With regard to (b), the Bill of 1893 differed from that of 1886 in the provision of a suspensory period of six years, during which all existing taxation in Ireland was to be under Imperial control, though Ireland could impose additional taxes of her own.  After six years—­and, under the Bill of 1886, from the outset—­Ireland was to have control over all taxation other than Customs and Excise.  Where is the wisdom in selecting direct taxation as peculiarly suitable to Irish control?  It is already higher in Ireland than in any country economically situated as Ireland is.  Yet Ireland’s power to reduce it will be very small and very difficult to use, if she is rigidly excluded from changes in the indirect taxation which presses mainly on the poor.  Would she naturally be inclined to increase direct taxation?  Land Value Duties produce next to nothing in Ireland, and their extension would be unpopular.  The existing rates of Income-Tax and Estate Duties cannot be raised, though their incidence might be extended to cover poorer elements of the population, as, for example, the small farmers.  That is a kind of measure which the farmers would, if necessary, willingly agree to, in order to balance the accounts of a financially independent Ireland, but it is not the kind of measure they would care about when their national finance was dictated by Great Britain.  If one cared to make a dialectical point, one could add that a common argument against Home Rule is a fear of oppressive taxation of the rich or oppressive taxation of North-East Ulster, at the hands of an Irish Parliament, through high direct imposts.  The fear is one of those which scarcely need serious discussion.  If Irish statesmen were as black as their most industrious traducers paint them, they could not by any ingenuity invent any new direct tax which would not hit all the provinces equally, saving perhaps a tax on pasture ranches, which would hit North-East Ulster least; while super-taxes on the exceptionally rich, if they were worth the trouble of collecting, would drive wealth out of a poor country at the very moment when it was most urgently necessary to gain the confidence of investors and the few wealthy residents.

With regard to (c), Mr. Gladstone’s various devices for obtaining from Ireland a contribution to Imperial services possess now only a melancholy and academical interest, because, without an elaborate manipulation of the accounts, so as to disguise their true significance, no such contribution can possibly be obtained.  In 1886 Mr. Gladstone provided for an annual payment from Ireland, fixed in amount for thirty years; in 1893 for the contribution of a quota—­namely, one-third—­of her “true” annual revenue from Imperial taxes, to run for six years, and then to be revised.  His calculations were conditioned to some extent by (d), the part payment from the Imperial purse of the cost of Irish Police, coupled, of course, with continued Imperial