The Government meant to obtain in the current year three distinct things: (1) the maintenance intact of the provisions for necessitous school areas, feeding of school children, nursing, measures against tuberculosis, and national insurance; (2) statutory authority for a more generous system of payment of grants during the next financial year; (3) statutory authority for a new system of valuation separating site from improvement value. Anyone who voted for the amendment was tending to put off social reform. The subsequent speeches exhibited in various ways the dissent among a section of Liberals from the proposals of the Government. Eventually Mr. Bonar Law rose. After saying that the change in the Budget was really due, not to the Speaker's ruling, but to the Liberal dissentients, he remarked that the plan for relieving local rating conflicted with the Report of the Committee, and asked why, if the separate valuation of site value was so simple, it was not put into the Bills? Because Ministers generally would only agree to an inquiry. He then elaborately attacked Mr. Lloyd George's financial methods. The Chancellor ignored regularity in procedure; he utterly failed to control expenditure; he ignored the maxim that taxes should not be imposed which involved an excessive cost of collection; and he and other new Liberals promised, not retrenchment, but extravagance. With the Chancellor of the Exchequer extravagance was a principle. He was trying to use Budgets to correct the inequalities of wealth. That could not be done by taxation. The Chancellor's theory of life was based on the strictest system of predestination. It was mere luck whether one was industrious and thrifty or an idler and wastrel, and so the duty of the former was to support the latter. Mr. Bonar Law closed by warnings against the excessive taxation of the rich and against depleting the resources of the country in regard to tax revenue and loans in time of war. The Attorney-General, in the course of a brief reply, remarked that nothing was now heard of Tariff Reform; and the amendment was then rejected, but only by 303 votes to 265, and the second reading agreed to. One Liberal voted with the Opposition, as did seven Independent Nationalists; thirty-five Labour members abstained, and it was only the Nationalist vote that saved the Government from defeat. It was felt that they, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in particular, had received a severe check; and the confusion caused by the provisional collection "at source" of the 1_d._ on the income tax now dropped was only increased by the instructions sent out by the Treasury.