March 31, 1916.

THE COLLIERY GUARDIAN.

611

this, the men are receiving a war bonus of 15 | per
cent, on the minimum wage under the new agreement.

The annual conference of the South Wales Miners’
Federation opened at Cardiff on Monday.

Mr. Balfour Browne, K.C., has been appointed to
arbitrate on the Scottish miners’ claim for an increase
in wage rates. The hearing will commence on
Tuesday next.

The House of Lords has confirmed
Increment the judgment given in the Court of
Value Duty Appeal in the case of “Foran and
OH Others v. the Attorney-General.” In
Minerals, order to estimate the importance of
this decision it may be well to recall
the circumstances of this case. The trustees of a
property near Dover, known as Appleton Farm,
were served with a copy of the famous Form IV.,
containing an extract from clause 23, subsection (2) of
the Finance Act, 1910, which runs as follows : —
“For the purpose of valuation, minerals are to be
treated as a separate parcel of land ; and where the
minerals are not comprised in a mining lease, or
being worked, they are to be treated as having no
value as minerals unless the proprietor of the minerals
in his return specifies the nature of the minerals and
his estimate of their capital value.” The validity of
Form IV. being in question, the trustees asked the
Commissioners of Inland Revenue to be allowed to
defer filling it up. The Commissioners refused, and
finally the trustees filled up and signed the form
without specifying any minerals. Subsequently the
minerals were sold for £5,500, and thereupon the
Commissioners claimed to treat this sum as incre-
ment value, one-fifth of which was payable as duty
under the Act. Mr. Justice Warrington decided in
favour of this claim, and the trustees appealed. The
Court of Appeal reversed this decision. In delivering
judgment, Mr. Justice Joyce said that Form IV.
was not a valid or proper notice to require a return
with respect to unworked minerals. He implied
that Form VI. might possibly with some modifica-
tion be applicable to the case ; but Form IV. would
not be understood by 99 people out of 100 as a notice
to furnish a return in respect of unworked minerals.
It would require, he said, not merely a lawyer, but
one of exceptional ability and caution to understand
the relevance of Form IV., and the documents
accompanying it, to unworked minerals.

This means in plain English that the trustees
were entitled to make a return with respect to
unworked minerals upon a proper form, in pursuance
of proper notice from the Commissioners, and to
have a separate provisional valuation of the minerals
in question, treated as a separate parcel of land, the
regular printed form for which is well known. In
other words, Form IV. cannot be taken as the return
referred to in clause 23, subsection 2 as given above,
because this form does not treat the minerals as a
separate parcel of land.

In the House of Lords judgment, Lord Atkinson
upheld the view of Mr. Justice Joyce, and said that
Form IV. was not framed according to the require-
ments of the statute. He said that the Commissioners
had the coolness to contend that the trustees, acting
under compulsion, had waived all objection to the
defects of Form IV., and he described their whole
action in the matter as unmeritorious, and, fortu-
nately, not one that a public department would often
adopt He charged the Commissioners with being
so devoted to shutting out the truth that they
persisted in sustaining a proceeding which, even if
it were technically within the letter of the law, had
no merits to support it. Lord Wrenbury was still
more severe, and regretted that a form issued by a
Government department should assume a shape
which he would not be surprised to find in a
prospectus issued by a company promoter, but which
was not worthy of the source from which it came.
He laid it down as the duty of the Inland Revenue
to the public not to enforce against a taxpayer a
liability under which he would not, in fact, lie, if he
had not by an error, to which the Department had
itself contributed, failed to protect himself by an
entry on his return, and he regretted that the
Commissioners of Inland Revenue had taken such a
wholly erroneous view of their duty.

It is not for us to endeavour to add to the severity
of the condemnation by their lordships of the attitude
of the Commissioners in this case. The plain fact is
that the validity of Form IV. in regard to mineral
rights duty is now finally destroyed.

The absurdity of the Commissioners’ claim was
perhaps most forcibly illustrated by Lord Atkinson,
who showed that, under this contention, a mine field
of 100 acres might underlie a village of 30 or 40
tenements. * Under Form IV. the value of the
minerals under each separate tenement would have
to be ascertained—a task which is clearly impossible,
because not one of these separate areas could be
worked by itself. Apparently the Commissioners
would claim that, because each of these separate
mineral areas was individually of no value, therefore
the whole area was collectively valueless—a conclu-
sion not only false in logic, but also not in accordance
with the provisions of the Act, which does not
require minerals to be valued in portions corre-
sponding to the occupational holdings of the surface.
The question at issue was of the greatest importance
to mineral owners, because upon it depended whether
owners are to be held liable to pay increment value
duty upon undeveloped mineral areas at the rate of
one-fifth of the purchase price realised on sale (or its
equivalent in annual sums of 4s. in the £ where
payment is by royalty), or whether they would only
be liable for mineral rights duty of 5 per cent,
upon UAhs the capital value which the minerals
were declared to be worth.

Owners of undeveloped minerals are in any case
placed in a difficult position by the Act. If they
place a high value upon their undeveloped minerals,
there are the succession duties to be faced; while if
they ignore their value entirely there is the possi-
bility of increment value duty if at a subsequent
period the minerals should by chance be sold. So
long, however, as they know their position they can
act as seems best in their interest; but it would be
clearly unjust that they should be deprived of the
right of making any choice at all under the
pressure of departmental bullying.

A great deal of attention is being
The Future devoted at the present time to such
Of British questions as trade after the war,
Industry, and the need for an immediate
preparation for the peace that is not
yet in sight. Industrialists are being urged to lose
no time in making plans for the future, and from
presidential chairs we have an inexhaustible crop of
suggestions, many of them excellent in themselves,
respecting the conditions that must sooner or later
confront us in the commercial world. This tendency
is not by any means to be deplored. A new world
is destined to arise out of the existing chaos and dis-
organisation. New factors will enter into industrial
competition ; some of them at least will be strange to
us, and outside the test of past or present experience.
Many of these latter cannot even yet be foreshadowed,
and it would be premature to speculate upon them.

But there are others which are as clear as the
light of day, and it would be foolish indeed to ignore
them. Of these, one stands out prominently from
all others. It is the fact that the war caught us in a
position of dependency upon foreign control for
certain products essential to our manufacturing
industries. Very emphatic has been the declaration
of the Government that this state of things must
never be allowed to recur, and the whole nation is
prepared for any measures that will prevent its
recurrence. But neither the Government nor the
nation has quite made up its mind how this end is to
be achieved. Some steps have been taken, it is true,
to secure our position with regard to the aniline dye
industry, but we are not convinced that even these
are adequate ; and Germany still believes that, with
the restoration of peace, she will be able speedily to
regain her former supremacy in the chemical industry
by the simple method of flooding us with her accumu-
lated stocks. In other directions but little has been
attempted. In the manufacture of optical glass and
electrical fittings, in the control of metals, and in
other branches of manufacture for which we were
largely dependent upon Germany, we are still with-
out any definite plan of action for meeting the

industrial war that must inevitably ensue. The
great Allied economic conference shortly to take
place in Paris may help to point out the right course
to pursue, and we will not attempt to anticipate its
results. But, in the meantime, there are many
directions in which we can even now begin to set our
house in order. Sir R. A. Redmayne, in his presi-
dential address to the Institution of Mining and
Metallurgy, last week, spoke especially of the
mineral industry. In this respect the British Empire
is, as he said, self-contained for almost every
mineral substance of economic importance, and he
made the practical suggestion that the time is ripe
for taking an inventory of the whole of our mineral
wealth. The idea is worthy of support. Such an
inventory would be of the greatest value, for
although much has been done in this direction by the
separate colonies and dependencies, these efforts have
never yet been co-ordinated. The Geological Survey
of Great Britain has now inaugurated a series of
monographs on the economic minerals of this
country, but this scarcely fulfils Sir R. Redmayne’s
plan, which would include the whole Empire in its
purview. Other steps have lately been taken which
would assist the realisation of this comprehensive
scheme. A Commission has recently been investi-
gating the nickel resources of Canada and other
countries, and a special Indian Commission is in
process of formation for the purpose of assessing
the mineral wealth of that country.

With regard to coal, Sir R. Redmayne recalls the
results of the investigation of the Royal Commission
on Coal Supplies, which, in effect, led to the con-
clusion that the nation may safely pursue its happy
go-lucky and wasteful methods without taking
undue thought for to-morrow. As a matter of fact,
this Commission has proved to be absolutely abortive
so far as practical results are concerned, and
numerous suggestions are made, including the
appointment of a standing committee of experts,
with the object of putting an end to existing
sources of waste in working. Sir R. Redmayne
raises, in this connection, so many points, that we
must defer their detailed consideration to a future
occasion, and we will now limit our remarks to one
only of his proposals—viz., the inauguration of a
chemical survey of the whole of our coal fields.

Such a survey, carried out seam by seam through?
out the country, would be a gigantic task, which
could only be accomplished at the national expense.
Its advantages can scarcely be denied. The whole
question of the chemical classification of British
coals is in a deplorable condition, and colliery
owners are by no means alive to its national impor-
tance/ The results of this absence of knowledge
have been strikingly illustrated during the present
war, when British coal has been largely in demand
to replace the deficiency in supply in various
Continental markets. Consumers abroad have been
put to great inconvenience owing to the almost
insuperable difficulty that has arisen in the effort to
find the best substitutes for varieties of coal no
longer available. They are confronted in many
cases with obsolete and antiquated analyses, and in
other cases by a total lack of any analyses at all. It
cannot be denied that we are, in this respect, far
behind both the United States and Canada, in both
of which countries elaborate State surveys have been
undertaken. * Our conduct in regard to our premier
mineral asset has been unscientific, unsound^
and unbusinesslike—-typically laisser faire, short-
sighted and—shall we say it ?—rather British. The
colliery owner is indifferent because he fails to see
any immediate commercial advantage in such a
scheme, and, moreover, he is already over-embarrassed
with a superabundance of legislative control; labour
is indifferent because the miner is sedulously taught
to concentrate his whole thought upon his wages ;
Governments are indifferent because there are no
votes to be gained, or obvious political advantage to
be reaped, by allocating the necessary funds for a
purpose so foreign to popular understanding. So
nothing is done, and it is left to Sir R. Redmayne,
Prof. Bone and others, to cry aloud in a wilderness
of national apathy and neglect.

The whole country is talking a great deal in these
days of the pressing need for introducing more