The facts, as The Critic reports today, are these. A writer who spent two years combing through the public accounts and published his findings on his own website calculates that over the last five tax years £2.6 billion flowed from the treasury into 92 societies of the kind called charities, though more than two hundred thousand such societies are registered in Britain. The Home Office is said to have signed in 2019 a ten-year contract worth £235 million with Migrant Help, which professes to give advice to those seeking asylum; the Foreign Office to have given the Americans' USAID no less than £100 million. Universities UK is reported to have received £18.8 million, BBC Media Action £52 million, the British Refugee Council £41 million, ODI Global more than £40 million; and this last says it rouses people to act on injustice by research, by convening and by influencing. The writer adds that these gifts were made under the Conservatives and now under Labour, and often to those who were campaigning against the government's own policies.

I ask first what my father asked in every case: by what right, and who gains? If a citizen of his own free choice gives his own money to a society he approves of, that is generosity, and no one blames him; the writer himself concedes as much. Our mothers, when the Gauls besieged the Capitol, brought their gold unasked; with Hannibal standing in Italy, they handed over their ornaments of their own accord. Unasked, of their own accord: those are the words that divide a gift from a tax. But the British citizen is not asked; he pays, and someone else chooses where it goes. Generosity made with other people's money is a tax dressed in generosity's clothes. Cicero put it rightly: "What is it but to snatch from some what is theirs, and give to others what is not?"

We know this breed. Our ancestors let out the taxes of Asia to the tax-farmers; and the tax-farmers, having bid too high for the contract, laid siege to the senate to have part of it remitted. Cato resisted, but afterwards a consul remitted it. So those who lived on public money used that same money to work upon the commonwealth. I see the same thing happening now: a society fed from the treasury is paid to lecture the magistrates about the treasury. A patron feeds his client, and the client applauds his patron; here, strange to say, the client accuses the patron, and the people pay for both.

The ministers will answer, I suppose (for the report gives no case of theirs, and I will not invent one), that these societies perform services the state itself could not perform. I grant it gladly: Migrant Help says it gives advice, not speeches; and the writer himself admits that not all this money is badly spent. But who renders the accounts? By what tender, under what auditor, with what scrutiny these contracts were awarded, the report does not say; and what it does not say is the first thing I would ask. Had one of our quaestors paid out such a sum without accounts, he would have stood trial for extortion. Where the money is public, the accounts must be public.

The remedy, magistrates, is neither new nor harsh. Let the societies that wish to persuade do their persuading with their own money; let those that perform services hold open contracts, openly tendered, reported to the people every year; let those who vote the money write their names in the record and answer for it. For the fatherland, if an enemy presses, citizens will give unasked, as our mothers gave; to feed opinions they do not themselves hold, not a single coin. For a people that feeds its own accusers has laid a tribute upon itself.