I imagine that if Sir William Harcourt had been asked by what special achievement he would choose his worth as politician, statesman and financier to be measured, he would have selected the Death Duties Budget. Although I hated the Bill I am bound to admit that to pilot it through the Commons was a great effort. It was full of highly contentious matter, some of it as objectionable to his own party as to ours. It was not the sort of measure that a powerful minister with a servile majority at his back can bludgeon through a House that has never tamely submitted to bullying. Even now that members are paid there have been signs, comforting signs, that an English Member of Parliament still recognizes the dignity and the self-satisfaction of a conscious independence. Harcourt was conciliatory and diplomatic, but he was as firm as a rock. Personally, as I have said, I disliked the Bill and I had the audacity to think it bad finance. It seemed to me that the fortunes of the inhabitants of a country constitute its capital, and that at every death to take away a considerable portion of the corpus of the dead man’s estate is to deplete the capital of the country. If going a step further you apply the portion so taken to the purposes of the year, you are then to that extent treating capital as income. To live upon capital can be healthy neither for a private person nor in the case of the public purse. I maintain that the sum realized out of what I held to be capital should be used not as income but for the reduction of the National Debt. I also thought and still think that an estate should be immune from death duty for a certain number of years—otherwise two or more deaths in rapid succession must have a ruinously unjust effect upon estates—and indeed be a still further injurious attack upon the capital of the country. “Then,” said my opponents, “the Bill would cease to be a ‘Death Duties Bill.’” “Bless my soul,” I answered, “with what equanimity should I behold that disaster!” In short, I was told that I was wrong, that I knew nothing about finance, and so I held my peace. But I am glad to see that after all these years there are now many men who are at one with the views of my ignorance. Lord Milner was pretty generally accredited with having been at Sir William Harcourt’s elbow and it was known that it was he who worked out the details of the Bill; some people went so far as to say that he inspired it. Lord Milner had been at that time Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue for two years, and he was the authority whom, above all others, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was bound to consult. I am inclined to think that the idea of the death duties was the Chancellor’s own conception, which it became the not uncongenial duty of Lord Milner as a civil servant to work into shape.