§ I return to the Exchequer account and we find that, the Exchequer expenditure having been £146,961,000 and the Exchequer revenue having been £141,546,000, the year closed with a deficit of £5,415,000, which has constituted a draft upon our balances. Fortunately, Sir, they were in a better position to stand a heavy draft than usual. During the course of the South African war we raised cash to the amount in round figures of £152,300,000, whilst the expenditure charged against capital was only about £149.500,000. We thus raised during the war £2,800,000 in excess of our actual requirements, and the balances were abnormally swollen to that extent. But the deficit of the year did not constitute the only demand upon our balances. We made a further draft upon them for capital purposes to the extent of £2,000,000, in connection with the various works programmes which I have already explained to the Committee, and which the National Debt Commissioners were unable to replace from the moneys at their disposal within the year. Thus the state of the balances is as follows:—We began the year with a balance at our bankers of £6,637,000, but we were owed by the Transvaal a sum of £3,000,000, which formed a temporary advance made to them under the terms of surrender and which was to be repaid out of the first issue of the Guaranteed Loan. That sum as it was repaid was paid back into the balances. Thus our real balance at the beginning of the year was £9,637,000. This was depleted as follows:—Our expenditure exceeded the revenue by £5,415,000; our advances on capital account exceeded the amount which the National Debt Commissioners could supply by £2,000,000, and we lost on Exchequer bonds, which had to be renewed at a discount, £38,000. On the other hand, the repayment on account of bullion exceeded the advance by £80,000, and we obtained from our bankers a temporary advance of £2,000,000, to recoup us the amount which we had advanced from balances on capital account. We thus ended the year with a balance on 31st March last of £4,264,000. There is, of course, no fixed standard of balances, and they 552 have, as a matter of fact, varied considerably at different times. It is, certainly, not convenient to have them very low at a time when the income-tax is very high, because the income-tax is mainly collected in the last quarter of the year, and we are rather short of supplies for financing the Exchequer in the earlier portions of the financial year. But to the extent to which the balances were abnormally swollen by cash raised during the war, for the purposes of the war, and not at the moment applied to the war, they may now be fairly reduced, and we may allow a sum of a little less than £3,000,000 of the deficit of last year to be borne by the balances. The Committee must remember that is less than the amount of the war charges which fell upon last year's Estimates; and it was to meet war charges that this sum of £2,800,000 was raised.