§ To turn to the details of the revenue. Customs produced £20,850,000, which was £230,000 less than the estimate. With regard to the minor items of Customs, coffee for once shows an increase. I am told that this is due to the increasing number of excellent temperance refreshment rooms in London, 996 where coffee is a favourite beverage. The use of cocoa, also, I am happy to say, has increased by 14 per cent., and it may comfort my honourable and gallant Friend the Member for Central Sheffield, who I know is a patron of cocoa, to be informed that a much larger proportion of the cocoa used in this country was of British manufacture than in the previous year. The revenue from dried fruits shows a small decrease, owing to a bad harvest. Tea shows an increase of £62,000, but I shall have to be cautious in my estimate of tea for the coming year, for I am sorry to say that tea has lately risen in price by, I am told, as much as 2d. in the pound. That is due to the fact that Indian and Ceylon teas are becoming very popular in Russia, the United States, and our great Colonies, and consequently there is a shorter supply in this country. No one seems to have noticed the increase in the price of tea, but a good deal would have been said about it if it had been due to an increase of taxation. And it may interest the Committee to be informed of rather a curious circumstance in regard to the receipts from tea. There is a singular rivalry now going on between certain great houses in the tea trade as to the amount of the cheques which each of them shall give for individual clearances of tea. And the result is sometimes greatly to discompose the receipts from tea in one quarter of the year, or even in different years, when compared with one another. The Customs were actually asked the other day to allow the inclusion in one of these cheques of the duty on tea afloat, and not yet arrived in this country. I need hardly say that we promptly put a stop to the suggestion, which, if allowed, would have entirely disorganised the proper keeping of our accounts from year to year. But there are two heads to which I wish principally to allude under Customs Revenue. These heads are, foreign plain spirits, and tobacco. The Exchequer receipts from foreign spirits, in 1897-98 were £898,000; last year they were only £760,000, showing a loss of £138,000. That was altogether unanticipated. It was due to the famine in Russia, which forced the peasantry to consume their potatoes and corn, if they had any, instead on converting them into spirits. And it WE due also to the 997 fact that the price of potatoes was very high in this country, and potatoes were imported here from the Continent, instead of, as usual, the cheap spirit extracted from them. That was no gain, I am sorry to inform the honourable Baronet opposite, to the cause of temperance, for although it raised the price of foreign plain spirits, the only result was that people used British spirits instead.