

The final scene in Capulet's tomb gained beauty. and pathos by the absence of accessories. But in Capulet's orchard the balcony from which Juliet addressed Romeo was invisible to the gods in the gallery, and even to the upper circle. Mr. Haviland was admirable as Mercutio. Mrs. E. H. Brooke made a most popular Nurse. Tybalt, Friar John, and the Apothecary were excellent. Mr. Laurence was an attractive Romeo. Miss Fay Davis struggled gallantly against the almost impossible task of the mature woman impersonating a little chit of fourteen. "THE EARTH AND THE DAILY MAIL."

It is to descend from the faerie fields of Romance and Poetry to a very banal plain to leave Shakespeare and turn to "The Earth" and "The Devil." But more people witnessed the modern plays than those who went to the Court to pay homage to Shakespeare. Of the two plays "The Earth," which Miss Lena Ashwell put on the stage at Kingsway, is much the cleverer, although it makes its appeal to a more limited class. "The Devil" owed a certain amount of advertising which it did not deserve to an inexplicable and combined attack upon the play by all the newspapers, some of whom even invoked the intervention of the Censor! It was a crude and somewhat tawdry representation of the Enemy of Mankind in his familiar rôle as Tempter. But it contained nothing to justify the outcry made against it.

"The Earth is much enjoyed by those who, rightly or wrongly, persist in seeing in it a skit upon Harmsworth and the Daily Mail. "An Englishman's Home" the audience always talk of the Germans, so at the Kingsway no one speaks

not

of Sir Felix Janion; it is always Harmsworth, Northcliffe or Kennedy Jones. Half of "The Earth" is clever, a realistic portraiture, not much exaggerated, of the actual happenings in any up-todate newspaper office. The other half is unreal, stagey, libellous and fantastic. Lord Northcliffe is a blackmailer, and the suggestion that his counterpart of the first act could stoop to the ineffable blackguardism of using information acquired as a host in order to ruin his guest, merely in order to defeat a Bill in Parliament, is preposterous. Lord Northcliffe would have scorned to do such a thing even to smash the Soap Trust-on which much advertising depended. It is quite unthinkable that he could even have felt tempted to proceed to such infamy merely to defeat a legislative proposal which would in no way have affected the advertising revenue of "The Earth."

There is no attempt to identify the baronet proprietor editor of "The Earth" with Lord Northcliffe by the make-up of the actor. But the spirit of the play is the spirit of Carmelite House, always barring the blackmail excrescence. The keen alertness of the chief director, the enthusiastic and obedient devotion of the manager, the telephone in every room and even in the garden, the ruthless infliction of dismissal on those who do not make the paper go, the immense circulation, the series of related papers, the unsparing use of the gramophone press, are all so characteristic, that the imputation of blackmailing practices to the journalistic hero jars upon us almost as if it were a personal libel. Of course everything is exaggerated for the purposes of caricature. But the caricature is not so extreme as to disguise the like

ness.

In nothing is "The Earth" so true to nature as when it represents the Napoleon of the Press on the morning of his victory over the Sweating Bill. The art of forgetting the things that are past and pressing forward to those that are before was surely never more effectively illustrated than when, on the very day on which the world is ringing with the announcement of his victory over the Government, he cruelly silences the jubilations of his staff over a thing that is past, and summons them to listen to his new ideathat of an "Infants' Encyclopedia," in which every thing in the world is to be illustrated in colours and described in the five chief languages of the world-English, French, German, Japanese and Esperanto. That is Harmsworth all over, and a very great compliment it is to the presiding genius of Carmelite Street.

"THE DEVIL."

At the Adelphi "The Devil" is staged more after the fashion of a melodrama than of the ancient mystery play. Why is it that alike in melodrama and mystery play the grim figure of the Enemy of Mankind always supplies the comic relief? In the miracle plays Judas was always in danger of degenerating into a buffoon. There must be some subtle