It is now 1911.  The deficit, once a large surplus, came into being only two years ago.  It was the direct and inevitable result of a fiscal Union against which Ireland has for generations unceasingly protested, and it was a result actually foretold in 1896 by Lord Welby and his two colleagues.  It could have been averted, as they pointed out, only by a form of Home Rule giving financial independence to Ireland.  But the warning was older than the Report of the Financial Relations Commission.  Mr. Gladstone told the House of Commons in 1886, when introducing his Home Rule Bill, that no limit could be set to Irish expenditure under the Union; he and Sir William Harcourt repeated the warning in 1893, and if the reader will study the debates on the financial clauses of the Bill of 1893,[136] he will find pages of bitter diatribe founded on the small net contribution from Ireland to Imperial services for which the revised financial scheme provided.  Ireland, said the Opposition, was to make money out of Great Britain, and escape her fair proportion of Imperial charges.  Mr. Chamberlain showed that, with allowance for payment from the Imperial purse of part of the cost of Irish police, the net initial contribution was about one-fortieth, and asked:  “Is Irish patriotism a plant of such sickly growth that it has to be watered with British gold?” The taunt was as pointless as it was cruel, for although the Union had kept Ireland poor, Irish leaders, in spite of that poverty, had asked for a financial independence which Mr. Gladstone in neither of his Bills felt disposed to give her.  Mr. Chamberlain had his way; the Union was maintained, and as a result Ireland’s actual contribution of two millions at that date has been replaced by a subsidy from Great Britain.  Are we to be told now by Unionists that the Union must be maintained in order to maintain this subsidy? or by Home Rulers that the Irish deficit is an argument for the perpetuation of the financial dependence which caused it, and an insuperable bar to the financial independence which alone can extinguish it?

No; let us look the facts in the face.  Here is a deficit officially given as L1,312,000.  It is probably less, owing to an underestimate of Irish revenue.  But it may grow to be more, even with allowance for an automatic growth of revenue, owing to the increased votes of the present year, and the expenses peculiar to the establishment of the new Irish Legislature and Government.  What her really healthy and normal revenue should be only Ireland herself can discover in the future.  What her right expenditure should be she alone can determine.  We can only work upon the data we have before us.  Economy cannot be instantaneous, either in Ireland or anywhere else.  Assume, then, an initial deficit in the Irish balance-sheet on the basis of present taxation.  Its exact size cannot affect the manner of dealing with it.  How are we to deal with it?