NEWS OF THE WEEK.
LO WE made a rather short and probably popular financial _LT L statement last Monday. He observed that the unfavourable harvest and the disturbances in France and Spain, together with the high price of coal and the number of strikes, might have led us to expect a bad revenue return, but that in point of fact no trace could be discovered of any adverse causes in the yield of the revenue. Then proceeding to business, Mr. Lowe compared the total grants made in the Appropriation Act and the Supple- mental Estimates approved by Parliament for the last year with the total expenditure, and showed that while the former amounted to £71,881,000, the actual expenditure had reached only to £70,714,000, so that the thrift of the Ministry in sparing what they had legally the power to spend, had saved the country £1,167,000. As compared with the original Budget estimate of 'the expenditure, excluding supplementary estimates, the saving was £599,000. Compared with the expenditure of the previous year (1871-2), the expenditure of the year ended on the 31st March last, showed a diminution of £776,000; so that the year has been one of less expenditure than the previous year by about three-quarters of a million sterling.
