BUDGET BY ASSIGNMENTS 119
was solved. From our knowledge of the history of the controversy that raged over the creation of Provincial Budgets we can say that what items of expenditure to incorporate into Provincial Budgets was no longer a prominent question of the time. Long since it was settled that there were charges in the Imperial Budget of a purely local character. By common consent they were regarded as the most unsatisfactory part of the Imperial Budget. It was admitted on all hands that, knowing nothing about these charges, the Government of India was either obliged to sanction an unnecessary charge which may have been carelessly endorsed by the head of a department having no immediate interest in guarding against the waste of public money, or by a too cautious spirit of a random parsimony, or by parsimony regulated only by the state of public revenue, refuse its sanction and check prudent and profitable expenditure. As either procedure was likely to cause mischief, it was commonly agreed that such matters over which the Central Government by its supreme ignorance was powerless to exercise any control, should be transferred from the direct purview of the Imperial Government to the immediate control and responsibility of the Provincial Government. One side of the problem had thus been solved by sheer force of circumstances. The matter on which all attention was mainly concentrated was the problem of providing the Provincial Governments with funds sufficient to meet the charges incorporated into their budgets. It was allowed on all hands to be reasonable that the receipts arising from the incorporated services should be appropriated by the Provincial Governments. Two good reasons were advanced for adopting such a procedure. It is laid down as a canon of good finance that tax administration and tax appropriation should go as far as possible together. On this principle it was but proper to have allowed the Provincial Governments to appropriate the receipts from the services which they administered. But there was also another weighty reason which influenced this decision. The main idea in the inauguration of Provincial Budgets was to interest the Provincial Governments in a judicious and economical management of the finances, and one way of sustaining their interest in the same was to have given them the receipts of the services they managed. The receipts, however, were so small a portion of the total funds necessary to meet the provincialized expenditure that the problem of balancing the Provincial Budgets remained unsolved notwithstanding. Two possible ways of solution were before the Government of India at the time : either to transfer for provincial uses