270 Chapter Eight
in a bill that widened the franchise substantially. Thereafter, the income
tax affected only a small proportion of the electorate.^12 On the other
hand, no parliament could long resist pressures from unemployed
voters, backed up by entrepreneurs eager for government contracts.
The new suffrage, therefore, altered the dynamics of politics. Trade
depressions, instead of making costly naval bills more difficult to get
through Parliament, made extra expenditures more urgent and attrac
tive than in times of prosperity. Arms contracts, after all, could restore
both wages and profits and strengthen Britain’s international position,
all at the same time. Taxpayers’ reluctance to pay for it all was no
longer decisive in politics, especially since more and more voters came
to believe that the rich could and should be made to foot the bill.^13
This vague and general, yet decisive, realignment of political and
economic interests achieved a cutting edge when a handful of techni
cally proficient naval officers inaugurated intimate collaboration with
private manufacturers of arms. Captain Fisher played a key role in this
change too. In 1883 he had become commander of the naval gunnery
school at Portsmouth—the vantage point from which he launched his
venture into high politics in 1884. Being responsible for improving
naval gunnery, Fisher made it his business to find out all he could
about every available model of big gun, including those being man
ufactured privately. He believed fervently in competition, and his idea
in 1884 was to stimulate rivalry between the Woolwich arsenal and
private manufacturers in order to assure an optimal result for the navy.
In practice, however, Fisher’s ideal was not realized. The Woolwich
arsenal never got the necessary plant to allow it to compete with pri
vate firms on anything like equal terms. Ironically, Fisher’s own ac
tions and characteristic impatience with the bureaucratic delays that
army officers interposed between his wishes and their realization at
the arsenal helped to assure this result. What happened was this: in
1886, when Fisher became director of naval ordnance, he demanded
and was accorded the legal right to purchase from private firms any ar-
- In 1914 less than one-seventh of the work force in Britain paid income tax,
according to Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Lon
don, 1965), p. 21.
- Conservatives, who supported defense expenditures more warmly than the Lib
erals, were nonetheless troubled by the drift towards graduated taxation as the way to
pay for more ships and guns. In 1889, for example, Lord Salisbury wrote confidentially
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer urging him to meet the increased naval appropria
tions of that year by raising excise as well as property taxes, since “it is dangerous to
recur to realized property alone in difficulties because the holders of it are politically so
weak that the pernicious financial habit is sure to grow.” Quoted from Gwendolyn
Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1932), 4:192.
