which contributed to Imperial services five and a half millions in 1860, and two millions in 1894, now, so far from contributing anything, costs a million and a quarter more than she brings in.  This, certainly, was not a result he either anticipated or would have approved of.  On the contrary, he anticipated a reduction in Irish civil expenditure, to be saved for Irish purposes, without prejudice to the Imperial contribution.  It makes the brain dizzy to compare his anticipation with the reality.

How, on the other hand, stands the argument of Lord Farrer and Mr. Currie?  They prophesied a great increase in Irish expenditure and the disappearance of the contribution to Imperial services.  That has come true.  Lord Welby (and indeed the majority of the Commission) was with them in declining to regard excessive local expenditure as a set-off to excessive and unsuitable taxation, and in condemning root and branch the system of grants, aids, and doles as wasteful in itself and as sapping the self-reliance of Irishmen.  There again they were right.  They were at one with all their colleagues in holding that under the Union it was impossible to differentiate between the taxation of Ireland and Great Britain, and they prescribed, as the only sound remedy, Home Rule.  Once more they were right.

The figures of to-day constitute the reductio ad absurdum of the Union.  For over a century in Ireland we have defied the laws of political economy, but they have conquered us at last.  Sound finance demands that revenue and expenditure should be co-related.  Ireland’s economic circumstances are widely different from those of Great Britain, but she has been included, without any regard to her needs and without any reference to Irish expenditure, in a system of taxation designed exclusively for the capacities and needs of Great Britain.  Hence Irish revenue is both excessive and inadequate.

“Excessive”?  “Inadequate”?  What do these terms really mean?  Let us once and for all clear our minds of all obscurity and look the facts in the face.  No one knows what Irish revenue and expenditure ought to be, or would be, if Irishmen had controlled their own destinies.  It is useless to parade immense sums as the cash equivalent of over-taxation; it is idle to array against them rival figures of over-expenditure.  Normal Irish revenue and normal Irish expenditure are matters of speculation.  For all we know, Ireland, had she been permitted normal political development, would be raising a larger revenue, and feeling it less; while it is absolutely certain that she would be paying her own way and contributing to Imperial services more, in proportion to her resources, than she did before the Union.  The political and therefore the economic development of Ireland have been deliberately and forcibly arrested.  I do not say malignantly, because there was no malignant intention.  But the action, if mistaken, was deliberately and consistently