Soon after this the country supped full of horrors in the famine of 1846-1847.  In the decade from 1845 to 1855 more than a quarter of Ireland’s population was lost.  No sooner did she begin to recover from the effects of this visitation than the Repeal of the Corn Laws dealt her an almost equally disastrous blow.  The absence of an industrial side which she might develop, as did England, the almost complete dependence on agriculture, joined to the enfeebled condition in which the lean years had left her, made the adoption at this moment of the principle of Free Trade—­in her case—­deplorable.  Nor was this all.  It was at this moment that the opportunity was taken by Mr. Gladstone, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, to reverse the discriminative policy upon which Peel had so strongly insisted.

The Income Tax was applied to Ireland in 1853 at the rate of seven pence in the pound.  Ten years later it had risen to seventeen pence.  At the same time an additional duty of eight pence a gallon on Irish whiskey was exacted, which in two years was multiplied fourfold, while in 1858 Disraeli assimilated for the first time the whiskey duty in the two islands by raising it in Ireland to 8s. a gallon.  The result of this new departure in taxation may be summarised by saying that the Irish revenue was raised from just under five millions in 1850 to nearly eight millions in 1860, and that, too, at a time when, of all others, her distress demanded special treatment and care.

Although the process of assimilation was carried far in 1853 and the subsequent years, fiscal unity has never been completely effected.  To this day Ireland secures exemption from the Land Tax, the Inhabited House Duty, the Railway Passenger Duty, and the tax on horses, carriages, patent medicines, and armorial bearings.  It will be said, no doubt, that Ireland ought to show due gratitude for these exemptions, but though they raise collectively a sum of L4,000,000 by their incidence in England, Scotland, and Wales, it is calculated that if applied to Ireland they would bring in not more than L150,000 a year, a sum so small that one may ask whether it would bear the cost of collecting.

By way of set-off to the imposition of income tax, which it should be noted was at the time said to be “temporary,” Mr. Gladstone wiped out a capital debt of four millions, but it must be pointed out that, in the fifty years which have ensued, a sum of between twenty millions and thirty millions has been collected in Ireland as income tax.  Objection cannot—­beyond a certain point—­be taken to the incidence of this tax, seeing that it does not fall upon the poorest classes, and that no country benefits more than does Ireland from the substitution of direct for indirect taxation.  But what does call for censure is that its application was not made an occasion for the remission of other taxes.