The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

} (Wives ie ieeonereeeiie en lSharp Rise Since Tories Got | Hold of Purse--strings i | I senetiepesare e e noomaccoomunyeiniitefots | Direc, -- Liability of Province Has Jumped From Eleven Millions in | 1904 to Forty--nine Millions of Dol-- | _ lars To--day. | | _ The public debt of Ontario since the Conservative party got hold of the purse strings in 1904 has increased fourfold. In 1904 the direct liability .'nt the Province was $11,709,651. . To. lday the public debt is $49,389,366. There has been a corresponding in-- i crease in the annual interest charges, i which now amount to $1,500,000. This éia an increase of over $1,000,000 since (lho present Government came into power. f _ Statements tabled in the Legislature | yesterday showed that the debt has | increased during the past year by | about $9,000,000. TLiberal members | commented on this fact yvesterday af-- | ternoon. '"The public debt is still ' | soaring," remarked Mr. Rowell with a | smile, when asked by a group of news-- i papermen what he thought of the Budget. | _ The total expenditure in the year |1904 was $5,267,000, while the total '(,-x;)emliturc {¥#> the year just ended | was approximately $18,000,000. . Even ' taking out of that the capital expend-- Iture of $2,380,000 on account of the 'H)dru_.rlq-c!ric system, and $236,000 on account of the Timiskaming & 'I\'Urtmérn Ontario Railway, the ex-- ) penditure still exceeds $15,000,000, | An Enormous Increase. The Provincial Treasurer announc-- ed a reduction in expenditure, but his | statement shows an enormous increase | as compared with the days of the Lib-- leral Government. The argument is [ advanced that the fact that the pre-- 'sen! Government is able to borrow so well is due to good government before the Conservatives came into power. The statement of revenue shows |. | that both by means of taxation of 'cor-- { porations and succession duties. the Conservatives are "getting more out ' of the people." ' Cost of Government House. -- Another feature of great interest at the present time is that the mc jic accounts brought down yests # added to the amount already rep.. . «d ; in the previous public accounts, snow that the total expenditure to date on the new Government House exceeds one million dollars. The sum of $100,000 was voted in the estimates for the current year at the last ses-- sion of the Legislature, and the sup-- plementary estimates . show $72,000 more. 5 Generous expenditures are also shown in connection with the Guelph Prison Farm, which total over sl:' 700,000, counting proposed expendi-- ture in the present year and expendi-- | ture already reported. This includes 'lhe cost of the building, equipment, plant, and items in the capital expend-- | iture column. The supplementary estimates for the year ending October 31, 1916, tabled vesterday, involve an expenditure of $1,193,299. _____------------ «mss mm mmmamammmn mm 1 OOO___Lcoommmmmnmeneeietei in