Karl Marx

The Paper Tax.—The Emperor’s Letter.

From the English.

[*New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 6030, August 22, 1860]

London, August 7, 1860

The great faction fight in the sitting which took place yesterday evening in a full House of Commons proved a failure from the standpoint of drama, although from the ministerial standpoint it was a triumph. Mr. Gladstone’s resolutions to reduce the paper duty to the level of the excise—a small surcharge being added to compensate for the occasional drawbacks of the excise—were carried by a majority of 33. In the Commons everything went as desired. There was an arena, and there were gladiators with their adherents behind them, but there was no audience worth mentioning. Before the battle began its outcome was known and its bulletin proclaimed. Hence the indifference of the public. The coalition parties which compose the so-called Great Liberal Party notoriously hold the majority in Parliament, so that a defeat of the Cabinet could only have come about through a split in the ranks of the majority. This point, however, had been settled in Lord Palmerston’s official residence, to which he had invited the Liberal members of every shade. The proposal itself emanated from the Manchester party of the Ministry, and Lord Palmerston had only succeeded in gaining the support of Messrs. Gladstone and Milner Gibson by promising to make Mr. Gladstone’s resolution a Cabinet question. He had deceived them by his handling of the proposal to repeal the paper duty. This time they had tied him down to a definite course of conduct. The actual Whigs were the only fraction of the majority suspected of harbouring treacherous designs. But the sharp voice of their master and the threat of a new dissolution of Parliament hanging over their heads sufficed to bring them back within the bounds of discipline. Thus, many hours before the curtain rose, all London was informed of the exact result of the party struggle, and, apart from the *habitués* in the strangers’ gallery, no one had any interest in attending the sham fight in St. Stephen’s. It was, in fact, a rather silly affair, enlivened only by the fluent eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and the highly finished argumentation of Sir Hugh Cairns. Mr. Gladstone attempted to represent the opposition to his bill as a last desperate step of the system of protection against free trade. When he sat down, the cheers that drowned his closing words seemed to hail him as the true head of the Liberal Party, whose despotic master Lord Palmerston is by no means beloved. On the Conservative side, Sir Hugh Cairns proved, by logical reasoning and with great analytical ability, that the reduction of the paper duty to the level of the excise was in no way required by the commercial treaty with France. His opponent, Sir Richard Bethell, the Whigs’ Crown lawyer, was tasteless enough to take umbrage at his rival’s success, to sneer at Sir Hugh’s “forensic eloquence,” and thereby to draw a regular volley of Tory interjections down upon his own faithful head.

Now that the great faction fight of the session is over, whole crowds of honourable members will certainly leave the House, so that Lord Palmerston, by the mere process of exhaustion, may now succeed in carrying every little bill that is dear to his heart—i.e., the monstrous India Bill for amalgamating the local European army with the British army. If a fresh striking proof were needed of how deeply parliamentarism has sunk in England, this India Bill and its treatment in the House of Commons would supply it. Every one in the House who has authority and experience in Indian affairs opposed the bill. The majority not only confessed their utter ignorance, but also betrayed their dark suspicion regarding the ulterior intentions of the framers of this measure. They had to admit that the bill had been smuggled into Parliament under false pretences, that the most important papers, indispensable for an accurate assessment of the case, had been fraudulently withheld, that the Minister for India (Sir Charles Wood) had introduced the bill despite the unanimous protest of the Council of India—a protest which, in open breach of the new constitution granted to India in 1858, he had failed to lay before Parliament—and, finally, that the Cabinet had not even attempted to give any reason why, at the end of the session and after all important questions had been withdrawn, a bill was being rammed through the House of Commons with such indecent haste—a bill that indeed radically altered the British constitution by a huge increase in the patronage of the Crown and by the creation of an army that would become independent in every practical respect of the voting of supplies. Still, this bill may now be carried, since the heads of both factions have, it appears, arrived at a secret understanding with the Court.

Louis Napoleon’s letter to his beloved Persigny continues to form the chief topic of conversation in England and across the Channel. It seems that the protest of the Porte against the Syrian expedition, as originally planned between France and Russia, was at first strongly supported by Austria and Prussia, while Lord Palmerston, who had just singled out Louis Napoleon as the great object of British suspicion on the occasion of the fortification debates, could do nothing but throw his weight into the scale in favour of Turkey and the German powers. It seems, moreover, that the man of December is somewhat frightened, not only by the dictatorial tone which Russia has assumed, but still more by the sneers circulating in the salons of the “anciens partis” and the quiet whispering in the faubourgs about the “alliance cosaque” (“alliance with the Cossacks”).

To make the latter palatable to Paris, a far greater confusion must supervene. Amid these tormenting circumstances and in a mood of evident uneasiness, Louis Napoleon wrote his letter, several passages of which are strongly perfumed with the scent of the ridiculous.

An Englishman may allow himself an honest laugh at the phrase addressed by Louis Napoleon to Lord Palmerston: “Let us come to an understanding, loyally and with honest trust, like honourable people, as we are, and not like thieves who mean to trick one another”; but the exquisitely bad taste, together with the effect of ridicule in the original French: “Entendons nous loyalement comme d’honnêtes gens, que nous sommes, et non comme des larrons, qui veulent se duper mutuellement”, can only be appreciated by a French ear. No Frenchman can read this passage without being reminded of a similar sentence that occurs in the celebrated play “Robert Macaire”.

I shall add a few data for a comparison between the French and the English state budgets. According to the provisional or estimated budget, the total revenue of France for the year 1860 is set down at 1,825 million francs, or £73,000,000, derived from the following sources:

|  | £ |
|---|---|
| I. Direct taxes, land, houses, personal property | 18,800,000 |
| II. Registration (stamp duties and domains) | 14,300,000 |
| III. Forests, woods, and fisheries | 1,500,000 |
| IV. Customs and salt duties | 9,100,000 |
| V. Indirect taxes (excise, etc.) | 19,500,000 |
| VI. Post Office | 2,300,000 |
| VII. Miscellaneous | 7,500,000 |

The English revenue in 1859 (the financial accounts for 1860 not yet published) was as follows (in both cases only round figures are given):

|  | £ |
|---|---|
| I. Taxes (including income tax) | 10,000,000 |
| II. Stamp duties | 8,250,000 |
| III. Crown lands | 420,000 |
| IV. Customs | 24,380,000 |
| V. Excise | 18,500,000 |
| VI. Post Office | 3,200,000 |
| VII. Miscellaneous | 2,100,000 |

The comparative public expenditure of the two countries was as follows:

|  | France | England |
|---|---|---|
|  | £ | £ |
| Interest on national debt | 22,400,000 | 28,500,000 |
| Army and navy | 18,600,000 | 22,500,000 |
| Civil list of the Crown | 1,000,000 | 400,000 |
| Cost of collecting the revenue | 8,000,000 | 4,500,000 |
| Other expenses | 23,000,000 | 9,000,000 |
| Total: | 73,000,000 | 65,000,000 |

From the last table it may be seen that the interest on the national debt in Bonapartist France is rapidly approaching the British level; that army and navy cost less under continental centralisation than under insular oligarchy; that a Louis Napoleon requires two and a half times as much for his private expenses as a British sovereign; and finally that, in a bureaucratic country like France, the cost of collecting the revenue swells to an amount disproportionate to the revenue itself.