The conclusion, therefore, might be extracted from the figures that, although by hypothesis overtaxed, Ireland was drawing a balance of profit, because, by having more spent on her—­or, to put it in another way, by costing more to govern, she paid a million less to the common purse than if she had been taxed according to her capacity.

This was precisely the conclusion drawn by one member of the Commission, Sir David Barbour, and implicitly acquiesced in by one other member, Sir Thomas Sutherland.  All the other Commissioners agreed that there was something seriously amiss, and declined to regard the disproportionately high expenditure on Ireland as compensation for the over-high taxation.  The O’Conor Don, as successor in the chairmanship to Mr. Childers, and four others contented themselves with setting forth the facts, but made no recommendations, on the ground that the Commission had not been asked to make any.  Mr. Childers, who died before the completion of the inquiry, left a Draft Report recommending that a special grant, amounting to two millions a year, should for the future be allocated to Ireland.  The other six members, dividing into two groups of three, under Lord Farrer and Mr. Sexton respectively, and stating their views in two different Reports, all agreed that a form of Home Rule giving financial independence to Ireland was the only solution of the difficulty.

The questions at issue were not at all obscure.  Any apparent obscurity was caused by the terms of reference to the Commission, which assumed the permanence of the Union, while it was absolutely impossible for the Commission, divided though its members were in politics, to start work at all without, as they said, considering Great Britain and Ireland as “separate entities.”  The reader must be on his guard against exaggerating the “over-taxation of Ireland” in its purely cash aspect.  The really important points were:  (1) The suitability of the Irish taxes and the responsibility for levying them; (2) the amount and suitability of the expenditure in Ireland and the responsibility for its distribution.  In order to see conflicting principles stated in their clearest form the reader should compare the terse and vigorous reports of Sir David Barbour on the one hand, and of Lord Farrer, Lord Welby, and Mr. Currie on the other.

It was Sir David Barbour’s great merit that he was not afraid of his own conclusions.  He frankly stated, like all the other Commissioners, that Ireland’s taxation, considered by itself, without regard to Irish expenditure, was unsuitable and unjust.  He recognized that a system of taxation which was suitable for a rich, industrial, and expanding country like Great Britain was unsuitable for a poor, agricultural, and economically stagnant country like Ireland.  He had before him the figures showing that two-thirds of the Irish population was rural, and that between three and four-fifths of the English population was