It may be worth while here to refer to the amazing statement that Great Britain has made a large “profit out of the Union.”  At the last meeting of the British Association, Prof.  Oldham affected to prove that Ireland “in the course of one hundred years ... had sent across the Channel as her contribution to the British Exchequer a clear net payment of about 330 millions sterling.”  The same contention has been urged by Lord MacDonnell.  This calculation ignores the fact that even the Irish Parliament between 1782 and 1800 acknowledged its obligation to contribute to Imperial services, and voted contributions for Imperial purposes, besides raising and maintaining in Ireland a force of 12,000 to 15,000 men, some of whom were available for foreign service.  It makes no allowance also for the debt which Ireland brought into the Union when the Exchequers were amalgamated in 1817.  The importance of the last item may be judged from the fact that if the whole of the so-called contribution to Imperial services, i.e. the excess of true revenue over local expenditure, had been employed since 1817 in paying interest at 3 per cent. on the old Irish debt and the whole of any balance remaining after payment of interest had been used for redemption of the capital, this debt would only have been extinguished in 1886.  If a contribution of only 1 per cent. to the cost of Imperial services had been previously charged against this excess, there would be a large balance of the Irish debt still outstanding.  As a matter of fact, in the same period that Ireland is said to have contributed L330,000,000, Great Britain may be shown by a precisely similar calculation to have contributed no less than L5,800,000,000 for Imperial purposes.  The measure of “injustice to Ireland” meted out by unsympathetic Britons in respect to the Imperial contribution extracted from Ireland may be seen from the following comparison for different dates in the last century.

RATIOS OF POPULATIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO IMPERIAL SERVICES OF IRELAND AND GREAT BRITAIN AT DECENNIAL INTERVALS.

Ratio of British to           Ratio of British to
Irish Populations.             Irish Contributions.

1819-20                  2.1                             12.7
1829-30                  2.1                             10.9
1839-40                  2.3                             11.5
1849-50                  3.2                             17.6
1859-60                  4.0                              9.8
1869-70                  4.8                             12.3
1879-80                  5.7                             16.3
1889-90                  7.0                             22.6
1899-00                  8.9                             46.5
1909-10                  9.3                             [52]

The truth is that from a financial point of view Ireland has no valid complaint to make on the score of her contributions for Imperial purposes.  Between