Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [248]
It was none of these measures but a tax of one-fifth the value on “unearned increment” of land when it was sold or passed by death, plus an annual tax of a halfpenny in the pound on undeveloped land and mineral rights, which aroused the whole of the landowning class in furious resentment, as it was intended to. The land clauses required registration and valuation of property, which to the landowner was no less than the bailiff’s foot in the door, the State’s trespass on a man’s private property. Lloyd George pressed it home in public mockery and appeals to the populace as blatant as when Mark Antony wept over Caesar’s wounds. Personifying the enemy as “the Dukes,” he told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London’s East End, “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts … is just as great a terror and lasts longer.” When the Government wanted money to pay for the Dreadnoughts, he went on, “we sent the hat around among the workmen. They all brought in their coppers.” Yet when “the P.M. and I knock at the doors of Belgravia” and “ask the great landlords to give something to keep the aging miners out of the workhouse, they say, ‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper’ and they turn their dogs on us and every day you can hear them bark.… It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb bleeding and footsore through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn.”
For a minister of the Crown it was a performance that no one but Lloyd George could have given without blushing. If the Prime Minister was embarrassed by it he gave no sign, a point which disturbed King Edward, who let it be known that he “cannot understand how Asquith can tacitly allow” speeches that would “not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until the last few years.”
Furor exploded over the Budget exactly as its authors wished. Conservative leaders roared in protest. Lord Lansdowne called Lloyd George a “robber gull.” Mr. Chaplin denounced the Budget as the first step in a Socialist war against property, the Law Society declared a land tax unjust and unworkable, a meeting of City men headed by Lord Rothschild protested the valuation of property by “irresponsible tribunals” such as those which had “cost one Stuart his head and another his throne.” The Duke of Norfolk announced he would have to sell a Holbein which he had lent to the National Gallery, the Earl of Onslow put up for sale parts of his Surrey estate, and Kipling in a hysterical poem, “The City of Brass,” portrayed England riddled by hatemongers and crushed by tributes levied “on all who have toiled or striven or gathered possession,” until without a defender “it passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong surrender!” No less a Cassandra, Lord Rosebery said the measure was “not a Budget but a revolution.” Underlying it was the “deep, subtle, insidious danger of Socialism” and Socialism was the “end of everything … of faith, of family, of property, of monarchy, of Empire.” His speech, addressed to a meeting of businessmen in Glasgow, was read next morning “with the greatest joy at every country house party in England, Scotland and Wales.”
A new Labour M.P., Philip Snowden, himself one day to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, said it was necessary to make the rich poorer in order to make the poor richer and the Budget was the beginning of democratic government. Balfour retorted that “you cannot abolish poverty by abolishing riches” and “let them not associate democracy with robbery.” The Duke of Rutland, close to apoplexy, proposed that all Labour M.P.’s should be gagged. As rage mounted, the King was forced to confess that the “foolish and mean speeches and sayings” of landowners and capitalists were causing immense harm.
Everyone including the common people was aware that the Veto, not the Budget, was the stake. When Minoru won the Derby that summer one man among the cheering