, mainly derived from Customs and Excise, and in the case of
Australia, as I observed at p. 245, the process at present entails an
elaborate system of bookkeeping to distinguish between the "collected"
and "true" revenue of the several States, similar in kind to the
calculations now made by the Treasury for ascertaining the "collected"
and "true" revenue derived from Ireland, Scotland, and England.[142]

In Australia this system of bookkeeping is discredited, although the
recent attempt by a Commonwealth Referendum to abolish both it and the
financial system of which it forms a part just failed. It is to be hoped
that, whatever financial scheme is adopted for Ireland, this bad
colonial precedent, together with the precedent of the Home Rule Bill of
1893, will not be made pretexts for perpetuating a system whose defects
are so glaring, and which is a source of continual dissatisfaction to
Ireland. If Irish Customs and Excise are to be outside Irish control,
while their proceeds are to be credited to Ireland, let her whole
collected revenue from those sources be credited to her, in spite of the
excessive allocation that step would involve.

Apart from this point of similarity in mechanism, the Australian and
Canadian subsidies to the States and Provinces respectively are of no
value as models for a Home Rule Bill. Let us examine the case of
Australia. There the Commonwealth, besides having exclusive control of
Customs and Excise, has general powers of taxation concurrently with the
States, though in practice Commonwealth taxation is almost entirely
confined to Customs and Excise. All surplus Commonwealth revenue is, by
the present law, returnable to the States, and the total annual amount
so returned must not be less than three-fourths of the total proceeds of
Customs and Excise; so large are these proceeds, and so small,
relatively, the expenses of the Commonwealth Government.[143] Here at
the outset is a feature which places Australian Federal Finance in an
altogether different category to that of the United Kingdom, where only
47.6 per cent, of the revenue is from Customs and Excise. Nor are the
distributions of surplus revenue to the States really "subsidies," even
in the case of the poorest States, but repayments, on a method laid down
in the Constitution, of that part of the State contribution to Federal
services which the Federal Government does not want. Here the system of
bookkeeping is of some service to us, bec