The arguments against the Budget were characteristic of their plutocratic origin. The class which had used Imperialist sentiment in the interest of its foreign investments, and had proposed at once to finance its military exploits and to increase its wealth by taxation of the common people, naturally resented this increase of its own fiscal burdens. The super-tax on incomes of more than L5,000 a year was described as a penalty upon thrift and enterprise, and it was urged with most patriotic zeal that these appropriations of surplus wealth would produce unemployment. The answer to the first argument is that incomes and accumulations of a size to be affected by the new taxes are not produced by thrift, in any real sense of the word, nor will the enterprise which produces them be checked by such trifling deductions. Enterprise was as vigorous and successful fifty years ago, when L10,000 a year was a very large income, as it is now, when incomes of L50,000 and L100,000, are almost as common. A certain definite inducement is required to stimulate a man to the utmost use of his capacity for producing wealth. Beyond that limit all that he earns is sheer waste, and uneconomic remuneration which evokes no further effort. Upon that surplus, and upon that only, do the new taxes operate. The argument from unemployment is more specious. It is that, deprived of the money required for income tax and death duties, the more prosperous citizens will be compelled to dismiss some of their servants. During the discussion of the Budget, the general public learnt, for the first time, that those wealthy persons who spent money on horses and dogs, motor-cars, jewellery, and china, shooting-boxes, racing stables, and rock-gardens were animated by no selfish love of their own ease and comfort, but by a disinterested passion for providing remunerative labour for the common people. The argument was partial. It dealt only with the taxes of the Budget, and ignored the alternative taxes of Tariff Reform. The problem was to raise money. Whatever form the taxation took, it must {343} deprive the taxpayer of his power of spending money and employing labour. If L1,000 was paid by a man with L20,000 a year, his power to employ motormen and gardeners, jockeys, gamekeepers, and dealers in pictures and jewellery was reduced by precisely that amount. But if the same sum is paid by a thousand cotton operatives, their power to employ butchers, bakers, tailors, and bootmakers is equally reduced. The reduction of employment is precisely the same in each case, whether the L1,000 is taxed out of one rich man or out of a thousand poor men. But there is an infinite difference in the other consequences of the two systems of taxation. The rich man paying the L1,000 is not deprived of anything which contributes to his present efficiency, to his future security, or to his reasonable enjoyment of life.[359] The poor men paying the same sum may suffer in any one of the three ways.