urgently required, the Council hope that Señor de Osma's efforts to institute reforms may meet with the success which they deserve.

REVENUE AND EXPENDITURE.

FINAL LIQUIDATION OF THE BUDGET OF 1902.

A Report of the "Tribunal of Accounts," giving an analysis of the final liquidation of the Budget of 1902, was published in the Gaceta de Madrid on the 26th January, 1904. This document shows that, excluding the item Municipal Surcharges" from both sides of the account, the actual Receipts in 1902 amounted to pesetas 1,013,271,067, and the actual Expenditure to pesetas 966,210,024. The financial year, therefore, closed with a surplus of pesetas 47,063,043. The Report also states that the accumulated arrears of Revenue and Expenditure due respectively to and by the State at the close of 1902 amounted respectively to pesetas 710,569,148 and pesetas 414,850,026. Whether these figures represent the actual totals seems, however, to be open to question, as a certain amount is apparently "annulled" or written off each year from each side of the account.

PROVISIONAL LIQUIDATION OF THE BUDGET

OF 1903.

The Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure for 1903, which were promulgated by Royal Decree on the 31st December, 1902, placed the Revenue at pesetas 969,337,257, and the Expenditure at pesetas 958,231,313. The voting of additional credits in the course of the year, and other modifications, however, brought up the total of the final

Estimates, including the Municipal Surcharges, to pesetas 1,038,429,502 for Revenue and pesetas 1,090,083,257 for Expenditure.

The returns shown in the following Tables are only provisional, and the definitive liquidation of accounts for 1903 will not be published until a later date.

The Municipal Surcharges being, as far as the State Budget is concerned, mere book-keeping entries, the amounts shown under this head in the above Tables should be deducted in order to arrive at the true returns of Revenue and Expenditure. In the following statement (in which fractions are omitted) these deductions have been made.

The results shown by the above figures are summarised in the Provisional Liquidation as follows:

With regard to the above surplus of pesetas 22,478,641, it is, however, pointed out that the Expenditure on account of the Budget of 1903 included not only the ordinary

interest and amortisation of the advance made by the Tobacco Régie Company in 1896, but also a sum of pesetas 55,171,275 set aside from the Revenue Receipts during 1903, and disbursed in order to complete the liquidation of the liability of the Government to the Company. Had this extraordinary payment not been made the surplus carried over from 1903 would have amounted to pesetas 77,629,619, as compared with 47,063,043 pesetas in 1902.

NETT RECEIPTS AND EXPENDITURE, 1899 TO 1903.

The following Tables of the nett receipts and payments during the five years, 1899-1903, were published in January last. The small differences which will be observed between the totals for 1903 given here and those which appear in the statement of the Liquidation of Accounts for 1903 on pages 373 and 374 are presumably due to slight corrections made in the accounts during the period which elapsed between the publication of the two sets of figures.