Saucy Budget

Dear, splendid England, with its clouds and its rain and its exquisite (though rare!) spring days, its summers without mosquitoes, and its foggy autumns. Do you feel grand and proud, British people, and realize that you are made of the salt of the earth -- and that you have a right to be even a little saucy?

Last autumn I happened to be dining with the Regent of Hungary on the night of the pound sterling's collapse. Every one was gloomy and prognosticating the end of all things with the fall of England, when the Regent, who looks just like an English admiral--the same tranquil "sea" eyes--raised his glass and said as quietly as Lord Nelson might have done:

"No, you are all wrong. Whatever happens England will never jail--I drink to England."

Now just think of that, people who are reading--England will never fail. . . . The good God gave the British people their immortal soul of Honesty, which will always rise to the occasion.

Britons read in a leading London weekly the above unsolicited testimonial from Novelist Elinor ("It") Glyn (Three Weeks), daughter of a Canadian, widow of an Englishman. Matter of fact last week there were sound reasons for the Empire to feel a little saucy. The British fiscal year 1931-32 had just closed and instead of recording disaster, Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain was able to announce that Britain's budget balanced with a surplus of $1,383,200.

No other Great Power can currently show, even on paper, such a surplus. During March moreover the pound sterling gained 20-c- on international exchange and held this gain last week. In Budapest His Serene Highness Admiral Nicholas Horthy de Nagybanya, Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, would have been well justified in raising his tranquil "sea" eyes and drinking again to England.

Naturally Mother Britain's budget, like that of Dame France, could only balance on paper. Her surplus of $1,383,200 was arrived at by crediting to Britain's Exchequer for the fiscal year 1931-32 an entire quarter of paid-up income tax which ordinarily would have been credited in the fiscal year 1932-33. In France the current budget (made to "balance" by even more irregular bookkeeping) has been publicly declared by high French fiscal authorities to be almost $150,000,000 in the red, a bookkeeping irregularity of three billion francs. Reason: the French parliamentary election next month after which Frenchmen will have to lay upon themselves such vexatious taxes as the U. S. Congress was last week inventing (see p. 17).

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