The separation of improvement values from site values was regarded as insane, but it worked well in British Columbia. When the Colonies proposed to tax corn they were our kith and kin; when they taxed land they were lunatics. The abolition of the sugar tax had been suggested, but the penny was wanted, and abolition would mean an increase next year on the income tax. Those who voted against the Bill would be voting against means to increase the efficiency of the people and make a stronger and more enduring State. Mr. Austen Chamberlain (U.) said that the Chancellor's speech gave no idea of the Bill, and he seemed not to have read the amendment. The relief of rates being of the utmost urgency, it was dropped, with trifling exceptions, for the current year, and made contingent for the next year on the passage of other Bills and a system of valuation of which the main features were still obscure. The proposals as to settled estate duty broke a bargain. Social reform could not be conducted regardless of its cost, and it was only on domestic expenditure that economies were possible. After protesting against the attack on Mr. Cassel for defending the rules and practice of the House, he said it was the conditions imposed by the Chancellor which made it impossible to give the strangled municipalities relief. Were the grants intended to relieve rates or to extend municipal activity? He recalled the Chancellor's speech at Ipswich, and described his electioneering as a crude form of bribery of a kind, for a less serious instance of which a Liberal Whip had been obliged to apologise.[1] He protested against centralised control as tending to extravagance, and attacked the valuation scheme. It was the Chancellor who by his attacks on property, adopted "the methods of the Eastern taxgatherer." He was using his conditions of relief to cover up the mess he had made.