Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/151

 1899.] Sale of Food and Drugs Bill. [143

net tithe rent charge after the deductions made — that is, after he has paid these heavy rates. Of course it-is possible to put it in that way and fancy that thus you get rid of the injustice, but I doubt if any man in this House would admit it to be just that deductions should be made before his net income could be obtained, and that he should have nothing to do with these, and that he would have no right to complain though tremendous fines were imposed, for he could only claim his net income. " The Earl of Kimberley said it could not be denied that the bill pro- posed to place upon ratepayers generally a charge for the benefit of the clergy ; in other words, whereas a large fund had been appropriated to the use of the different local authorities, a certain portion of it was now to be diverted from that fund — that was to say, taken out of the pockets of the ratepayers who had hitherto enjoyed it, taken from the city of London, from all parts of the country, and placed in the pockets of one particular class. That seemed to him unjust and unfair. The Marquess of Salisbury wished to call attention to a point on which he thought sufficient stress had not been laid. "We are very much criticised," he said, "on the source from which we have drawn this relief, and it has been stated that we ought, before relieving a patent and pressing injustice, to have entered into the consideration of a scheme for recasting the whole of the complex fabric of English rating. They forget that this is a transitory bill — it is only to run for two years. This year you will be again asked to assent to a law by which personal property shall be exempted from rating. By doing so you will not be consenting that that shall always be the case, but you will absolutely lay down that the exemption is not fixed and accepted for all time, but from year to year, which any year you may change/ ' They could not ask the clergy, at this period of their extreme distress, to go on trusting in the prospect of Parliament being able to amend the whole law of rating within any early time. Till that end was attained, let them be given at least this sad and sorry compensation for all the wrongs they had suffered. The bill was then read a second time by 113 to 23 votes.

The Sale of Food and Drugs Bill was another measure which provoked an amount of hostility and discussion out of all proportion to its very reduced scope. As originally intro- duced it contained clauses having reference to the general law affecting food and drugs as recommended in the report of a select committee which had met three years previously. It, however, became obvious that dairy produce alone would be touched by the measure, and that the struggle would be between the rights of margarine and the claims of butter. Having passed through the ordeal of the Standing Committee of Trade, it might have been supposed that it would have escaped further criticism. Nevertheless more than five days were spent in fighting for the interests of the farmer against those of the