§ I proceed to deal very briefly with the revenue from direct taxation. It is to the yield, from this form of taxation that the unexpectedly satisfactory result of the year is in the main to be attributed. The death duties all but reached the estimate of £13,000,000, and show an increase in Exchequer receipts of no less than £627,000 as compared with the previous year. If you add the amount intercepted for the relief of local taxation you will find that the total result produced by this tax in the course of the twelve months was no less than £17,336,000. Stamps, which are in some 283 respects a very good criterion of the volume of trade, have shown considerable elasticity, the estimate of £8,000,000 having been exceeded by £180,000. This is largely due to the increased volume of business on the London Stock Exchange. Income tax maintained its productiveness, the Exchequer receipts were £31,350,000, showing a slight increase over those of the preceding year. The produce of each penny in the pound of this tax has slightly exceeded any figure hitherto recorded. Lastly conies the Post Office and Telegraph Services, the largest contributors to our gains, yielding between them an excess of nearly £500,000 over the last Budget estimate and of more than £1,000,000 over the receipts of the previous year. This is a still more satisfactory indication of the general progress of business in the country, though to some extent it must be put down to exceptional causes, such, for instance, as the general election, which led to a large growth in the volume of postal and telegraph business, and there has been an extraordinary popularity in a new fashion of correspondence with which some of us are painfully familiar—;the picture post-card. But, apart from these, there is indication of steady growth of receipts over issues in Post Office services in the last ten years. The average annual surplus for the five years 1897–1902 was £3,728,800, and for the five years 1902–7 (including the estimate for 1906–7) it works out at £4,473,400. It is right to add that the expenditure out of Post Office votes ten years ago was only 73 per cent, of the revenue, but it has now risen to 76 per cent.