In the Return of 1894, as presented to the Royal Commission, this error was eliminated, but the method of calculation remained imperfect. Nobody knows now what the true figures are, and there is good reason to think that Irish revenue has always been, and still is, substantially underestimated. The same obscurity shrouded, and still shrouds, the "true" Irish revenue from income-tax and stamps, whose proceeds it is exceedingly difficult to trace under a system of unitary finance, and which are traced by the Treasury in a fashion again admittedly unreliable.[104] In regard to taxes on consumption the same difficulty has been met with in Australia since the federation of the Colonies and the delegation to the Commonwealth Government of exclusive control over Customs and Excise. The product of these duties makes up the bulk of Australian revenue, and is far too large for the needs of the Commonwealth Government. The Constitution of 1900 provided that the surplus should be returned to the individual States in proportion to their "true" contributions to the revenue, and for the calculation of these "true" contributions an elaborate system of book-keeping was instituted, in order to trace the ultimate place of consumption of dutiable articles. Each State was then credited with its "true" revenue, and debited, among other things, with a proportionate share of the expense of any Department transferred by the Constitution from the State to the Commonwealth. The system caused general dissatisfaction, owing, as the Australian Official Year Book puts it, "to the practical impossibility of ensuring that in every case a consuming State will be duly credited with revenue collected on its behalf in a distributing State." That is the well-founded complaint of Ireland in regard to the Treasury returns. Hitherto in Australia efforts to change the system for another allocating the surplus on a basis of population have not been successful.[105] The Canadian Federal Constitution uses the basis of population for the distribution of small subsidies to the Provinces, but complaints have arisen as to its fairness. British Columbia, for example, for a long time complained that her subsidy was too small, one of the grounds being that her consumption of dutiable goods was unusually large. No means existed of verifying this complaint by figures.[106] With this explanatory digression about a very important feature of Anglo-Irish finance, I return to the findings of the Royal Commission of 1894-1896. The figures supplied to them were as shown on the opposite page.