was not yet made, that Ireland was paying a large contribution to Imperial services, over and above her local expenditure.  In the half-century between 1810 and 1860 she had paid an average yearly sum of nearly four millions, and a total sum of nearly two hundred millions.  In the year 1859-60, when the now equalized spirit duties were raised to 10s., she paid L5,396,000; a sum considerably more than double the expenditure on Irish services, and equivalent to no less than five-sevenths of the revenue raised in Ireland.

Parliament gave no serious attention to any of these phenomena from the time of the fiscal union in 1817 until after the introduction of Mr. Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill in 1893.  No settled conclusions were arrived at as to the relative wealth of the two countries, as to the capacity of Ireland to bear the British scale of taxation, or even as to the amount of revenue derived from and expended in the countries respectively, with the consequent contributions made to common Imperial services.  A Committee sat in 1864-65, which compiled some interesting information and heard some important witnesses, but ignored the main questions at issue and produced what Sir Edward Hamilton described later as an “impotent” Report.  Sir Joseph MacKenna, an able Irish banker, again and again, between 1867 and 1876, pleaded for an inquiry into Anglo-Irish finance, alleging gross injustice in the incidence of Irish taxation, and obtained nothing more than a rough return showing that between 1841 and 1871 the gross tax revenue per head of the population had risen in Ireland from 9s. 6.7d. to L1 6s. 2.2d. and had fallen in Great Britain from L2 9s. 9.5d. to L2 4s. 1.6d.  For the first time also it was shown that the national beverages of England and Ireland, beer and whisky, respectively, were taxed in a ratio unfair to Ireland.  In 1886 Mr. Gladstone, in preparing his first Home Rule Bill, had to re-open the question of the relative resources of Ireland and Great Britain for the first time since the Union, because he proposed a fixed annual contribution, unchangeable for thirty years, from Ireland towards the Imperial services.  He fixed the contribution at one-fifteenth or approximately half that of two-seventeenths fixed by Pitt in 1800, and the new figure was certainly not too low.  In 1888 the question was again incidentally raised by Mr. Goschen, who apportioned certain equivalent grants towards local taxation in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the proportion of 80, 11, 9, apparently on the principle that those were the proportions in which each country respectively contributed to Imperial expenditure.  Mr. Gladstone, in preparing the Home Rule Bill of 1893, made investigations which threw additional light on the true amount of revenue derived from Ireland, with allowance made for revenue from dutiable goods taxed in Ireland but consumed in Great Britain, and vice versa, but his financial scheme, as revised in the course of the Session and passed by the House of Commons, evaded the crucial issue by making Ireland’s contribution to Imperial services a quota, one-third, of her true annual revenue.  This quota, moreover, was indirectly reduced by temporary subsidies in aid of Irish charges (e.g., for Police) and was estimated, with these deductions, not to exceed at the outset one-fortieth.