backed by courageous public opinion, to overhaul a bureaucracy so old and extensive.  Take the police, for example, the first and most urgent subject for reduction.  Adding the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Dublin Metropolitan Police together, we have a force of no less than 12,000 officers and men, a force twice as numerous in proportion to population as those of England and Wales, and costing the huge sum of a million and a half; and this in a country which now is unusually free from crime, and which at all times has been naturally less disposed to crime than any part of Great Britain.  It is the forcible maintenance of bad economic conditions that has produced Irish crime in the past.  Irishmen hotly resent that symbol of coercion, the swollen police force, which is as far removed from their own control as a foreign army of occupation.  On the other hand, the force itself is composed of Irishmen, and is a considerable, though an unhealthy, economic factor in the life of the country.  It performs some minor official duties outside the domain of justice; it is efficient, and its individual members are not unpopular.  Reduction will be difficult.  But drastic reduction, at least by a half, must eventually be brought about if Ireland is to hold up her head in the face of the world.

The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of public expenditure.  Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is destructive to thrifty instincts.  A rain of officials has produced an unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom.  No one feels responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one in Ireland is, in any real sense, responsible.  There is no Irish Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government logically defensible.  The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not connect their taxes with the expenditure going on around them.  On the contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain as the source of grants, salaries, pensions.

And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being financially dependent on Great Britain.  After more than a century of Union finance, after contributing, all told, over three hundred and twenty millions of money to the Imperial purse over and above expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and are a little in debt.  As we shall see, when I come to a closer examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has been the Old Age Pensions.  The application of the British scale, unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union encourages.  Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism.  It was an unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it has gravely compromised Home Rule finance.