and £2,510,000 for "local civil charges other than Constabulary.” First, as to the item for the Constabulary. Under the Home Rule scheme of 1886 that force was to be retained for an indefinite time under the control of the Imperial authority, and consequently any excess in the cost of the Irish Constabulary over £1,000,000 was to have been borne by the Imperial Exchequer. The Irish police were rightly regarded as, in part at least, an Imperial force, and the Empire accordingly was to assist in maintaining it. But why the proportion of the cost to be borne by the Empire should be merely the excess over £1,000,000 passes comprehension on any theory of justice or logic. Obviously, the only fair proposal to have made was that Ireland should be charged with only so much of the cost as would have sufficed to maintain a force of police equal to its needs in a normal state of things in a self-governed country, and that the Empire should be charged with the balance that would be required to make the police sufficiently numerous for Imperial requirements. Mr. Gladstone himself seemed, in his speech on the introduction of the Home Rule Bill of 1886, to point to £600,000 as about the sum for which an efficient local police might be organised for Ireland; and it is now submitted that, if the intolerable proposal should once more be made to keep the police within the control of the Imperial Ministry, every penny in respect of the charge for the Constabulary beyond £600,000 should come out of the Imperial Treasury. Of course, if, on the other hand, the Constabulary are to be handed over to the proposed Irish Parliament, no exception need be taken to the charge for that force, for the Irish Parliament will be able to reduce it, and will no doubt reduce it, to the proper dimensions. Then, as to the other civil charges, it is to be observed that, under the head of Irish Services, are some at least which ought properly to be classed as British or Imperial. The viceroyalty, for example, is, like the monarchy, an Imperial institution, and ought, therefore, like the monarchy, to be maintained out of Imperial funds. Again, some Irish services are maintained on a scale much greater and more costly than Ireland could afford if it were managing its own affairs.. What the exact amount of the deduction on this head ought to be has been suggested by Mr. Gladstone himself. "The House would like to know," said he, in his speech on the introduction of his Home Rule Bill on April 8, 1886, "what an amount has been going on, and at this moment is going on, of what, I must call, not only a waste of public money, but a demoralising waste of public money-demoralising in its influence on both countries. The civil charges, per capita, at this moment, are, in Great Britain, 8s. 2d. ; and, in Ireland, 16s. They have increased in Ireland in the last fifteen years by 63 per cent. ; and," he suggestively added, "my belief is that, if the present legislative and administrative systems be maintained, you must make up your minds to a continued, never-ending, and never-to-be-limited augmentation." Here is a pretty plain admission that the civil charges referred to are about double what they ought to be, and that the excess is due to Imperial misgovernment. Now, if those charges are to be maintained, for a time at least as they must be, if injustice to individual members of the Civil Service in Ireland is to be avoided-and if, moreover, the proposal of 1886 for ante-dating the pensions of some members of the Civil Service in certain contingencies be repeated in the next Home Rule Bill, it is clear that the entire cost of the latter transaction, and the cost of the former beyond what it would be at the rate of 8s. 2d. per capita, ought to be defrayed by England or the Empire. In other words, Ireland ought not to be compelledespecially when it is about to start on a career of self-governmentto pay for the effects of the misrule which will have been condemned as an unendurable evil. The items in Mr. Gladstone's Irish budget of 1886, therefore, for the constabulary and for other local civil charges, ought to be, respectively, £600,000 and £1,255,000, or, taken together, £1,855,000—that is, £2,655,000 less than the sum estimated by Mr. Gladstone. The foregoing deductions from Mr. Gladstone's estimates at the debit side of the Irish budget and the suggested transfers of charges from the local to the Imperial account being made, the result will be what Ireland ought to pay on the theory that it is bound to make a contribution to the Imperial expenditure proportionate to its relative taxable capacity; and it is manifest that that sum will be a very much smaller sum indeed than that fixed by the Bill of 1886. But now the question arises whether Ireland, at present, ought to pay towards the expenditure of the Empire a sum proportionate to its relative taxable capacity. It is submitted that it ought not to be called upon to do so for the present, and for at least fifty years to come. On this point the present writer is at variance with many persons whose opinions, no doubt, are entitled to greater weight than his own. Amongst other maxims quoted by those authorities is the following from Adam Smith: "The subjects of every State ought to contribute towards the support of the government as nearly as possible in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the State. The expense of government to the individuals of a great nation is like the expense of management to the joint -tenants of a great estate, who are all obliged to contribute in proportion to their respective interests in the State. In the observation or neglect of this maxim consists what is called the equality or inequality of taxation (Book V. chap ii.)." The present writer does not intend to controvert this fundamental principle of taxation; and, in accordance with it, he admits that What was the financial settlement prescribed by the Act of Union? The seventh article or section of that enactment provided (1) that Ireland was to be protected from any liability on account of the British National Debt contracted prior to the Union; (2) that the separate debt of each country being first provided for by a separate charge on each, Ireland was then to contribute two-seventeenths towards the joint or common expenditure of the United Kingdom for twenty years, at the end of which period the Irish contribution was to be made proportionate to its relative ability as ascertained by certain tests, including a comparison of the exports and imports of the respective countries and of their incomes estimated by the produce of a general tax (such as the Income Tax); and (3) that the taxation of Ireland should not be raised to the standard of Great Britain till (a) the two debts should come to bear to each other the proportion of fifteen parts for Great Britain to two parts for Ireland, and (b) that the circumstances of the two countries should admit of uniform taxation. The seventh article of the Act of Union contained also a clause which provided that, if any surplus Irish revenue remained after the proportional contribution to the Imperial expenditure and the separate national charges had been defrayed, taxes were to be taken off Ireland to the amount of such surplus, or the surplus was to be applied to Irish purposes exclusively. In other words, Ireland was guaranteed inter alia a lower rate of taxation than Great Britain on the score of its lighter indebtedness. Now, the question is whether these stipulations were all of them just, and whether they have been observed. The answer is that one of them-the most important one-was grossly unfair, and that they have all of them been systematically violated, against the interest of Ireland, from the time of the Union down to the present hour. In fixing the contribution of Ireland to the Imperial expenditure at two-seventeenths of the whole, an overcharge similar to that proposed by the Home Rule Bill of 1886 was made, and was arrived at on a similarly fallacious assumption--namely, that the relative wealth of Ireland was greater than it was in fact. Ireland's wealth, as compared with the wealth of Great Britain, was estimated by Lord Castlereagh and the other authors of the Union to be as 1 to 7; the opponents of the Union-including the anti-Union Irish Lords who drew up and signed a remarkable protest on the subject-contended that the true proportion was 1 to 13. Experience demonstrated this latter estimate to be the true one, or, at least, that the former was ruinously high. No sooner had the Union taken place than it was found that Ireland was absolutely unable to contribute its quota to the common expenses. of the United Kingdom. When this fact had been made plain beyond all doubt, the course that, obviously, ought to have been adopted was. to reduce the quota. Instead, however, of taking this course, the British authorities (who were now complete masters of Ireland) re-. sorted to the plan of borrowing on Ireland's separate account every: year the amount of the annual deficit; although, by the way, it had: been expressly provided by the Act of Union that all loans raised after 1800 should be on joint account, and that the interest should be borne in the proportion already mentioned. The result was truly startling. At the time of the Union the debt of Ireland was £28,500,000; in four years it had risen to £53,000,000; and in 1817 it had mounted up to the astounding total of £112,500,000. In the fifteen years before the Union Ireland paid about £41,000,000 in taxes, or about £3,000,000 a year; in the fifteen years after the Union it paid (chiefly by borrowing) about £150,000,000, or about £10,000,000 a year. The following table shows the amount of the two debts as they stood on January 5, 1801, and January 5, 1817: Year. 1801 1817 British Debt. £450,504,984 734,522,104 Irish Debt. £28,545,134 From these figures it will be observed, first, that not only had the Irish debt increased to a monstrous amount in 1817, but that it had between the Union and that date been quadrupled, while the British had been less than doubled in the same time; and, secondly, that while the comparative taxable capacity of Ireland had been fixed at 1 to 7, the borrowings after the Union were in the much higher ratio of 1 to 31. In a report prepared for the Dublin Corporation in 1863 by Alderman John B. Dillon (father of the present Mr. John Dillon, M.P.) the matter is put more concisely as well as in a more striking way. "The entire liabilities of Ireland," says this document, “during the sixteen years after the Union may be stated in round numbers at £106,000,000. The Irish revenue during the sixteen years amounted to £94,238,828, leaving a deficit of something under £12,000,000, and to make up this deficit there was added to the Irish debt £80,538,939." Can any one pretend that it is now fair, or that it was ever fair, to saddle Ireland with responsibility for this post-Union addition to her debt, brought about in such ways and by such devices ? But this is not all. It will be remembered that the seventh article of the Union provided that whenever the Irish debt, which at the time of the Union was one-sixteenth part of the British, should have been swelled so as to bear to the British the ratio of 1 to 71, the fixed quotas of contribution might be abolished, the two exchequers might be consolidated, and the two countries might be taxed indiscriminately-in other words, that Ireland might be taxed on the high British level. This profligate arrangement, as the veteran Irish financier, Mr. O'Neill Daunt, justly describes it, was put in force in 1817, the requisite contingency having then happened. All which means that the debt of Ireland having been increased to the extent mentioned by the flagrantly dishonest device of overestimating her relative taxable capacity, for that very reason two of the fundamental stipulations of the Union arrangement-viz., that Ireland should never be subject to the pre-Union debt of Great Britain, and that she should be taxed on a strict measure of her relative ability—were audaciously violated. And the violation of them was, at the time and long afterwards, actually represented as an act of benevolence to Ireland! It seems never to have struck English statesmen that justice, not to talk of benevolence, was properly to be shown by reducing Ireland's contribution to the Imperial expenditure, and relieving her of at least a portion of the addition to her debt that had been caused by what was at last admitted to be an over-estimate of her relative taxable capacity. Mr. O'Neill Daunt, in a report which he drew up for the Home Government Association in 1872, puts the case forcibly, but, it is submitted, in terms not too strong for the occasion. "Suppose," he says, a money transaction between two merchants, A. and B. On making up their accounts B. discovers that A. has overcharged him £1000. A. admits the error, and transfers the £1000 to his own debit. But he then says to B.: Well, my dear. fellow, as I have generously taken the onus of that thousand on myself, you must really allow me to fleece you some other way.' The practical consequence to Ireland of the benevolent arrangement of 1817 was that she was “fleeced” in a new way. She was now subject to a system of taxa |