Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/431

 NOTES AND MEMORANDA 409 receipts from alcohol exceed those of last year by 719,000, and exceed Mr. Goschen's estimate by 898,0(g), and this without counting the additional duties imposed for local purposes. Then the tobacco duty has yielded f243,000 more than the Chancellor looked for, and mainly on the coarser kinds of tobacco smoked by the people. Not the least satisfactory thing about the present budget, therefore, is the proof it gives of the prosperity of the working classes during the past year. The income tax revenue is only a trifle over the estimate, and the sur- plus has come almost entirely out of the pockets of the working people. But while a surplus of 1,756,000 remains in hand, fresh debt has been incurred to the extent of 3,388,000 to meet expenses of the year, chiefly under the loans authorised three years ago by the Barracks Act, the Imperial Defence Act, and the Naval Defence Act. This addition to the unfunded debt has provoked a good deal of criticism, as being a departure from the principle of making every year bear its own burdens, and the criticism has been extended to the arrangement for the repayment of part of the Imperial Defence Loan .out of the Suez Canal dividends, which will in 1894 begin to yield this country a bonus of half a million a year. This arrangement has been censured for predetermining the destination of future revenues, but every loan does that, and we need not enter here into a discussion of the expediency of public loans generally, or of these in particular. If the unfunded debt has been temporarily increased, the funded debt has been reduced during the year by 6,665,000. The amount trans- ferred from imperial revenue to local bodies for the relief of local taxation has been 7,073,000, and when deduction is made for the old grants in aid, which have now been stopped, the net relief local taxation has received is 3,873,000. As to the finances of the coming year, the estimated expenditure is 88,319,000, and the estimated revenue 90,430,000. The expected increase in the expenditure over that of last year is principally due to 200,000 to be spent on Irish railways and public works, 400,000 in building new Post Offices and raising Post Office wages, and 150,000 on the census; and the expected increase of revenue is to come from various sources from the consump- tion of an increased population, from there being three more tax-earning days in this financial year than in last the 29th of February, Good Friday, and Easter Monday; and from the continued prosperity of the country, which the Chancellor thinks good for 500,000 extra from the income tax. He counts altogether on a surplus of 2,111,000, and he proposes to apply the surplus, as far as it will go, to providing free education in primary schools. A bill has since been introduced by Government for giving effect to this proposal, by a grant to public ele- nentary schools in England and Wales, at the rate of ten shillings a year for every child bet'een five and fourteen years of age.