1.  A subsidy (from L20,000 to L40,000) based on the total provincial population.

2.  A payment of 80 cents per head of the provincial population.

Both together are very small by comparison with the Australian payments.  Neither is really a subsidy, though it is given that name, but the return of a surplus indirectly contributed.  It is, indeed, conceivable that a new and poor Province might actually contribute less than she received back.  One Province, British Columbia, having long complained that she contributed far more than her share, and received back too little, obtained an exceptional grant of L20,000 under the Act of 1907.[147] The sums raised independently in each Province for the support of the provincial administration are, as in Australia, derived to a very slight extent from direct taxation, and to a very large extent from public property; not, as in Australia, from railways, tramways, etc., but mainly from vast tracts of public land.  In this respect the Provinces resemble the Dominion, which derives a large revenue from the same source.

In three vital points, then, Anglo-Irish finance differs from that of the Colonial Federations.  Ireland’s whole net income comes from taxes; she needs it all; and her economic conditions are totally different from those of Great Britain.  So far from borrowing anything from Federal finance, we should deduce from it the moral of financial independence for Ireland.  With all the powerful centripetal forces, moral and material, which originally united, and now hold together, the federated States of Australia and Canada, there is continual controversy, and sometimes considerable friction, over finance, generally in connection with the position of the poorer Provinces or States.  Some problems are still unsolved.  Good authorities, among them Sir Arthur Bourinot, think that the Canadian subsidies are unsound.  Australia is dissatisfied with her system.  The American States, while giving up Customs and Excise, are self-supporting entities; but that system has its drawback, in Federal extravagance.  We must remember, too, that even if these examples were of any use to us, the weak States or Provinces in a Federation have a greater control over Federal financial policy than Ireland could have under any scheme which reserved Customs and Excise to the Imperial Parliament; because the Federal principle, partially infringed only in the case of Canada, is to give them disproportionately high representation in the Upper Federal chamber, which can reject money Bills.[148]

On all counts, Ireland’s position is that of a country which imperatively needs fiscal isolation similar to that enjoyed by States prior to Federation, before it can dream of embarking on the perilous sea of quasi-Federal finance.  Trouble enough comes from the present joint system.  We should make a clean sweep of it, permit Ireland, with a minimum of temporary assistance, to find her own financial equilibrium, and so lay the foundation, perhaps, for a genuine Federation in the future.