not accepted in Germany, in France, in the United States, or in the British Colonies; why should Irishmen be wiser than the inhabitants of every civilised country, except England?  The fact, in any case, cannot be altered that most Home Rulers are Protectionists, and that many of them desire Home Rule mainly because they desire Protection for Ireland.  Yet Protection, at any rate in the form of a tariff, they cannot have.[84] Take again the Restrictions imposed on the endowment of religion.  All English Nonconformists, and many English Churchmen, hold these Restrictions to be in themselves politic and just.  But the one strong reason for the concession of Home Rule is that Irishmen disagree with English notions of policy and of justice.  No one can assign any reason why Irish statesmen, Catholics or Protestants, might not feel it a matter of duty or of policy to endow the priesthood, to level up instead of levelling down, to enter into some sort of concordat with Rome.  It is a policy which is distasteful to English Nonconformists and to most Irish Protestants.  But under a system of Home Rule, at any rate, English Nonconformists have no right to dictate the policy of Ireland.  There is not the remotest reason why Restrictions on the endowments of religion and the like should not be hateful to Irishmen.

The limitations, in short, on the competence of the Irish Parliament are inconsistent with the fundamental principle of Gladstonian statecraft.  It is a policy we are told of trust in the people, the limitations are dictated by distrust of the Irish people; Home Rule is to be granted in order that Irishmen may give effect to Irish ideas; the Restrictions are enacted to check the development of Irish ideas, and to impose English ideas upon the policy of Ireland.

As though, however, the Restraints were not enough to cause first irritation and then agitation, the financial provisions contemplated by the Bill are in themselves certain to generate, not future, but immediate discord.

Of the financial arrangements instituted under the new constitution, my purpose is to say very little.  My object is not to show that Mr. Gladstone’s financial calculations are wrong, or that they are ruinous to Ireland or unfair to England.  All this is for my present purpose immaterial.  My aim is to insist that, in their very nature, they are a cause of conflict; and that they bring the interest, and, even more, the sentiment, of Ireland into direct opposition with the power of England.[85]

All the customs payable at every Irish port are to be regulated, collected, and managed by, and to be paid into, the Exchequer of the United Kingdom.  Not a penny of these customs benefits Ireland; they are all—­and this is certainly the light in which they will appear to most Irishmen—­a contribution to the revenue of the United Kingdom, that is, of England.  If every taxable article were smuggled into Ireland, so that not one pound of Irish customs were paid to the English treasury,