outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical technique of a super-bucket-shop.  From the first Great Britain robbed the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk, and appropriated it for her own nourishment.  One has a sort of gloomy pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we were not duped.  Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons—­in those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom—­tore the cloak off Lord Castlereagh’s strutting statesmanship, and laid bare his real motives.  Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said: 

“But the noble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly.  Ireland, he says, must contribute to every war, and the Minister won’t trust to interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. He must have her purse within his own grasp.  While three hundred men hold it in Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out of his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over and lay it at his feet, and then he will have full and uncontrolled power.”

So it came about.  Even before the Union Grattan’s Parliament had, of its own free will and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into debt for the first time to help England against France.  But, as Foster indicated, the Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of their resources.  They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became a necessary ingredient of Pitt’s foreign policy.  By it Ireland was swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so properly styles his “reckless finance.”  In sixteen years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy.  Between 1801 and 1817 her funded debt was increased from L28,541,157 to L112,684,773, an augmentation of nearly 300 per cent.  In the first fifteen years following the Union she paid in taxes L78,000,000 as against L31,000,000 in the last fifteen years preceding the Union.  After the amalgamation of the Exchequers in 1817 the case becomes clearer.  In 1819-20, for instance, the revenue contributed by Ireland was L5,256,564, of which only L1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great Britain of L3,691,684.  For 1829-30 the tribute was L4,156,576.

Let us now inquire how things stood with regard to absenteeism.  This had existed before the Union’; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to Johnson’s “Dictionary” he will find it damned in a definition.  But it was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London.  The memoirs of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and more material evidence in those fallen and ravaged mansions which now constitute the worst slums of our capital city.