nt an annual allowance to
Ireland of nearly a million and a half pounds, the principal reason
being that Ireland, which is a larger manufacturer of spirits and
tobacco, was exporting more than she consumed of these commodities. In
the Bill of 1893, as part of a wholly different financial scheme, Mr.
Gladstone abandoned the plan just described, and provided for the annual
calculation of "true" Irish revenue, as distinguished from "collected"
revenue; but it is a proof of the obscurity and intricacy of the whole
business that the Treasury officials made a mistake of L400,000 in the
initial calculation, with the result that Mr. Gladstone had to recast
his financial scheme from top to bottom.

In the Return of 1894, as presented to the Royal Commission, this error
was eliminated, but the method of calculation remained imperfect. Nobody
knows now what the true figures are, and there is good reason to think
that Irish revenue has always been, and still is, substantially
underestimated.

The same obscurity shrouded, and still shrouds, the "true" Irish revenue
from income-tax and stamps, whose proceeds it is exceedingly difficult
to trace under a system of unitary finance, and which are traced by the
Treasury in a fashion again admittedly unreliable.[104]

In regard to taxes on consumption the same difficulty has been met with
in Australia since the federation of the Colonies and the delegation to
the Commonwealth Government of exclusive control over Customs and
Excise. The product of these duties makes up the bulk of Australian
revenue, and is far too large for the needs of the Commonwealth
Government. The Constitution of 1900 provided that the surplus should be
returned to the individual States in proportion to their "true"
contributions to the revenue, and for the calculation of these "true"
contributions an elaborate system of book-keeping was instituted, in
order to trace the ultimate place of consumption of dutiable articles.
Each State was then credited with its "true" revenue, and debited, among
other things, with a proportionate share of the expense of any
Department transferred by the Constitution from the State to the
Commonwealth. The system caused general dissatisfaction, owing, as the
Australian Official Year Book puts it, "to the practical impossibility
of ensuring that in every case a consuming State will be duly credited
with revenue collected on its behalf in a distributing State." That is
the well-founded