questions still:  Is the enormous charge for the Irish Police, which is under Imperial control, and exists avowedly for the purpose of forcibly maintaining, in the Imperial interest, an unpopular form of government in Ireland, to be charged against Ireland?  Or, again, should Ireland be debited with the cost of the machinery for carrying out Land Purchase, a policy admittedly rendered necessary by the enforced maintenance in the past of bad land laws?  Obviously such questions can never be answered so as to satisfy both Irishmen and Englishmen, because they go to the root of the political relations between Ireland and Great Britain.  The Royal Commission, therefore, was naturally unable to give a unanimous answer to the last clause of Question No. 3 of their Terms of Reference—­namely, “What is the Imperial expenditure to which Ireland should equitably contribute?” Some members held that under the Union even a theoretical classification was unjustifiable, while it was obvious that under the Union no effect could be given to it.  Still, the classification had to be made, in order to arrive at a theoretical estimate of the financial situations of Great Britain and Ireland respectively, and the Treasury, charged with the preparation of this estimate, took the only course open to it in reckoning as Irish expenditure all expenditure which would not have to be incurred if Ireland did not exist.  It was the perfectly correct course for the Treasury to take in dealing with the task set before them, and, as we shall see, it provides the only basis on which to construct the balance-sheet of a financially independent Ireland.

The insolubility of the second problem—­that of discovering the “true” revenue of Ireland and Great Britain respectively—­arises from the difficulty of tracing the passage of dutiable articles from one part of the kingdom to the other, and of tracing the incidence of direct imposts such as income-tax and stamps.  The great bulk of Irish revenue is derived from indirect taxes on commodities, liquor, tobacco, tea, sugar, etc.  Since the consumer pays the tax, revenue is rightly credited to the country of consumption.  The tax, for example, on tobacco manufactured in Ireland may be collected in Ireland, but the revenue from Irish-made tobacco exported to and consumed in Great Britain is rightly credited to Great Britain.  The converse holds true.  Half the tea consumed in Ireland has paid duty in London, but the whole of the revenue from tea consumed in Ireland must be credited to Ireland.  Now, since 1826, no official records had been kept by the Customs-houses of the transit of goods between Ireland and England, except in the solitary case of spirits.  The data, therefore, did not exist, and do not exist now, except in the case of spirits, for an accurate computation.  This is frankly confessed by the Treasury officials.  They base their published figures on certain arbitrary methods of calculation which have never been submitted to any public inquiry,