There is a proverb that “good wine needs no bush.” The Chancellor’s efforts to convince his victims of the comfort of the plaster which is blistering them are almost pathetic. But surely it is another proof, if one were needed, of the weakness of his cause. A local laundry owner has been receiving six pounds a week, lecturing, in Devonshire of all places, on the blessedness of the Act as experienced by himself and staff. One of our district nurses, a delightful sturdy North Country woman, was “approached” as to whether she would undertake, for a consideration, to use her persuasiveness with her patients and make them see how much they were benefited by the stamp tax. She declined with a heat that may have astonished the emissary.
It must indeed be a little difficult to make, say, a struggling greengrocer understand the debt of gratitude he owes to the law which constrains him to pay fourpence a week for the assistant he can so ill afford as it is and mulct that discontented youth of threepence! More especially when baker and grocer charge him more to cover their own losses.
The obvious remedy, says Mr. Lloyd George, is for the greengrocer to raise the prices in his town! He does; and somehow it doesn’t work. Being in a poor district and all his patrons being poor, they buy less from him, and he buys less from them.
“But look at the comfort in sickness!” It is tiresome, it almost seems like putting bad will into it, that the greengrocer’s wife should develop consumption before the first stone of any sanatorium is ready!
Now, that prosperous, contented class, the labourer on the great estate, a man who lives on his lord’s lands, if not rent free, very nearly so, with wood and garden produce, potatoes, milk and what not, and steady employment all the year round, he is to be benefited—save the mark! A “minimum wage,” cheap housing, the fixed hours, the sacred half-holiday, it sounds so plausible! The propagandist is volubly at work. “No wonder,” as the young Squire we have recently visited once ruefully said to us, “my decent, contented, God-fearing villagers were turned in a couple of hours into shrieking, blaspheming lunatics by such a gospel, preached with forcible arguments in the public-house.”