the Imperial power would lose, but the Irish State would gain.  Ireland would be delivered from a tax which will soon be called a tribute.  If, moreover, Ireland continues to be treated as financially a part of the United Kingdom, then free smuggling, which is free trade, would make Ireland a free port, where might be landed untaxed the goods required by the whole United Kingdom.  It is easy to see how the English revenue would suffer, but it is equally easy to see that Irish commerce might flourish.  If I am told that the ruin of the British revenue may be averted by the examination of goods brought from Ireland to Great Britain—­this, of course, is so.  But then freedom of trade within the United Kingdom is at an end.  We are compelled, in substance, to raise an internal line of custom houses; we abolish at one stroke one great benefit of the Treaty of Union.

The mode, again, in which the customs are levied outrages every kind of national sentiment.  Coast-guards, custom-house officers, and gaugers are never popular among a population of smugglers; they will not be the more beloved when every custom-house officer or coastguard is the representative of an alien power, and is employed to levy tribute from Ireland.

Another leading feature of the financial arrangements is the charging upon the Irish Consolidated Fund of various sums rightly due and payable to the Exchequer of the United Kingdom.[86] They are made a first charge upon the revenue of Ireland.  They are to be paid in the last resort upon the order of the Lord Lieutenant, acting as an Imperial officer.  The necessity for some arrangement of this kind is clear.  Millions have been lent to Ireland, and these millions must be repaid.  But if the need for some such arrangement be certain, its desperate impolicy is no less certain.  England and Ireland, the English Government and the Irish Government, are brought into direct hostile collision.  The rich English Government appears in the light of an imperious creditor the Irish Government stands in the position of a poverty-stricken debtor.  Note, and this is the point which should be pressed home, that in all confederations the difficulty of exacting the money needed by the federal government from any state of the confederacy has been found all but insuperable.  Study the history of the thirteen American colonies between the time of the acknowledgment of their independence by England and the formation of the United States.  This has been termed ’the critical period’ of American history.  The colonies were united by recollections of common suffering and of common triumph, they were not divided by race or religion; no State aspired to separate nationality, yet they drifted rapidly towards anarchy; they were discontented at home, they were powerless abroad, above all, they nearly made shipwreck on the financial arrangements.  Congress was never able, for the satisfaction either of national needs or of national honour, to obtain fair contributions from the different States.[87]