Birmingham age-herald., 1895-06-02
FOREIGN ECHOES.

M. Ribot, the French minister of finance, proposes to make the upper and middle classes supply the deficit of 60000,- 600 francs which exists in his budget. He can secure 25,O00000 francs from the re-
 modelled succession duties, and he hopes
 to raise the sum of 10,000000 francs by tax on servants, farm and factory hands
 being exempted. In Paris the charge will be 30 francs for one male servant. 45 francs for two, 60 francs for three, and 90 francs for four or more, the rate for female servants being only half these
 figures. The charge will be graduated in other towns according to population. The duty on horses and carriages is to
 be progressive, yielding an extra 100000 francs. A sum of 14,000 GOO francs is to be raised by increasing the stamp duty on foreign companies bonds from l 1-5 to per cent. Foreign government
 bonds will continue to pay l per cent. Lastly, he proposes to raise 1,2O0,o0O francs by making the duty on playing cards higher for pack of fifty-two cards than for pack of thirty-two, and by pre- cautions against the sale of second-hand packs.
 The plan of the Paris exhibition of 1900 Is now before the supreme commis- sion, and will be submitted to the cham bers in July. The main features of it are already public property. The cost is estimated at 60,000,000 francs. The grand entrance will be at the Place de la Concorde, but the Champs Elysees gateway will be at the extremity of a broad avenue lined with statues and colonnades and leading to the new In- valides bridge over the Seine. To the right of this avenue will be the marble palace of fine arts, which is to supersede the palace of industry, and to be a per manent structure. To the left will be a smaller permanent building devoted to the art of the past. The French textile exhibits will occupy the Invalides es- planade, while along the river on both banks between the Invalides and the Alma bridges will be a series of build ingS for foreign exhibits, the congresses, flower shows, etc. The army and navy exhibits will be, little lower down on the south side. The food, transport, mechanical and chemical sections will oc- cupy the Avenue de Suffren side of the Champ de Mars, while on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais side will be the literary, scientific, artistic, dress, mining and metal sections The electricity building will connect these two wings, while the center of the Champ de Mars will be de- voted to fountains and flower beds. The festival hall, with agricultural ex- hibits on each side will be behind the electricity building and in the center of the machinery building. Colonial indus tries products and dwellings, with their inhabitants, will occupy the Trocadero Gardens.
 Some interesting and suggestive testi- mony concerning the effect of the agri- cultural depression in England upon the revenues of Oxford colleges was given recently before the royal commission on agriculture by Mr. L. L. Price, the treas urer of Oriel college. His evidence was based, in the main, upon figures collected for two papers read to the Royal Statis- tical society, one in February, 1892, deal ing with the accounts of Oriel college, 1876-'90 and the other in January of this year dealing with thd published ac- counts of nineteen colleges for the de- cade 1SS3-93. With regard to Oriel col lege, the present depression, he said, had brought about total fall in rental of about 45 per cent. The abatements granted in 1894 amounted to f1300 on a rental of f7403. Dealing with the reve- nues of nineteen Oxford colleges, MT. Price said that the fall in the gross ex- ternal receipts in the last ten years had been some per cent and in the net re- ceipts Geached by deducting from the external receipts the external expendi- ture) some IA or 15 per cent. But an in crease in the receipts from houses of f21, 900 and the substitution of rack-rent tenancies for beneficial leaseholds must be borne in mind, both in the case of the house and of the landed estates. Taking the agricultural receipts proper i. e., the receipts from lands at rack rent. the receipts from lands let on beneficial lease, and the receipts from tithes-the fall in the total receipts from lands and tithe was II per cent, in the receipts from lands alone Il per cent, in the re- ceipts from lands let at rack rent alone 4 per cent, in the receipts from tithes Is or IT per cent, and in the receipts from lands let at rack rent and the 1.-the com bined per cent. An attempt to elimi- nate the influence of the beneficial lease seemed to point to general fall of from 20 to 25 per cent, and this might be regarded as approximately accurate Together with this fall of rental the col leges, he added, had had to meet ex-