Odd Millions

COMMONWEALTH

(British Commonwealth of Nations)

A big, humorous, dynamic statesman is Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Last week he could suck his eternal plump cigar contentedly and even smugly over a sheaf of treasury reports. They showed that, with less than a month to go before the fiscal year ends on March 31, there is every prospect that the daring jugglery embodied in Mr. Churchill's present budget (TIME, April 18) will indeed enable him to make ends meet at his estimated total: -L-834,830,000.

What this means to so zestful a plunger in statescraft as Winston Churchill may be sensed by recalling that eleven months ago the Laborites were tearing his estimates to tatters. At that time the Rt. Hon. Philip Snowden, the only Laborite ever to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared formally: "I predict that ... the Chancellor [Mr. Churchill] will find himself having to face the country with a deficit."

Last week the sheaf of statistics showed that, while an odd hundred million pounds must be received by the Exchequer during March 1928 to balance its books, a practically equivalent sum was received in March 1927 and can be conservatively counted on this year.

Chancellor Churchill's most audaciously successful current "jugglery" has been to so revise the periods on which the landlord's property tax payments become due that an extra payment date was smuggled into the present fiscal year.