FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

I.

THE ESSENCE OF HOME RULE.

Let us now sum up this financial question, and give its place in the general problem of Home Rule. In Chapter X. I argued that, on broad grounds of political policy, Ireland, in her own interest, and in the general interest of the United Kingdom, should have "Colonial" Home Rule without representation in the Imperial Parliament. Leaving finance temporarily aside, while observing that any substantial Imperial control over Irish finance would defeat the "colonial" solution of the problem, I endeavoured to show that there were no tenable grounds of a non-financial character for retaining Irish Members at Westminster, nor any dangers to be feared from excluding them. I have now reviewed the history of Anglo-Irish finance up to the present day, and I hope in so doing to have proved that, so far from presenting an obstacle to "Colonial" Home Rule, the financial conditions demand such a solution. Finance and policy are inseparably one. All the considerations which render Home Rule desirable lead irresistibly to the financial independence of Ireland, with complete control assigned to her over all branches of taxation. Without financial independence it is impossible to realize the objects of Home Rule. It would be a miracle were the case otherwise. Ireland would, indeed, be abnormal if, after her history, she could reach prosperity and stability without passing through a phase of financial independence. No parallel, even in the most distant degree, could be found for any such metamorphosis in the whole of the British Empire.

If we study Ireland's interest, we shall promote Imperial interests. The main object of Home Rule is to make Ireland self-reliant. Lord Welby and his colleagues were right in 1896 when they declared that ideal to be impracticable without giving Ireland entire responsibility both for her revenue and her expenditure. This declaration is as true as ever. The situation has changed only in one respect: that financial independence will now mean a financial sacrifice to Ireland, whereas in 1896 it would have meant a financial gain to Ireland—that is, if Lord Welby's recommendation in favour of remitting the Irish contribution to Imperial services had been carried out. At that time Ireland contributed two millions. Now Great Britain contributes over a million to Ireland. Sooner or later that subsidy must stop, and the sooner it stops the better.

But it is of vital importance that Ireland should understand the situation. The present position is dangerous, because the Irish people at large are ignorant of the facts, and their leaders are taking no steps to enlighten them. The reasons are intelligible, but they are not sound reasons. Paced with the facts and the choice, Ireland would not hesitate, but she must know the facts and understand the nature of the choice.

II.

THE DEFICIT.

Let us deal at once with the question of the deficit. It is inconceivable surely that the existence of a deficit should be used as an argument against financial independence, much less as an argument against Home Rule in general. Will anyone be found to say that an island with a fertile soil, several nourishing industries, and a clever population of four and a half millions, is to be regarded, whatever its past history, as incapable of supporting a Government of its own out of its own resources? Let nobody be tempted by the fallacy that, given time, Ireland will regain financial stability under the fiscal Union, and at a later stage, perhaps, be more fitted to bear the burden of fiscal independence. The supposition is chimerical. The present system, besides being radically vicious in a purely scientific sense, undermines the moral power of Ireland to secure her own regeneration.

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 £1,312,000. 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?

Let us dismiss at once the theory of "restitution" with the earnest hope that we shall hear nothing of it in the coming controversy. No Irishman will argue that a subsidy to the extent of, or exceeding the deficit, is a good thing in itself, and should be large and lasting because it will represent compensation for money unfairly exacted in the past. It is, indeed, true that the Union impoverished Ireland, but the most grievous wrong was moral, and for that wrong alone is reparation possible. Home Rule is not worth fighting for if it has not as its end and aim a self-reliant and self-supporting Ireland. Nor does it improve the argument in the least to represent the subsidy as productive expenditure for the purpose of raising Ireland's taxable capacity and improving her economic position. No money raised outside of Ireland will have that effect. Once admit the principle of restitution, and where are you to stop? What rational or scientific limit can be set to it? More pertinent question still, what are the conditions which will inevitably be imposed in exchange? Ireland cannot have it both ways. She must either hold out for financial independence or, for every financial boon, submit to a corresponding deduction from her political liberty.

If there were no alternative between financial independence without a farthing of temporary aid, and permanent financial dependence with a permanent loss of liberty, it would pay Ireland a thousandfold in the future to choose the former scheme, remodel taxation promptly to meet the initial deficit, and with equal promptitude set on foot such a drastic reduction of expenditure as would ensure the rapid attainment of a proper financial equilibrium. When once the Irish realized the issue, they would accept the responsibility with all its attendant sacrifices, which would no doubt be severe.

But there is an alternative, and that is to make good the initial deficit, whatever the financial authorities finally pronounce it to be, with an initial subsidy of equal size, or perhaps of somewhat greater size so as to admit of a small initial surplus, but destined to diminish by stated amounts, and within a few years to terminate. To such assistance, given unconditionally, Ireland has an unanswerable claim, and to such assistance she ought, in my opinion, to limit her claim. Until two years ago she contributed uninterruptedly, and sometimes excessively, to the support of the Empire. With men and money she has made efforts for the common weal which no self-governing Colony has made, though she has been treated, politically and financially, as not even a Crown Colony has been treated. Just at the point where the self-governing Colonies, thanks to the liberty allowed them, are beginning to contribute indirectly to the defence of the Empire, Ireland, as the ultimate result of a century of coercive government, ceases to contribute. She can claim honourably, if she wills, to be placed, by temporary financial aid from the authority which is responsible for her undoing, in the financial position of a self-governing Colony.

From the British point of view it is difficult to see any valid objection to the course suggested. There will be no stinginess in the settlement. Even if there were any disposition in that direction, it would be idle to grudge the initial subsidy, because an equivalent sum is already being paid. The Union will infallibly continue to accentuate the deficit and increase the resulting burden on the taxpayers of Great Britain. The plan proposed would eventually remove that burden. But, obviously, its success hinges on the concession of full financial powers to an Ireland unrepresented at Westminster. In their own interests, if not for very shame, Englishmen should decline to make use of the old adage, that "he who pays the piper should call the tune." For more than a century Ireland paid the piper and England called the tune—and what a tune, and with what results! Representation has nothing to do with the case. Precedents are needless, but there are, as a fact, many. Crown Colonies have frequently received free grants for the relief of distress—Jamaica and other West Indian islands, for example. The Transvaal and Orange River Colony received several millions after the war to enable the ruined farmers to start business on a footing of solvency. During the whole period of their adolescence, and, indeed, until quite a recent date, all the self-governing Colonies were virtually subsidized by the allocation of British forces for local defence, maintained at the Imperial charge. And Ireland paid her share of this charge. Similar garrisons were, are, and will be, maintained in Ireland. Yes, but Ireland contributed to their cost, and in course of time will, it is to be hoped, resume her contributions with a gladder heart and a freer conscience than ever before.

Canada was economically stagnant under coercion. If, in her case, we had carried coercion as far as we carried it in Ireland, it would have been necessary to give her a temporary subsidy in order to enable her to assume the position of a self-governing Colony. Ireland's proximity does not alter economic laws. "Facts are stubborn things," and these are the Irish facts. Duty apart, no more profitable investment could possibly be made by the British tax-payer than a subsidy designed to enable Ireland to stand on her legs again. The present tribute to her is a dead loss.

The subsidy, if given, ought, I submit, on no account to be earmarked, on the bad precedent set by the Bills of 1886 and 1893,[137] for any particular head of expenditure in Ireland, as for Police, Pensions, Land Commission, or Education. As I have shown previously, nothing is easier than to pick out items of excessive expenditure, or of under-expenditure, for which Ireland is not herself responsible. But to allocate a grant specially to any of these purposes would be superfluous unless the intention were to maintain Imperial control over the service in question. As I urged in Chapter X., none of the services mentioned above ought to be retained under Imperial control. Extravagance in the first three will not be properly checked, save by a responsible Ireland. Nor will extra money on Education be properly spent until it is raised and spent by Ireland. There are no other services, with the possible exception of Posts, to which a subsidy could possibly be applicable. Even in that case an earmarked subsidy would be out of place. But Posts are outside the point we are discussing. If for mutual convenience they were to be kept under Imperial control—a step which would not render imperative Irish representation at Westminster—their finance would remain, as at present, common to the whole United Kingdom. There is officially held, on bad evidence, to be a loss on Irish Posts of £249,000, and this loss is debited against Ireland, and goes to swell the deficit we have been considering. With the Posts under Imperial control, the initial deficit to be made good by subsidy would be reduced by the amount of the loss. Should it, however, be decided that Ireland is fairly entitled to a share of the large general profit earned by the Postal Services of the United Kingdom, the annual profit so attributable to Ireland would be set off against the annual subsidy as long as the subsidy lasted, and after it was at an end would be a clear item of revenue to Ireland. My own opinion, as I stated in Chapter X., is that the Irish postal system, whether standing by itself it shows a profit or a loss, ought to be under Irish control.

III.

FUTURE CONTRIBUTION TO IMPERIAL SERVICES.

This must be left a voluntary matter for Ireland, as it is for the self-governing Colonies. There is no contribution from Ireland at present, and to fix a future date at which a fixed contribution, like that from the Isle of Man, should begin, is a course hardly practicable even if it were desirable.

IV.

IRELAND'S SHARE OF THE NATIONAL DEBT.

Until two years ago Ireland, of course, contributed, inter alia, to the annual interest and sinking fund, amounting in 1910-11 to £24,554,000, on the National Debt of the United Kingdom. It is impossible to estimate her share of the capital of the Debt, and I scarcely think that anyone would seriously propose to encumber the new Ireland with an old Debt, based on some arbitrary estimate. For the great bulk of Debt created in the past she has little moral responsibility—no more, at any rate, than the self-governing Colonies. In this respect she must begin, like them, with a clean sheet.

V.

IRELAND'S SHARE OF IMPERIAL MISCELLANEOUS REVENUE.

On the other hand, Ireland, in consideration of the remissions mentioned, must renounce the share to which she is technically entitled of the Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue, derived mainly from Suez Canal shares and the Mint, and amounting altogether in 1910-11 to £2,769,500.[138]

VI.

IRISH CONTROL OF CUSTOMS AND EXCISE.

Let us now come to close quarters with this important issue. The grand argument on the affirmative side is that the products of these duties represent nearly four-fifths of the tax revenue collected in Ireland. What are the objections?

We need scarcely consider the general objection, sometimes made ostensibly in the interests of Ireland, that her public men have little financial experience. The fact is true, and it is not their fault. But the financial scheme cannot reasonably be based on a recognition of a temporary lack of experience.

I place Customs and Excise together because I believe there is no serious question of making a distinction between the two, and of allowing Ireland to levy and collect her own Excise duties, while denying her authority over Customs. It is true that until 1860 such a distinction was made, and a lower Excise duty levied upon Irish than upon British spirits;[139] but the tendency in all modern States is to make the authority over Customs the same as that over Excise, and any departure from that principle, in the case of modern Ireland, is likely to cause considerable inconvenience. License Duties, which are included under the head of Excise, may, no doubt, without much inconvenience, be differentiated from the rest, but their Irish proceeds (£284,000) are too small to influence the question.

Excise, then, follows Customs. What are the objections to giving Ireland, like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, control over her own Customs? Without doubt, the establishment of a new Customs barrier between Ireland and Great Britain is in itself a drawback. The Custom-house machinery exists, of course, at present, because Ireland is an island; nor would the additional function of checking British as well as foreign imports into Ireland cause any great increase of expense; but since the great bulk of Irish external trade is with Great Britain, there will unquestionably be a certain amount of inconvenience and expense both to Ireland and Great Britain in submitting merchandise on both sides of the Irish Channel to the passage of a Customs barrier.

That seems to be the limit to which criticism can justly go in the case of Ireland and Great Britain. That is as far as it goes in the analogous case of New Zealand and the Australian Commonwealth, where a small island State has a separate Customs system from that of a large, wealthy, and populous neighbour of the same race, and with many identical interests. That is as far as it goes in the parallel case of little Newfoundland and the great Dominion of Canada. Neither the Dominion nor the Commonwealth claim that proximity, power, and racial identity give them the right to control the trade and taxation of their small independent neighbours, nor does the smallest friction result from the mutual independence. On the contrary, both the Dominions and the Commonwealth were founded on that vital principle of a pre-existent State independence surrendered voluntarily for larger ends. The whole Empire depends on the principle of local autonomy, and, above all, on the principle of local financial autonomy. Endeavours in America to sustain the opposite theory led to disaster. We have for generations regarded it as perfectly natural that the self-governing Colonies should have Customs systems of their own, even when they are used for the purpose of imposing heavy duties on goods coming from the Mother Country, and we know that that liberty has borne fruit a hundredfold in affection and loyalty to the Imperial Government. Until the Union of Great Britain and Ireland it was regarded as equally natural that Ireland should have control of her own Customs, along with all other branches of revenue. Even after the Union, although there was no Irish control over anything Irish, it was recognized, until the fiscal unification of the two countries in 1817, that Irish conditions required a separate Customs system, which, in fact, existed until 1826.[140] How fiscal unification and the subsequent abolition of separate Customs was brought about I have told in Chapter XI. It is not a pleasant story. To say the least, the conditions, moral and material, were not such as to warrant the inference that there is any inherent necessity for joint Customs between Ireland and Great Britain. The presumption raised by all subsequent events is in the opposite direction.

But the tradition of unified Customs, now nearly a century old, has immense potency, and unless it is fearlessly scrutinized and challenged, may be able, reinforced by the passions excited by the great controversy over Free Trade and Protection, to defy the warnings writ large upon the page of history. The tradition must be so challenged. Say what we will about the proximity of Ireland and Great Britain, descant as we will in law-books, pamphlets, leading articles, debates, on what ought theoretically to be the fiscal relations of the two countries, we cannot escape from the fact that, in this as in so many other respects, both the human and economic problem before us is fundamentally a colonial problem, and that its being so is not the fault of Ireland, but of Great Britain.

Belief in Home Rule seems to me necessarily to involve a willingness to give Ireland her Customs. Great Britain has no moral right to lay it down that her views about trade shall govern the course of Irish policy; and if Great Britain believes sincerely in Home Rule, she should be willing to trust Ireland, regardless of the economic consequences, and regardless of the effect upon the great Tariff controversy.

The effect upon that controversy I shall not discuss. It seems to me to possess only a tactical and electioneering interest, and that side of the Home Rule problem I have rigidly avoided, while expressing in general terms my belief that sound policy and sound tactics in reality coincide. The Home Rule Bill is far more likely to be wrecked by timidity than by boldness, by precautions and compromises than by a fearless accommodation of British policy to Irish facts and needs.

As to the danger to Great Britain of separate Irish Customs, it seems to me to be greatly exaggerated. Ireland's own interests will primarily dictate her action. What she will decide her interest to be, nobody can foretell with certainty beyond a limited point, because Irish public opinion is not formed. Ireland has taken little or no part in the fiscal controversy, for the simple reason that she has been absorbed in the task of getting Home Rule, and until she gets it she is precluded from formulating a trustworthy national opinion on most of the great subjects which agitate modern societies. There is, however, no tradition in favour of high Protection, even from Grattan's commercially free Parliament. The question of a low protective or purely revenue tariff on imports has not received any serious investigation. Let us frankly admit at the outset that no country in the world, economically situated as Ireland is, dispenses with a general tariff of some sort, and undoubtedly there are to-day a good many Irishmen outside political life who advocate the encouragement of infant Irish manufacturing industries by sufficient protective duties directed against Great Britain as well as against the outside world. It would be strange if there were not, in view of the distressing past history of Ireland's throttled industries, and in view of the strenuous efforts now being made by the Development Associations to push the manufacture and sale of Irish goods in all parts of the world. There are many avowed Free Traders also; nor are the Development Associations themselves officially protectionist. The opinion is sometimes expressed that Ireland, which could easily be self-supporting in the matter of food, occupies an unhealthy position in exporting a large proportion of her own agricultural produce, butter, bacon, meat, etc., and in importing for her own consumption inferior British and foreign qualities of some of the principal foodstuffs; but, so far as it is possible to ascertain it, the predominant opinion seems to be that an agricultural tariff would not be a good remedy for this weakness, if it be one, and that Ireland's future development, like that of Denmark, lies in the increasingly scientific organization of her agricultural industries, and in the better cultivation of her own soil. "Better farming, better business, better living," to use the admirable motto invented by Sir Horace Plunkett for the I.A.O.S. In the absence of an Irish Legislature, no special importance can be attached to individual expressions of opinion. Yet a measure of prophecy is permissible. The Irish Legislature will have to study the national interest, and it is possible to say with certainty at least this—that Ireland's interest lies in maintaining close and friendly trade relations with Great Britain. Unfortunately, we have no means of accurately ascertaining the amount of trade done by Ireland with Great Britain and with foreign and colonial countries respectively. Irish commerce takes, of course, three forms: (a) Direct trade with countries outside Great Britain; (b) indirect trade with these countries via Great Britain; (c) direct local trade with Great Britain. The statisticians of the Irish Department of Agriculture make only an imperfect attempt to distinguish between these classes, but their figures, so far as they go, prove beyond question that the great bulk of Irish external commerce belongs to Class (c)—local trade with Great Britain. The total value of Irish trade in 1909 is estimated at £125,675,847, of which £63,947,155 was for imports, £61,728,692 for exports. Probably 80 per cent., at least, of this trade was strictly local. Certainly Great Britain is the market for very nearly the whole of Irish agricultural produce, and for most of her exports of linen, ships, tobacco, liquor, etc. Any aggressive action likely to provoke a tariff war would be ruinous to Ireland, while it would hurt Great Britain far less in proportion. But, in fact, both countries would suffer, Great Britain from the loss of an easily accessible food-supply of extraordinary value, not only for economic, but for strategical reasons; Ireland from the loss of an excellent and indispensable customer.

On the other hand, whatever Ireland's trade policy may be, she certainly needs the power of fixing her own duties upon commodities like tea and sugar, which are of foreign origin, and are now merely transported to her through British ports. Taxation of this sort is a matter of the deepest concern to a country where agricultural wages average only eleven shillings a week, and which cannot reduce its exorbitant Old Age Pensions Bill without giving some compensatory relief to the classes concerned. Tobacco, of which in its manufactured forms Ireland is a considerable producer as well as a large consumer, belongs to the same category. Liquor is an important article of production in Ireland, as well as of consumption, and the Irish Legislature ought to be able to form and carry out its own liquor policy. Ireland is just as able and willing to promote temperance as Great Britain, and just as competent to reconcile a temperance policy with due regard to producing and distributing interests.

The Customs tariff is an Irish question, not an Ulster question. The interests of the Protestant farmers of North-East Ulster are identical with those of the rest of Ireland, and obviously it will be a matter of the profoundest importance for Ireland as a whole to safeguard the interests of the shipbuilding and linen industries in the North in whatever way may seem best. The Industrial Development Associations, which are affiliated in a national organization, and are far above petty sectarian jealousies, may be trusted to see that Ireland steers a safe financial course in her trade policy.

If there is little or no danger that a Home-Ruled Ireland will commit tariff follies of her own, she has unquestionably a right to escape from further entanglement in the tariff policy of Great Britain. What may be the issue of Great Britain's great fiscal controversy nobody can foretell. But as long as a protective tariff remains the cardinal point in the constructive policy of one of the British parties, there is a strong likelihood of such a tariff, which would be uniform for the whole United Kingdom, being carried into law. Free Traders, like myself, may deplore the possibility, but we cannot shut our eyes to it. That tariff, if and when it is framed, will, like the Free Trade tariff of the past, be framed without regard to Irish interests, which are predominantly agricultural, and with exclusive regard to British interests, which are mainly industrial. Whatever may have been the original ideal of the Conservative Protectionists, however highly they may once have valued the protection of agriculture, irresistible political forces have driven them in the direction of a tariff framed mainly to secure the adhesion of the great manufacturing towns. The electoral power of these towns, the growing resentment of the working classes in most parts of the world at the increasing cost of living, the fact that Great Britain cannot under any conceivable circumstances feed her own population, have been reflected in the definite abandonment by the party leaders of the proposed small duty against colonial imports, and in the admission by Mr. Bonar Law at Manchester, during the last General Election, that the proposed tariff would not benefit the farmers. Nor will the failure of the Reciprocity Agreement between Canada and the United States appreciably diminish the obstacles to food-taxes in the United Kingdom. Any practicable protective tariff, therefore, on the ground of its injustice to Ireland, would cause strong and legitimate resentment in that country, which is subjected to the most formidable competition from foreign and colonial foodstuffs, but whose great competition in manufactured goods is Great Britain herself. The one Irish industry which might favour it is the linen industry of the North. It would have no attraction for the shipbuilding industry, which in no part of the British Isles has anything to gain by Protection, as I believe all parties to the controversy agree. Other small manufacturing industries would complain that they gained nothing; while the agricultural population would complain that, as consumers, they would be damaged by higher prices for clothing and other manufactured articles, while as producers they were ignored.

The difficulty is only one further proof of the dissimilarity of economic conditions between Great Britain and Ireland, and of the artificial and unnatural character of the present fiscal union. Justice to Ireland demands its dissolution. The dangers are imaginary. Liberals, however firm their belief in Free Trade, should hold, with Lord Welby and his Home Rule colleagues on the Financial Relations Commission, that "even if Ireland initiates a protective policy, in this case, as in that of the Colonies, freedom is a greater good than Free Trade." As for the Protectionists, I have never seen an argument from that source, and I do not see how any consistent or plausible argument could possibly be framed, to show that a uniform tariff for the United Kingdom could be fair to Ireland. Professor Hewins, the leading Tariff Reform economist, virtually acknowledges the impossibility in his Introduction to Miss Murray's "Commercial Relations between England and Ireland." There were two sound lines of policy, he points out, which might have been adopted towards Ireland in the period prior to the Union: (1)To have placed her on a level of equality with the Colonies, applying the mercantile system indiscriminately and impartially to the Colonies and to her; or (2) to have aimed from the first at the financial and commercial unity of the British Isles. Neither of these courses was taken. Ireland, while kept financially and commercially separate, "was in a less favourable position than that of a Colony." With regard to the present, "Most of the difficulties of an economic character," says the Professor, "in the financial relations between England and Ireland, arise from the differences of economic structure and organization between the two countries. If Ireland were a highly organized, populous, manufacturing country, the present fiscal system would probably work out no worse than it does in the urban districts of Great Britain. But whatever be the virtues or demerits of that system, it was certainly not framed with any reference to the economic conditions which prevail in Ireland." We wait for the seemingly unavoidable political inference, but in vain. Professor Hewins is a Unionist. "A 'national' policy for Ireland ... is never likely to be possible." Well, that is plain speaking, and the more plainly these things are said the better. Let Unionists, if they will, tell Ireland frankly that she must eternally suffer for the Union, but let them not pretend, as they do pretend, that Ireland profits by the Union.

VII.

FEDERAL FINANCE.

Directly we leave the simple path of financial independence, and endeavour to construct schemes which on the one hand disguise the financial difficulties of Ireland, and on the other provide for Imperial control of Irish Customs and Excise, we involve ourselves in a tangle of difficulties. A brief examination of these schemes will throw into still stronger relief the merits of the simpler solution.

First of all, let us dispose finally of the Federal analogy. In Chapter X. I showed that the framework of Home Rule cannot be Federal, because the conditions of Federation do not exist in the United Kingdom. One of the invariable features of a Federation is the Federal control of Customs and Excise, but I pointed out that an equally invariable condition precedent to Federation was the willingness on the part of a self-supporting State, previously possessing complete financial independence, to abandon its individual control over this realm of taxation to a Federal Government of its own choosing,[141] and that no such condition existed in the case of Ireland. But some features of Federal finance undoubtedly may be made to show a superficial analogy to Anglo-Irish conditions, and may therefore have an attraction for those who shrink from giving Ireland financial independence. In the first place, it is possible to find Federal precedents for the payment out of the common purse of certain large items of Irish expenditure. There is no precedent for the payment of Police, but Old Age Pensions, for example, are paid in Australia by the Commonwealth, not by the States. The chief point of interest, however, is the mechanism of Federal finance. The Australian and Canadian Federations are the only two which suggest even a remote parallel. There the subordinate States are actually "subsidized" by regular annual payments out of Federal revenues, mainly derived from Customs and Excise, and in the case of Australia, as I observed at p. 245, the process at present entails an elaborate system of bookkeeping to distinguish between the "collected" and "true" revenue of the several States, similar in kind to the calculations now made by the Treasury for ascertaining the "collected" and "true" revenue derived from Ireland, Scotland, and England.[142]

In Australia this system of bookkeeping is discredited, although the recent attempt by a Commonwealth Referendum to abolish both it and the financial system of which it forms a part just failed. It is to be hoped that, whatever financial scheme is adopted for Ireland, this bad colonial precedent, together with the precedent of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, will not be made pretexts for perpetuating a system whose defects are so glaring, and which is a source of continual dissatisfaction to Ireland. If Irish Customs and Excise are to be outside Irish control, while their proceeds are to be credited to Ireland, let her whole collected revenue from those sources be credited to her, in spite of the excessive allocation that step would involve.

Apart from this point of similarity in mechanism, the Australian and Canadian subsidies to the States and Provinces respectively are of no value as models for a Home Rule Bill. Let us examine the case of Australia. There the Commonwealth, besides having exclusive control of Customs and Excise, has general powers of taxation concurrently with the States, though in practice Commonwealth taxation is almost entirely confined to Customs and Excise. All surplus Commonwealth revenue is, by the present law, returnable to the States, and the total annual amount so returned must not be less than three-fourths of the total proceeds of Customs and Excise; so large are these proceeds, and so small, relatively, the expenses of the Commonwealth Government.[143] Here at the outset is a feature which places Australian Federal Finance in an altogether different category to that of the United Kingdom, where only 47.6 per cent, of the revenue is from Customs and Excise. Nor are the distributions of surplus revenue to the States really "subsidies," even in the case of the poorest States, but repayments, on a method laid down in the Constitution, of that part of the State contribution to Federal services which the Federal Government does not want. Here the system of bookkeeping is of some service to us, because it reveals, approximately, at any rate, both the contribution and the actual repayment, which is based on a calculation of the amount saved to the State by the transference of certain departments to the Federal Government, set off by a per capita charge for new Federal expenditure, as, for example, for Old Age Pensions (see Table on p. 297).

The great bulk of the tax revenue shown comes, as I have said, from Customs and Excise, and it is unnecessary to set out the respective figures of revenue derived from these duties.[144] It will be seen, after deducting repayments from contributions, that even the poorest States make a substantial net contribution to Federal purposes. On the other hand, the relative proportion of revenue contributed by Western Australia and Tasmania is diminishing. In Western Australia it was 12-49 per cent. of the whole in 1905, 8-13 per cent. of the whole in 1909. In the same period, not only relatively, but actually, the gross contribution of Western Australia has diminished from £1,431,624 in 1905 to £1,166,126 in 1909, while the repayment to her has also diminished from £1,031,223 in 1905 to £627,933. Tasmania's repayment is also diminishing, though her gross contribution has increased. These circumstances suggest a slight resemblance to the growing disproportion between the resources of Ireland and Great Britain, but they do not assist us towards a solution of the Irish problem. Each Australian State, while contributing the whole of its Customs and Excise to the Federal Government, receives back at least half, and in some cases two-thirds,[146] and adds that sum to its own independent revenue for the maintenance of the State Government. The sum refunded amounts on the average to a little below a quarter of the total State revenue—to be accurate, 23.01 per cent. Of the remaining 76.99 per cent., only 10 per cent, on the average is derived from direct taxation; 10.10 per cent from public lands, 4.15 per cent, from miscellaneous services, and no less than 52.55 per cent, from Public Works—railways, tramways, harbours, etc.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF, AND REPAYMENTS TO, THE STATES OF THE AUSTRALIAN COMMONWEALTH, 1908-09.[145]

	Contributions to Revenue.	Repayments from Commonwealth.
	£	£
New South Wales	5,621,958	3,326,276
Victoria	3,750,161	1,987,435
Queensland	1,989,540	1,027,047
South Australia	1,307,621	716,957
Western Australia	1,166,126	627,938
Tasmania	515,387	244,747
	Total Commonwealth Revenue.	Total Repayments.
	14,350,793	7,930,395

Here are the details of revenue for 1908-1909 in the richest and the poorest State, respectively:

Particulars.	New South Wales.	Tasmania.
	£	£
Refunded by the Commonwealth	3,377,213	232,342
Taxation (direct)	907,249	250,835
Public Works and Services	7,309,062	329,192
Land	1,778,002	96,519
Miscellaneous	274,600	25,017
Totals	13,646,126	934,405

Now, Ireland raises no public revenues at all from Public Works, only £24,500 out of a total of ten millions from public lands; while 29.25 per cent, of her "true" tax revenue comes from direct taxation and 70.75 per cent, from Customs and Excise. To take away even a third of her receipts from Customs and Excise would be to leave her with a deficit of three millions and a half, which would have to be made up by additions to a direct taxation, which is already vastly higher than in any part of Australia. She needs every penny of her revenue from whatever source derived, and there is no possibility of extracting from her a contribution to Imperial services, unless it be an illusory contribution based on faked figures.

The real moral to be derived from the Australian comparison is that both Australia and Ireland are countries where accumulated wealth is comparatively small, and where the importance of indirect taxation is very great. All the more reason for giving Ireland control of her own indirect taxation. Canada, and, indeed, all the self-governing Colonies, suggest the same moral. In Canada the Federal or Dominion Parliament has an unlimited power of taxation, the Provinces being vested only with the concurrent right of direct taxation within their respective borders (B.N. America Act, Clauses 91 and 92). In practice, nearly the whole Federal tax revenue is derived from Customs and Excise. We have no materials for a comparison of gross and net provincial contributions, because no records are compiled. Under an Act of 1907, revising the former arrangements, two small subsidies, forming a fixed charge on the gross Federal revenue, and bearing no specific proportion to the income from Customs and Excise, are given to each Province.

1. A subsidy (from £20,000 to £40,000) based on the total provincial population.

2. A payment of 80 cents per head of the provincial population.

Both together are very small by comparison with the Australian payments. Neither is really a subsidy, though it is given that name, but the return of a surplus indirectly contributed. It is, indeed, conceivable that a new and poor Province might actually contribute less than she received back. One Province, British Columbia, having long complained that she contributed far more than her share, and received back too little, obtained an exceptional grant of £20,000 under the Act of 1907.[147] The sums raised independently in each Province for the support of the provincial administration are, as in Australia, derived to a very slight extent from direct taxation, and to a very large extent from public property; not, as in Australia, from railways, tramways, etc., but mainly from vast tracts of public land. In this respect the Provinces resemble the Dominion, which derives a large revenue from the same source.

In three vital points, then, Anglo-Irish finance differs from that of the Colonial Federations. Ireland's whole net income comes from taxes; she needs it all; and her economic conditions are totally different from those of Great Britain. So far from borrowing anything from Federal finance, we should deduce from it the moral of financial independence for Ireland. With all the powerful centripetal forces, moral and material, which originally united, and now hold together, the federated States of Australia and Canada, there is continual controversy, and sometimes considerable friction, over finance, generally in connection with the position of the poorer Provinces or States. Some problems are still unsolved. Good authorities, among them Sir Arthur Bourinot, think that the Canadian subsidies are unsound. Australia is dissatisfied with her system. The American States, while giving up Customs and Excise, are self-supporting entities; but that system has its drawback, in Federal extravagance. We must remember, too, that even if these examples were of any use to us, the weak States or Provinces in a Federation have a greater control over Federal financial policy than Ireland could have under any scheme which reserved Customs and Excise to the Imperial Parliament; because the Federal principle, partially infringed only in the case of Canada, is to give them disproportionately high representation in the Upper Federal chamber, which can reject money Bills.[148]

On all counts, Ireland's position is that of a country which imperatively needs fiscal isolation similar to that enjoyed by States prior to Federation, before it can dream of embarking on the perilous sea of quasi-Federal finance. Trouble enough comes from the present joint system. We should make a clean sweep of it, permit Ireland, with a minimum of temporary assistance, to find her own financial equilibrium, and so lay the foundation, perhaps, for a genuine Federation in the future.

VIII.

ALTERNATIVE SCHEMES OF HOME RULE FINANCE [149]

Historically, these fall into two classes; though, as I shall show, they are for all intents and purposes merged in one to-day.

The two classes are—(1) The Gladstonian; (2) the "Contract."

1. Mr. Gladstone's Schemes.—It is unnecessary to examine these in close detail, though, if the reader cares to do so, he will find details set forth in the Appendix. Four outstanding features were common to the schemes both of 1886 and 1893: (a) Permanent Imperial control over the imposition of Customs and Excise; (b) Irish control over all other taxation; (c) an annual Irish contribution to Imperial expenditure; (d) Imperial payment of part cost of the Irish Police.

With regard to (a), the most important point of difference in the two Bills was that under the first Ireland was credited with her whole "collected" revenue from Customs and Excise, under the second (as amended) with only her "true" revenue, which was less than the former by £1,700,000. Another point in which the two Bills differed was the permission to Ireland, under the Bill of 1893, after six years, to collect her own Excise. Both imposition and collection were wholly reserved under the Bill of 1886. I have already given grounds for the impolicy of retaining control over Customs and Excise. Let me only ask the reader, in conclusion, to figure the situation. How could Ireland frame a financial policy? Three-quarters of the revenue, as at present levied, of a country profoundly dissimilar economically from Great Britain, and in need of drastic reforms of expenditure and marked changes in taxation, would be permanently outside the reach of an Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, and, in spite of the representation at Westminster which Imperial control would entail, would in the long-run fluctuate according to British needs and notions. In the long-run, I repeat; but incidentally there would be sharp and damaging conflicts. Occasions might occur like that of 1909, when the majority of Irishmen, rightly or wrongly, resented the form of new taxation, and would have secured the rejection of the Budget had not that step been hurtful to the prospects of Home Rule. It will be useless to blame either Ireland or Great Britain. Every country is bound to study its own circumstances. A similar crisis would have imperilled even the strongest Federation. We are not in the least concerned at the moment with the goodness or badness of that famous Budget. We are concerned with the effect on the relations of the two countries, and with the indefeasible right of Ireland and Great Britain to do what they consider best for their own interests.

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 control of that Police, pending its replacement by a new civil force. It is easy enough in ways like this to show a balance in Ireland's favour, and, at the same time, to cripple the responsibility of the Irish Legislature by transferring selected services from the Irish to the Imperial side of the account. We can extend the process to Old Age Pensions, the Land Commission, and what not. As I have repeatedly urged, this course is radically unsound. As for the Police, there can be no responsible government without control of the agents of law and order.

By crediting Ireland with her whole "collected" revenue, we can give her at once a balance of half a million. By freeing her from the payment of Old Age Pensions, we can make the balance three millions. With the elimination of the Land Commission and the Police, we can make it five millions. Then we can postulate an imaginary taxable capacity, an ideal contribution to Imperial services, and a hypothetical share of the National Debt, and so arrive at a Budget which will look well on paper, but which will deceive nobody, and be open to crushing criticism.

2. "Contract" Finance.—It will be seen that both Mr. Gladstone's schemes set up in Ireland—though under the Bill of 1893 only after six years—a dual system of taxation, Imperial and Irish, after the Federal model. The revenue, "collected" or "true," derived from Imperial taxes levied in Ireland, was to be paid, after the deduction of sums due to the Imperial Government on various accounts, into the Irish Exchequer. And into the same Exchequer went the proceeds of taxes levied by Ireland herself. The distinguishing feature of "Contract" finance is that it maintains the fiscal unity of the British Isles. All taxation in Ireland would be permanently levied and collected, as before, by the Imperial Parliament, Ireland being allowed only the barren and illusory privilege of levying new additional taxes of her own. Out of the Imperial Exchequer a lump sum of fixed amount, or a sum equivalent to the revenue collected in Ireland, would be handed over to Ireland, by contract, as it were, for the maintenance of the Administration.

The simplicity of this scheme seems to me to be its only merit. It disposes of all complicated bookkeeping, all heart-burnings over "true" and "collected" revenue, and all controversies, for a long time at any rate, over an Irish contribution to the Empire; while it involves and immensely facilitates a subsidy based on the reservation of selected Irish services for Imperial management and payment. On the other hand, it is not Home Rule. It annihilates the responsibility of Ireland for her own fortunes, and is, indeed, altogether incompatible with what we know as responsible government. Its germ appeared in the Irish Council Bill of 1907—a Bill which did not pretend to set up anything approaching responsible government, and to which the scheme was therefore in a sense appropriate, though it must, I think, have produced mischievous results if it had been carried into law.[150]

I wish to speak with the utmost respect of Lord MacDonnell and the other patriotic Irishmen who have advocated this kind of financial solution. There was a time when it might have been good policy for Ireland to obtain any—even the smallest—financial powers of her own as a lever, though a very bad lever, for the attainment of more. But we ought now to make a sound and final settlement, and I do earnestly urge upon all those who have Irish interests at heart to reject schemes which merely evade, if they do not actually aggravate, some of the pressing difficulties of the Irish problem of to-day. The fact that Contract finance works well in India is prima facie a reason why it should not work well in Ireland. It does not exist, and it could not be made to show good results, in any community of white men. If anyone is disposed to trace a faint analogy—which in any case would be a false analogy—with the lesser of the two small subsidies given by the Dominion of Canada in aid of the Provincial administrations,[151] let him imagine what the moral and practical consequences would be if, instead of constituting a small fraction of the provincial income, this subsidy were increased to a lump sum calculated by the Dominion Government as correct and sufficient for the whole internal government of the Province. And the pernicious results in a Canadian Province would be trivial beside the pernicious results in Ireland, where the whole system of expenditure and revenue needs to be recast; where large economies are needed, together with additional outlay on education; and where above all, the sense of national responsibility, deliberately stifled for centuries, needs to be evoked. Nothing could be more cruel to Ireland than to give her a fictitious financial freedom, and then to complain that she did not use it well. No nation could use freedom well under the Contract system of finance, whether based on a fixed grant or on revenue derived from Ireland. It is not in human nature to reduce expenditure unless the reduction is reflected in reduced taxation. Every official threatened with retrenchment, even in the services under Irish control and, a fortiori, in the services outside Irish control, would have a grievance in which the public would sympathize, while resentment at an unequal fiscal union would be unabated. Irish statesmen, like any other men in the same position, would be exposed unfairly to the continual temptation of preserving institutions and payments as they were, of making changes only of personnel, and of annually appealing to Great Britain for more money for new expenditure. These appeals could not possibly be refused. If Great Britain chooses to place Ireland in a position of financial dependence, she must take the consequences and pay the bill, as in the past, even if the bill exceeds the revenue derived from Ireland. But, indeed, under Contract finance, attempts to make Irish expenditure conform to Irish revenue would necessarily be abandoned.

Bad as the results must be, we are inexorably driven to some form of Contract finance directly we relinquish its anti-type, financial independence. There is very little practical difference between the Gladstonian and later plans. We may be drawn along the downward path either by considerations of revenue, or considerations of expenditure, or by both combined. To retain Imperial control of Customs and Excise, while crediting the Irish proceeds to Ireland, is in itself equivalent to making three-quarters of Irish tax revenue take the form of an annual money grant fixed by Great Britain. If Englishmen also want to retain control over Irish Police, and Irishmen are short-sighted enough to desire Imperial control, as a corollary of Imperial payment, of Old Age Pensions, National Insurance, or Land Purchase, there at once are four millions, or more than a third of present Irish expenditure, withheld from Irish authority. To cover the remaining seven millions by a Contract allowance, instead of going through the pretence of allotting items of revenue and of deducting a contribution to Imperial services, is a step which is only too likely to commend itself to harassed statesmen. But it would not be Home Rule.

This is not a matter of speculation, but of experience. As long ago as 1818, in the case of Canada, we discarded as vicious the old doctrine that a dependency ought not to be allowed to provide for the whole cost of government out of its own taxes, for fear that its Legislature would control policy. If we are going to remove features which make Ireland resemble a Crown Colony now, do not let us import others which recall the ancient fallacies of a century ago.

There remains to be considered the important question of loans, and to that I shall devote a separate chapter.

CHAPTER XIV

LAND PURCHASE FINANCE [152]

I.

LAND PURCHASE LOANS.

The data of the land problem are as follows:

The superficial area of Ireland is 20,350,725 acres, and in 1909 it was utilized as follows:[153]

	Acres.	Percentage.
Area under tillage, hay and fruit	4,582,697	22.5
Area under pasture	9,997,445	61.6
Grazed mountain land	2,548,569	61.6
Woods, etc.	301,444	1.5
Bog, barren mountain, water, roads, townlands, etc.	2,925,570	14.4
Total	20,350,725	100.0

The agricultural area, calculated by the exclusion of the last item in the above column, works out at 17,425,155 acres, but since bog forms part of a large number of farms, we may, for the purposes of Land Purchase, place the agricultural area of Ireland at 18,739,644 acres, the figure given in the Census of 1901, and its annual value for rating purposes, as given in the same census, at £10,061,667.

This area is divided into 603,827 agricultural holdings, which are in the hands of 554,060 occupiers, and vary in size from vast pasture ranches to the tiny plots of miserable rock-sown soil, which abound in the congested districts of the west.

But small holdings largely predominate. More than two-thirds do not exceed 30 acres; 153,565 are between 5 and 15 acres, and 147,580 are below 5 acres.

Size, however, is by itself an imperfect index to value. The effects of the ancient confiscations and of the extraordinarily unequal distribution of land which they and the bad Irish agrarian system produced may be gauged by the valuation figures of the Census of 1901, which showed that 335,491, or 68.5 per cent, of the total number of holdings had an annual value (for rating purposes) not exceeding £15, while they covered only a little more than a third of the total agricultural area; 134,182 of these holdings were rated below £4, and covered only 1,360,000 acres.

All farms rated below £4, and a large number of those below £15, may be regarded as "uneconomic"—that is, incapable by themselves of supplying a decent living to the farmer and his family.

I shall say no more here about the legislation beginning forty years ago, which revolutionized the agrarian tenure derived directly from the Penal Code, and converted the Irish tenant into a "judicial" tenant with a rent fixed by the Land Commission, with security of tenure, and free sale of the tenant-right.[154] There are now in Ireland two distinct classes of occupying tenants, "judicial" tenants, and purchasing tenants, and it is upon the question of the State-aided transference of the land from the landlord to the tenant that I wish to concentrate the reader's attention.

The principle of Land Purchase is this: The State advances money, raised by a public loan, to the tenant, who pays off the landlord with it, and becomes for a fixed period the tenant of the State. During this period he pays, in lieu of rent, an annuity, which represents both interest and sinking-fund on the capital sum advanced to him. At the end of the period, which, of course, will vary with the fixed annual amount of the sinking-fund, he becomes owner in fee-simple of his farm.

There is no charity to the tenant. He borrows the money and pays it back in a perfectly regular way, and the State has made a temporary investment of a profitable character.

And now, for the last time, I must trouble the reader with a little indispensable history. There are four phases in the history of Irish Land Purchase.

1. John Bright was the first British statesman to maintain that no healthy and lasting readjustment of the relations between landlord and tenant in Ireland could ever be made by law. He advocated State-aided purchase; and in the Church Disestablishment Act of 1869 and the Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, clauses were inserted allowing the State to advance money for Land Purchase. The conditions, however, were so onerous, both to landlord and tenant, that only 7,665 tenants out of more than half a million were able to avail themselves of these purchase clauses.

2. The Ashbourne Act of 1885 was the first successful measure of the kind. Five millions were advanced under it, and five millions more under an extending Act of 1887. Next came the Act of 1891, empowering the loan of thirty-three millions, followed by the amending and simplifying Act of 1896. These Acts form a body of legislation by themselves, of which I need refer only to a few salient characteristics. They were all alike in settling the tenant's annuity (in lieu of rent) at 4 per cent, on the purchase money, though the proportions allocated to interest and sinking-fund varied. Under the first two Acts the period for final redemption of his loan by the tenant was forty-nine years, under the third forty-two years, though this period was extended to seventy years if the tenant availed himself of decadal reductions in the annuity, proportionate to the capital paid off by the sinking-fund.

The average price of the holdings sold under these Acts represented seventeen and a half years' purchase, and the tenant's great inducement to buy was that, by the aid of cheap State credit, the annuity he paid, even over so short a period as forty-nine years, represented a reduction of more than 20 per cent, on his existing judicial rent.

Under the first Act, that of 1885, the landlord received the purchase money in cash, under the other two, in guaranteed 3 per cent, or 2| per cent, stock, an arrangement which suited him very well as long as Government stocks maintained the high level which they reached in the period preceding the South African War. With the heavy fall in stocks during and after the war, purchase came to a standstill. The net result of the operations under the Acts of 1885 to 1896 was that close upon twenty-four million pounds were advanced to 72,000 tenants, occupying about two and a half million acres, out of the total of 18,739,644 acres which constitute the agricultural area of Ireland.

3. Once begun, purchase had to be continued, if for no other reason than that a purchasing tenant paid in annuity a substantially lower sum than the non-purchasing judicial tenant paid in rent, with the additional, if distant, prospect of an absolute fee-simple in the future.

Mr. Wyndham, acting on the recommendation of a friendly Conference between landlords and tenants, took the bull by the horns in 1903, and carried the great Land Act of that year. Under the Wyndham Act the system of cash payment to the landlord, dropped since 1891, was resumed, on a basis calculated to give a selling landlord a sum which, invested in gilt-edged 3 or 3¼ per cent. stocks, would yield him as much as the second term judicial rents on the holdings sold, less 10 per cent., representing his former cost of collection; while the annuity payable by the tenant in lieu of rent was reduced from 4 to 3¼ per cent., of which 2½ per cent, was interest on the purchase money advanced, and ½ per cent, was sinking-fund. This reduction involved an extension of the period of redemption from forty-nine to sixty-eight and a half years. The annuity was calculated to represent an average reduction of from 15 to 25 per cent, on second-term judicial rents. Since the gross income of the landlord was to be reduced only by 10 per cent. on a basis of 3 per cent. investments, while the annual payment by the tenant was to be reduced by an average of 20 per cent., clearly there was a gap to be filled up, and this gap was filled by a State bonus to the selling landlord of 12 per cent, on the purchase money, a bonus which went wholly to him personally, clear of all reversionary rights under settlements. A sum of twelve millions altogether was to be expended on the bonus.

In addition to direct sales between landlord and tenant through the Estates Commissioners, large powers were also given both to the Land Commission and the Congested Districts Board for the purchase and resale of certain classes of estates—land in congested districts, untenanted land, etc.

The Act was enormously popular. The landlord, in view of the manifold insecurities of land tenure in Ireland, made an excellent bargain, and the tenant, tempted by the immediate transformation of his rent into an annuity of reduced amount, ignored the extension by twenty years of the period of redemption, and was willing to agree at high prices for the purchase of his land. The average price of land sold rose from the seventeen and a half years' purchase under the old Acts to over twenty years' purchase, and the soil of Ireland rapidly began to change hands. But the Act broke down on finance, as adapted to what were then estimated as the requirements of the purchase operation. The estimate for the total sum required was one hundred millions, and the purchase money was to be raised by successive issues of 2¾ per cent. Guaranteed Land Stock. Sums needed from time to time for payment of the landlord's bonus were also raised by stock, and were placed to an account known as the Land Purchase Aid Fund.

Now, any loss on flotation, due to stock being issued at a discount, was to be borne, in the first instance, by the Ireland Development Grant,[155] and, if and when that was exhausted, by the ratepayers of Ireland through deduction from the grants in aid of Local Taxation.[156] The stock, like all Government stocks at that period, fell heavily from the first, and in 1908 the point was reached when further issues would have entailed a heavy loss payable out of Irish rates, growing ultimately, as it was calculated, to an annual charge of more than half a million. The infliction of such a burden upon the ratepayers of Ireland was felt to be inequitable. Ireland was not responsible for the evils which necessitated purchase, and even if she were, the ratepayers were not the right persons to be mulcted. Meanwhile, purchase was at a complete standstill.

4. This serious situation led to Mr. Birrell's Land Act of 1909, which was based upon the Report of a Treasury Committee which sat in the previous year.[157] The problem was twofold: (a) how to deal with future agreements to purchase, between landlord and tenant;(6) how to deal with agreements to purchase pending under the Act of 1903, but as yet uncompleted.

(a) With regard to future agreements, there are four main points:(1) The old policy of payment in stock, instead of in cash, is reverted to, and the stock is a 3 per cent. stock.

(2) The tenant's annuity is raised from 3¼ to 3½ per cent.

(3) The period of redemption is reduced from sixty-eight and a half years to sixty-five and a half years. (4) The landlord's bonus is allocated on a graduated scale, under which the higher the price the land is sold at, the less is the bonus conferred. These changes, though no doubt somewhat prejudicial to the prospects of Land Purchase, were absolutely necessary, owing to a cause beyond human control—the condition of the money-market.

(b) In regard to pending purchase agreements arrived at under the old Act, no alteration is made in the terms of the bargains already concluded between landlord and tenant; but changes are made in the method of financing these agreed sales. Briefly, parties can obtain priority in treatment among the enormous mass of cases awaiting the decision of the Land Commission by agreeing to accept 2¾ per cent. stock at a price not lower than 92 per cent, (which means, at present prices, that the loss on flotation is split between the landlord and the State), or, by waiting their turn, they can obtain half the price in stock at 92, and half in cash. Payments elected to be made wholly in cash come last of all. Bonus to be paid in cash as before.

Losses caused by the flotation of stock at a discount no longer fall upon the Irish rates. Any loss not capable of being borne by the Ireland Development Grant is to be borne by the Imperial Exchequer.

Other important clauses gave compulsory powers of purchase to the Congested Districts Board, and, in the case of "congested estates" and untenanted land outside the jurisdiction of the Board, to the Estates Commissioners. Otherwise Purchase and Sale remained voluntary.

So much for the history of Land Purchase. How exactly do we stand at the present moment?

In round numbers, nearly 24 millions have actually been advanced under the old Acts prior to 1903, and up to March of this year (1911) a further sum of 42¼ millions had actually been advanced under the Wyndham Act of 1903 and the Birrell Act of 1909.[158]

That makes a total of 66½ millions actually advanced to 165,133 tenants up to March of 1911, covering the purchase of nearly 6 million acres of land, or nearly a third of the total agricultural area of Ireland. The tenants of the land are now quasi-freeholders, and will eventually be complete freeholders. In addition, agreements for the purchase of properties by 150,490 tenants, under the Wyndham and Birrell Acts, at a total price of 46½ millions, for 4½ million acres, were pending in March, 1911, though the sale and vesting were not yet completed. The properties represented by these agreements will be duly transferred in the course of the next few years, though the congestion of business is very great.

That will make a total of 113 millions advanced to 315,623 tenants for the purchase of 11 million acres under all Acts up to and including that of 1909. Now, how much more will be required? We have only one recent official estimate—that made by the Land Commission in 1908 for the Treasury Committee which sat to consider the crisis in Land Purchase. It did not pretend to give an accurate forecast, but only to estimate the maximum amount which would be needed, on the assumption that all unsold land would eventually be sold at the average price reached under the Act of 1903.[159] It is certain that the amount so calculated, covering as it does all classes and descriptions of agricultural land, and including land farmed by the landlord himself, as well as short-term pasture tenancies,[160] will considerably exceed the actual requirements. Some of the unsold land, especially of the pasture land, will never need to be sold; nor is the average purchase price likely to remain permanently as high as that obtained under the Act of 1903.

Still, this speculative estimate gives us an outside figure which is useful. The conclusion from it is that 95 millions may be required to finance all future sales initiated under the Act of 1909.

But if we want to know how much cash may be wanted, dating from March, 1911, onwards, to finance Land Purchase, we must add the 46½ millions needed for sales now agreed upon, and waiting to be carried through, but not yet completed. That brings the total to 141½ millions.

For the reasons given above, I think we might very well strike off 20 from the 95 millions of future sales, and so reduce the total to 121½ millions.

Two further questions remain to be considered: (1) Can we assume that in the future purchase will proceed smoothly? (2) Who pays for the machinery of Land Purchase, and what is the security for the money advanced?

1. The Act of 1909 is still young. At the end of March, 1911, applications had been lodged for the direct sale of 5,477 holdings at a price of £1,623,526, representing an average of 20-8 years' purchase, and negotiations were in progress for the purchase by the Congested Districts Board of estates worth another 1½ millions. Total, a little over 3 millions—a substantial amount of business in view of the artificial acceleration caused by events in 1907 and 1908, the subsequent reaction, and the enormous arrears of business still remaining to be cleared up.

We should naturally expect a slight check to purchase under the Act of 1909, since the inducement both to landlord and tenant is less. The tenant would be inclined to hold out for a lower price because his annuity is higher (though signs of this check are not yet apparent), and the landlord is paid in a stock whose market price seems to be slowly but steadily falling. It is now (November, 1911) at 86¼. On the other hand, the wise change in the allocation of the bonus places a much-needed premium on sales of poor land at low prices, and reverses the process by which a wealthy landlord of good land sometimes obtained the largest reward for submission to sale.[161] Moreover, there is constant pressure towards purchase owing to the better financial position of the purchasing tenant over the non-purchasing or judicial tenant, while the fear in the landlord's mind of further periodical reductions in the judicial rents tends to induce him to meet this pressure halfway.

Still, there is a point beyond which such pressure might not be strong enough to carry on voluntary Purchase, especially if the 3 per cent, stock continued to fall. Wide powers of compulsion,[162] covering considerably more than a third of Ireland, and including the poorest areas, where purchase is most needed, already exist under the Act of 1909. Some think that general compulsion will be needed. Other well-informed men count with confidence on completing all the necessary part of the purchase of Irish land in from twelve to fifteen years under the existing system. On the other hand, it is necessary to contemplate the possible need for universal compulsion.

2. Cost of the working of Land Purchase, and security for the money advanced. It is just as well to make these points perfectly clear, in view of the legends which obtain circulation about the "giving" of British money for the purchase of Irish land.

The cost of the Land Purchase machinery falls at present on the taxpayers of the whole United Kingdom, including, of course, those of Ireland. It amounted in 1909-10, as I showed in the last chapter, to £414,500, and for 1911 the estimate is £544,395. This sum includes the administrative cost of the Land Commission and Estates Commissioners, the temporary losses on flotation caused in financing, under the Act of 1909, the balance of agreements made under the Act of 1903, and the bonus to landlords.

The Treasury, in their returns estimating the revenue and expenditure of various parts of the United Kingdom, debit the whole of this sum against Ireland, and, moral responsibility apart, I regard it as necessary that, under Home Rule, Ireland should assume both the cost and the management of Purchase.

Apart from the annual vote I have mentioned, Land Purchase pays for itself. The security for the individual holders of the Guaranteed Land Stock by means of which the purchase money is raised is the Consolidated Fund of the United Kingdom, but the Consolidated Fund has never been called upon for a penny, either for interest or capital, and never will be.

At present the initial security of the Government which controls the Consolidated Fund—in other words, the initial security of the United Kingdom taxpayers—is the Irish rates; for the grants in aid of Irish local taxation still form a guarantee fund chargeable with the unpaid annuities of defaulting tenants, though they have escaped the liability for losses on the notation of stock at a discount. The ultimate security is the purchased land itself; for, in the last resort, a defaulting tenant who, it must be remembered, is a State tenant, can be sold up. But the really important security is the tenant himself. The Irish tenants, treated properly, pay their debts as honestly and punctually as any other class of men in the world. Annuities in arrear are negligible. The last Report of the Land Commission shows that out of two million pounds of annuities due from 165,133 purchasing tenants, and close upon another two millions of interest (in lieu of rent) upon holdings agreed to be purchased by 150,490 tenants—a total of nearly four million pounds—only £28,084 were uncollected on March 31 last. The cases of hopeless default, leading to a sale of the land, were only fifty-four. Not a penny has actually been lost.

The State, then, or, if we choose so to put it, the United Kingdom taxpayers, are safe from loss, and make a good investment. There has never been the faintest symptom of a strike against annuities, and the only cause which could conceivably ever suggest such a strike would be the irritation provoked by a persistent refusal to grant Home Rule. Even that possibility I regard as out of the question, because there is a sanctity attaching to annuities which it would be hard to impair. Still, to speak broadly, it is true that Home Rule will improve a security already good, and that Home Rule, with financial independence, will make it absolutely impregnable.

Let me sum up.

More than half the agricultural land of Ireland is sold to the tenants, or agreed to be sold. Eleven million acres out of 18¾ million acres have changed hands, or will soon change hands; 315,623 out of 554,060 occupiers now pay annuities or interest in lieu of rent, to the amount of nearly 4 million pounds. In regard to value, out of a total value of 208 millions for the whole agricultural land of Ireland, 66½ millions have actually been advanced for purchase, 46½ millions are due to be advanced under signed agreements; and, on the extreme estimate of the Land Commission, based on the supposition that all the remaining land will ultimately be sold, 95 millions more will have to be advanced. Total future liability on the extreme estimate, 141½ millions; or, if we take the more moderate and reasonable figure I suggested, 121½ millions.

Now, two conditions must be laid down—

1. Purchase ought to continue.

2. Cheap Imperial credit is necessary for it.

These conditions ought not to entail, beyond a strictly limited point, the continued control of Purchase by the Imperial Government. That step, as I suggested at p. 221, might involve Imperial control over (1) the Congested Districts Board; (2) the whole work of the Land Commission, outside Purchase, and all Irish land legislation; (3) the Irish police; because the power of distraint for annuities, the last resource of the creditor Government, rests, of course, with the arm of the law.

Any one of these consequences, as I have urged, would be inconsistent with responsible government in Ireland.

What are the objections to Irish control over Purchase, with its corollary, Irish payment of the running costs of Purchase? Two distinct interests have to be considered: (1) That of the British taxpayer; (2) that of the landlord.

1. If we carry out the plan I have advocated, the British taxpayer, as soon as he ceases to contribute to the diminishing subsidy suggested at p. 284 in order to meet the initial deficit in the national Irish balance-sheet, will cease to contribute anything towards the running costs, landlord's bonus, and flotation losses of a Purchase operation for the necessity of which Great Britain, in the past, was in reality responsible. Great Britain is under a moral obligation to continue to support Land Purchase with her national credit, which is indispensable. She is also entitled to demand whatever reasonable conditions she thinks fit, for example, a share in the nomination of Land and Estates Commissioners; while any new legislation will, in the ordinary course, need her assent. The security, as I said above, will be impregnable. The purchasing tenant would become the tenant of the Irish State. The Irish Government, as a whole, instead of the individual annuitants, would, of course, be responsible to the Imperial Government, would collect the annuities itself, and bear any contingent loss by their non-payment. To repudiate a public obligation of that sort would be as ruinous to Ireland as the repudiation of a public debt is to any State in the world.

In point of fact, the Irish Government would find it good policy to popularize Irish Land Stock in Ireland. At present prices the 3 per cent, stock is among the cheapest and safest in the world, and would return to the farmer thrice as much interest as the average bank deposit which he now favours.

Mercifully, there is no exact historical precedent for such a case as Ireland, though, on a small scale, Prince Edward Island is an instructive parallel.[163] But if precedents, in the shape of guaranteed loans to self-governing Colonies, are needed, they exist. The most relevant and recent is the Imperial guaranteed loan of 35 millions made to the Transvaal by Mr. Balfour's Government in 1903 after the great war. Why it should be a heresy to do for Ireland what we did for the Transvaal, I am at a loss to conceive. The loan became, of course, an obligation of the Colony when it received Home Rule, and in 1907 a further guaranteed loan of 5 millions was authorized, of which 4 millions has been issued. Like Irish Land Stock, these loans are secured on the Consolidated Fund; but I do not think a fear is now suggested that the Consolidated Fund is in danger on that account. Prophecies of that sort were common enough in the mouths of those who opposed Transvaal Home Rule, but they did not long survive its enactment.

Another precedent is a guaranteed railway loan to Canada in 1873 of £3,600,000, which is just now becoming redeemable, while the Crown Colony of Mauritius received a guaranteed loan of £600,000 in 1892. The British and Irish taxpayers have also made themselves responsible for £9,424,000 on account of Egypt; £6,023,700 on account of Greece; and £5,000,000 on account of Turkey. The total nominal amount of the guaranteed loans to countries, colonial or foreign, outside the United Kingdom is £63,647,700. The total amount outstanding on March 31, 1911, was £59,474,200, and the Government holds securities only to the value of £4,800,556 against these liabilities, leaving the net liability of the taxpayer at £54,673,644.

The net liability of the taxpayer at the same date on account of Irish Guaranteed Land Stocks of all descriptions was £65,764,054.[164] Ireland has a claim to Imperial credit far superior to any of the Colonies, dependencies, or foreign Powers mentioned, and the credit should not entail control, or the representation of Ireland at Westminster.

Incidentally, it goes without saying that Ireland, in common with the Colonies, should receive the very valuable privilege of having independent loans raised by herself inscribed at the Bank of England, and made trustee securities.

2. It may be argued that the Congested Districts Board and the Land Commission, and through them Irish statesmen, may be subjected to local pressure hostile to the landlord's interests, and that the Irish Government would feel itself more free for social and other reforms if the land question were placed legally outside their purview. My answer is, in the first place, that Great Britain would cease to lend if her conditions were unfulfilled; in the second place, that in this, as in all matters, we are bound to place faith in the self-respect and sense of justice of a free Ireland—in its common prudence, too; for it would be a disaster whose magnitude is universally recognized in Ireland if any course were to be taken which prevented the landlord class from joining in the great work of making a new Ireland. Fair treatment of the landlords by a free Ireland, as distinguished from fair treatment at the hands of an external authority, would do more than anything else to bring about a reconciliation. That is human nature all the world over.

II.

MINOR LOANS TO IRELAND.

It remains only to refer briefly to two other cases where Ireland benefits from Imperial credit.

(1) The Labourers (Ireland) Act of 1906 sanctioned the advance of money through the Land Commission to Rural Councils for building labourers' cottages—a class of loans previously made by the Public Works Commissioners of Ireland. £3,111,816 had been advanced under this head on March 31, 1911, and £1,138,184 had been applied for. The money is raised by guaranteed 2¾ per cent, stock in the same way as the money for Land Purchase.

(2) In addition, there are the loans granted by the Irish Commissioners of Public Works. In their capacity as lenders, which is only one of a multitude of capacities, the Commissioners are really a subordinate branch of the Treasury, and fulfil the same function as the Public Works Loans Commissioners in Great Britain. They lend principally to local authorities for all manner of public works and public health requirements, also to private individuals, mainly for the improvement of land, and, to a small extent, to Arterial Drainage Boards and to railways. They get their money from the National Debt Commissioners, and in 1909-10 issued loans to the amount of £293,233—a figure which shows a considerable reduction on that of the previous two years.[165] The total amount of 35,000 outstanding loans on March 31, 1910, was £9,608,110, of which between two-thirds and three-quarters were due from local authorities. The interest varies, as in Great Britain, from 2¾ to 5 per cent., according to the nature of the security, and in 1909-10 averaged £3 10s. 6d. Most of the loans are secured on local rates, where the interest payable is either 3½ or 3¾ per cent., according to the period of the loan; others on undertakings such as harbours; and others on the land for the improvement of which the money is borrowed.

Here, then, are two small and secondary problems. Under Home Rule Ireland will have no claim to further Imperial credit for loans of either of the above classes. On the other hand, there is no reason why the Treasury, if it pleases, and on its own terms, should not lend as before, though not directly, as it virtually does now, but indirectly, by loan to the Irish Government. The security will be just as good, and probably better. If a negligent Local Government Board under Irish control sanctions reckless loans by local authorities, and a negligent Irish Government advances for such loans money borrowed from Great Britain, the Irish Treasury will suffer. Such eventualities need not seriously be considered. The analogy with the Transvaal and Canada loans, which were mainly for public works, is very close.

CHAPTER XV

THE IRISH CONSTITUTION [166]

I have dealt with the major issues of Home Rule. The exclusion or retention of Irish Members at Westminster, and the powers—above all, the financial powers—of the Irish State, are the two points of cardinal importance. As I have shown, they are inseparably connected, and form, in reality, one great question.

I have endeavoured to prove that from whatever angle we approach that central issue, whether we argue from representation to powers, or from powers to representation, and whether the particular powers we argue from be financial, legislative, or executive; whether we place Irish, British, or Imperial interests in the forefront of our exposition—we are led irresistibly to the colonial solution—that is, to the cessation of Irish representation at Westminster, coupled with a concession to Ireland of the full legislative and executive authority appropriate to that measure of independence, and, above all, with fiscal autonomy.

All the other provisions of the Bill are secondary. They may be divided into two categories, which necessarily overlap:

1. Provisions concerning Ireland only.

2. Provisions defining the Imperial authority over Ireland.

The structure of the Irish Legislature, the position of the Irish Judiciary, the safeguards for minorities, the provision made for existing servants of the State, the statutory arrangements, if any, for the future reorganization of the Irish Police—these and other questions are of great intrinsic importance, and need the most careful discussion; but they are altogether subordinate to those we have already considered. If it be over-sanguine to hope, in Ireland's interest, that they will be discussed in a calm and dispassionate way, we can at least demand that those provisions belonging to the second category, which present no appreciable difficulty, will not excite bitter and barren disputes like those of 1893.

It is not within the scope of this volume to discuss exhaustively the secondary provisions of the Bill, or to suggest the exact statutory form which those provisions, major or minor, should take. In this chapter I shall deal briefly with matters which I have hitherto left aside, and incidentally give more precision to the points upon which I have already suggested a conclusion, in both cases indicating, so far as possible, the most useful precedents and parallels from other Constitutions. The result will be the rough sketch of a Home Rule Bill.

PREAMBLE.

"Whereas it is expedient that without impairing or restricting the supreme authority of Parliament, an Irish Legislature should be created, etc." So ran the opening sentence of the Home Rule Bill of 1893. The words I have italicized are harmless but superfluous. They have never appeared in the Constitutions granted to Colonies, even at periods when the Colonies were most distrusted. Nothing can impair the supreme authority of Parliament.

EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY.

In all parts of the Empire, power emanates from the Sovereign, and is wielded locally in his name.

Section 9 of the British North America Act of 1867 runs as follows: "The Executive Government and authority of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen." Similar words are used in the South Africa Act of 1909, and in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of 1900. Curiously enough, these were Acts to legalize the Federation, or Union, of separate Colonies, and were passed at a time when the principle embodied needed no affirmation. In earlier Acts for granting Colonial Constitutions, the principle was taken for granted, and implied in numerous provisions, but not stated explicitly. The most recent unitary Constitution, that of the Transvaal (Section 47), was even more reticent, though the principle was none the less clear. The point is unimportant, and the words used in the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 (Clauses 5 and 7 respectively), modified to meet a change of Sovereign, will serve very well: "The Executive power in Ireland (or the Executive Government of Ireland) shall continue vested in His Majesty...."

Thereon follow the provisions for delegation of the Royal authority, first to the Sovereign's personal Representative in Ireland, and then through him to the members of the Irish Executive. The simpler these provisions are, the better. What we know as responsible government has never been defined in any Act of Parliament. The phrase "responsible government" has only once appeared in any Constitution—namely, in the preamble of the Transvaal Constitution granted in 1906, and even then no attempt was made at definition, though certain sections, like certain sections in the Australian Constitutions of 1855 and in the later Federal Acts, inferentially suggested features of responsible government.

The system is two-sided. Ministers are responsible on the one hand to the King direct, as in Great Britain, or to the King's Representative, as in the Colonies, and, on the other hand, to the elected Legislature. Ireland will resemble a Colony in being a dependent State under a Representative of the King—namely, the Lord-Lieutenant. This personage, corresponding to the Colonial Governor, will also have to act in a dual capacity. On the one hand he will be responsible to the King, or, virtually, to the British Cabinet, and, on the other hand, he will be bound by an unwritten law to nominate for the Government of Ireland persons acceptable to the elected Legislature, and in Irish matters to act by their advice in all normal circumstances.

Let us dispose first of the relation of the Ministers and of other public officials to the Legislature. There will be no question, presumably, of giving statutory power to this relation. It is an unwritten custom—(1) that Ministers must be members of one branch of the Legislature; (2) that they must hold the confidence of the elected branch; (3) that, as a Cabinet, they stand or fall together; and, lastly, (4) that all non-political officials are excluded from the Legislature. The first and the last of these conventions have taken legal form in some isolated cases;[167] the other two appear in no statute that has yet been framed.[168]

Neither have the functions in practice exercised by the Ministry or Cabinet, nor the relations which in practice exist between it and the King's Representative, ever had statutory definition. Whatever form the Home Rule Bill takes, it cannot give legal precision to these things. The King's Representative always nominates an Executive Council—that is, a Cabinet to "advise" him in the Government, and whether, as in the Bill of 1893, that Council is called an Executive Committee of the Privy Council of Ireland by analogy with the Dominion of Canada, where it is the "King's Privy Council for Canada," or whether it is merely an Executive Council is immaterial. That it is, nominally, the constitutional duty of the King's Representative (like that of the King himself) to perform executive acts on the advice of his Ministers is never stated expressly. He is always, and generally in the text of the Constitution, vested with the power of summoning, proroguing, and dissolving the Legislature, and of giving or withholding the Royal Assent to Bills. He also, by unwritten law, wields the prerogative of Pardon, and appoints all public servants; and in all these cases, except in the case of appointing non-political officials, he occasionally has to act on his own personal responsibility.

This personal responsibility cannot be distinguished in practice from his responsibility to the Crown, which appoints and can remove him. Cases have arisen where the Governor of a self-governing Colony has written home for special guidance on some specific point, and where the answer given has been that he must act on his own responsibility, or follow the advice of his Ministers. All Colonial Governors, however, whether or not their powers are defined in the Constitution, are appointed by Commission from the Crown with powers defined in Letters Patent and Instructions as to their exercise. These Letters Patent and Instructions are not of much importance in the case of a self-governing Colony where responsible advice so largely controls the action of the Governor. Sometimes the executive powers given by Instructions to the Governor are indirectly alluded to in the Constitution, as in the South Africa Act of 1909, where, by Clause 9, under the head of "Executive Government," the Governor-General is "to exercise such powers and functions of the King as His Majesty may be pleased to assign to him." In the Australian and Canadian Acts of 1900 and 1867 respectively, the words do not appear. I name this point because in Clause 5 of the Home Rule Bill of 1893, and Clause 7 of the Bill of 1886, a similar course was taken in providing that the Lord-Lieutenant should "exercise any prerogatives, or other executive power of the Queen, the exercise of which may be delegated to him by Her Majesty." The words are not strictly necessary. The Lord-Lieutenant will, of course, have his Letters Patent and Instructions, but the powers of the Crown are theoretically absolute. If the Crown, acting under responsible British advice, should wish to defy the Irish Legislature, it could do so whatever the terms of the Bill.

Naturally, there will be certain Imperial and non-Irish matters in which the Lord-Lieutenant will act primarily under the orders of the British Cabinet, and the Departmental British Minister primarily responsible for Irish-Imperial matters would be the Home Secretary.[169]

The question may be raised, as in 1893 (July 3, Hansard), whether a staff of Imperial officials ought not to be set up to conduct any Imperial business which has to be done in Ireland, on the analogy of the Federal staff in the United States. I hope Mr. Gladstone's answer will still hold good—that no such staff is needed; that the Irish officials will be responsible, and ought, on the Home Rule principle, to be trusted, as they are trusted in the Colonies.

The Royal Assent to Bills is always a matter for express enactment in the Constitution, but here the "instructions" of the Governor, and even his personal "discretion," have generally been alluded to in recent Constitutions, whether conferred by Act or Letters Patent. The typical form of words is that the Governor "shall declare his Assent according to his discretion, but subject to His Majesty's instructions."[170] The Home Rule Bill of 1893 left out reference to "discretion," and, on the other hand, is, I think, the only document of the kind in which the "advice of the Executive Council" has ever been expressly alluded to, although the practice, of course, is that the Assent, normally, is given or withheld on that advice. The Transvaal Constitution of 1906 (Section 39) was unique in prescribing that special instructions must be received by the Governor in the case of each proposed law, before the Assent is given. I hope that will not be made a precedent for Ireland. Such precautions only irritate the law-makers, and serve no useful purpose.

Colonial Governors, besides the power of Assent and Veto, may "reserve" Bills for the Royal pleasure, which is to be signified within two years. Moreover, Bills which have received the Governor's Assent may be disallowed within one or two years.[171] Neither of these provisions appeared in the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, and neither appear to be strictly necessary, owing to the proximity of Ireland. Whatever is done, we may hope that the practice now established in Canada, where the Federal Government never disallows a provincial law on any other ground than that it is ultra vires, and, a fortiori, the similar practice as between Great Britain and the Dominions, may be imitated in the case of Ireland.

To sum up, the terse and simple words of the Bill of 1886 really enunciate all that is necessary:

Constitution of the Executive Authority.

"7.—(1) The Executive Government of Ireland shall continue vested in (Her) Majesty, and shall be carried on by the Lord-Lieutenant on behalf of (Her) Majesty with the aid of such officers and such council as to Her Majesty may from time to time seem fit.

"(2) Subject to any instructions which may from time to time be given by (Her) Majesty, the Lord-Lieutenant shall give or withhold the assent of (Her) Majesty to Bills passed by the Irish Legislative Body, and shall exercise the prerogatives of (Her) Majesty in respect of the summoning, proroguing, and dissolving of the Irish Legislative Body, and any prerogatives the exercise of which may be delegated to him by (Her) Majesty."

LORD-LIEUTENANT AND CIVIL LIST.

The restriction as to the religion of the Lord-Lieutenant will, of course, be removed. There is no reason why his term of office should be limited by law. His salary, payable by Ireland, should perhaps be stated in the Act, as in the case of Canada and South Africa, though not in that of Australia. Australia, on the other hand, has a statutory Civil List, and a fixed Civil List was an invariable feature of the old Constitutions given to self-governing Colonies. Canada and South Africa are under no such restrictions, and it would be very inexpedient to impose them upon Ireland.

LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY.

The Irish Legislature will be given power, according to the historic phrase, "to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of Ireland," subject to restrictions afterwards named. That the laws should be only "in respect of matters exclusively relating to Ireland or some part thereof" goes without saying, and need not be copied from the Bill of 1893 (Clause 2). Nor need the superfluous proviso in the same clause be reproduced, asserting the "supreme power and authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom." The supreme power becomes none the more supreme for such assertions. Clause 2 of the Bill of 1886 is simple and decisive:

"2. With the exceptions of and subject to the restrictions in this Act mentioned, it shall be lawful for (Her) Majesty (the Queen), by and with the advice of the Irish Legislative Body, to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of Ireland, and by any such law to alter and repeal any law in Ireland."

With the restrictions on the powers of the Legislature I dealt fully enough in Chapter X.,[172] and I need only summarize my conclusions:

1. Reservations of Imperial Authority.—The Irish Legislature should not have power to make laws upon—

The Crown or a Regency.
Making of War or Peace.
Prize and Booty of War.
Army or Navy.
Foreign Relations and Treaties (excepting Commercial Treaties).
Conduct as Neutrals.
Titles and Dignities.
Extradition.
Treason.
Coinage.
Naturalization and Alienage.

Reservation of the nine subjects included in the bracket is implied, without enactment, in all colonial Constitutions, but in the Irish Bill it is no doubt necessary that all reserved powers should be formally specified.

All powers not specifically reserved will belong to the Irish Legislature, subject to those restrictions, constitutional or statutory, which in matters like Trade and Navigation, Copyright, Patents, etc., bind the whole Empire.

Section 32 of the Bill of 1893, borrowed from the Colonial Laws Validity Act, will no doubt be applied.

2. Minority Safeguards.—This point, too, I dealt with in Chapter X.[173] Let the Nationalist Members come forward and frankly accept any prohibitory clauses which the fears of the minority may suggest, provided that they do not impair the ordinary legislative power which every efficient Legislature must enjoy. Almost every conceivable safeguard for the protection of religion, denominational education, and civil rights was inserted in the Bill of 1893, including even some of the "slavery" Amendments to the United States Constitution. The list may require revision—(a) in view of the recent establishment of the National University, and the disappearances of all apprehension about the status of Trinity College, Dublin; (b) in regard to an extraordinarily wide Sub-clause (No. 9) about interference with Corporations; (c) in regard to the words, "in accordance with settled principles and precedents," which appeared in Sub-clause (No. 8) (Legislature to make no law "Whereby any person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law [174] in accordance with settled principles and precedents," etc.). A debate on this question may be found in Hansard, May 30, 1893. The words italicized were added in Committee on the motion of Mr. Gerald Balfour, though the Attorney-General declared that they gave no additional strength to the phrase "due process of law," while they certainly appear calculated to provoke litigation. Sir Henry James appeared to think that they made the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act ultra vires. If that is their effect, there is no reason why they should be inserted. Even a Canadian Province, whose powers are more limited than those of the subordinate States in any other Federation, has "exclusive" powers within its own borders over "property and civil rights,"[175] and can, beyond any doubt, suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, if it pleases.

The same superfluous words appeared in Sub-clause (No. 9) about Corporations.

THE IRISH LEGISLATURE.[176]

As I urged in Chapter X., this is a subject in which large powers of constitutional revision—much larger than those contained in either of the Home Rule Bills—should be given to the Irish Legislature itself, corresponding to the powers given by statute to the self-governing Colonies, and to the powers always held by the constituent States of a Federation. In the Bill itself it would be wisest to follow beaten tracks as far as possible, and not to embark on experiments. Present conditions are, unhappily, very unfavourable for the elaboration of any scheme ideally fit for Ireland.

A Bi-Cameral Legislature.—Working on this principle, we must affirm that Ireland's position, without representation in the Imperial Parliament, would certainly make a Second Chamber requisite. Three of the Provinces within the Federation of Canada (Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario) prefer to do without Second Chambers—so do most of the Swiss Cantons—but all the Federal Legislatures of the world are bi-cameral, and all the unitary Constitutions of self-governing Colonies have been, or are, bi-cameral.

The Upper Chamber.—One simple course would be to constitute the Upper Chamber of a limited number of Irish Peers, chosen by the whole of their number, as they are chosen at present for representation in the House of Lords. Historical and practical considerations render this course out of the question, though some people would be fairly sanguine about the success of such a body in commanding confidence, on the indispensable condition that all representation at Westminster were to cease. It has been membership, before the Union of an ascendency Parliament, and after the Union of an absentee Parliament, which has kept the bulk of the Irish peerage in violent hostility to the bulk of the Irish people. Those Peers who seek and obtain a career in an Irish popular Legislature—to both branches of which they will, of course, be eligible—will be able to do valuable service to their country. The same applies to all landlords. Now that land reform is converting Ireland itself into a nation of small landholders, who, in most countries, are very Conservative in tendency, the ancient cleavage is likely to disappear. Indeed, an ideal Second Chamber ought perhaps to give special weight to urban and industrial interests, while aiming, not at an obstructive, but at a revising body of steady, moderate, highly-educated business men.

We have to choose one of two alternatives: a nominated or an elective chamber. The choice is difficult, for second chambers all over the world may be said to be on their trial. On the other hand, nothing vital depends upon the choice, for experience proves that countries can flourish equally under every imaginable variety of second chamber, provided that means exist for enabling popular wishes, in the long-run, to prevail. The European and American examples are of little use to us, and the widely varied types within the Empire admit of no sure inferences. Allowance must be made for the effect of the Referendum wherever it exists (as in Australia and Switzerland), as a force tending to weaken both Chambers, but especially the Upper Chamber of a Legislature. It does, indeed, seem to be generally admitted, even by Canadians, that the nominated Senate of the Dominion of Canada, which is added to on strict party principles by successive Governments, is not a success, and it was so regarded by the Australian Colonies when they entered upon Federation, and set up an elective Senate. The South African statesmen, who had to reckon with racial divisions similar to those in Ireland, compromised with a Senate partly nominated, partly elected, but made the whole arrangement revisable in ten years.[177]

It would be desirable, perhaps, on similar grounds of immediate policy, to let those who now represent the minority in Ireland have a deciding voice in the matter. No arrangement made otherwise than by a free Ireland herself can be regarded as final, and I suggest only that a nominated Chamber would be the best expedient at the outset, or in the alternative a partly nominated, partly elected Chamber.

If and in so far as the Upper Chamber is elective, should election be direct or indirect? There is a somewhat attractive Irish precedent for indirect election, namely, the present highly successful Department of Agriculture, whose Council and Boards the County Councils have a share in constituting,[178] and I have seen and admired a most ingenious scheme of Irish manufacture for constructing the whole Irish Legislature and Ministry on this principle. But the objections appear to be considerable. Local bodies in the future should not be mixed up in national politics. That has been their bane in the past. Besides, the principle of indirect election is under a cloud everywhere, most of all in the United States. Australia rejected it in 1900, and the South Africans, while giving it partial recognition in the Senate, made the expedient provisional.

The Lower House.—The Lower House might very well be elected on the same franchise and from the same constituencies as at present, subject to any small redistributional modifications necessitated by changes of population. This is certainly a matter which Ireland should have full power to settle for itself subsequently.

Lord Courtney's proposals for Proportional Representation [179] merit close consideration and possess great attractions, especially in view of their very favourable reception from Nationalists in Ireland. My own feeling is that such novel proposals may overload a Bill which, however simply it be framed, will provoke very long and very warm discussion. If the system were to be regarded by the present minority as a real safeguard for their interests, its establishment, on tactical grounds alone, would be worth any expenditure of time and trouble; but, if they accept the assumption that existing parties in Ireland are going to be stereotyped under Home Rule, and then point to the paucity of Unionists in all parts of Ireland but the north-east of Ulster, they can demonstrate that no practicable enlargement of constituencies could seriously influence the results of an election. My own view, already expressed, is that, provided we give Ireland sufficient freedom, wholly new parties must, within a short time, inevitably be formed in Ireland, and the old barriers of race and religion be broken down, and, therefore, that all expedients devised on the contrary hypothesis will eventually prove to be needless and might even prove unpopular and inconvenient. On the other hand, merits are claimed, with a great show of reason, for Proportional Representation, which are altogether independent of the protection of minorities from oppression. It is claimed that the system brings forward moderate men of all shades of opinion, checks party animus, and steadies the policy of the State. But I think that a free Ireland should be the judge of these merits. At present the bulk of the people do not understand the subject, and need much education before they can appreciate the issue.

Meanwhile, the conventional party system, based on conventional constituencies, will, to say the least, do no more harm to Ireland than to any other State in the Empire. Any minor defects will be infinitesimal beside the vast and beneficial change wrought by responsible government.

DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN THE TWO HOUSES.

It is essential to provide for this, and it would be difficult to better the proposal in the Bill of 1893: that after two years, or an intervening dissolution, the question should be decided by a joint vote in joint session.

MONEY BILLS AND RESOLUTIONS.

To originate in the Lower House on the motion of a Minister.

POLICE.

The Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police should be under Irish control from the first. The former force will undoubtedly have to be reconstituted, and its reconstitution, as an ordinary Civil Police, ought to be undertaken by the Irish Government, but the financial interests of "retrenched" officers and men should be safeguarded in the Bill itself.

JUDGES.

All future appointments should be made by the Irish Government, without the suspensory period of six years named in the Bill of 1893. Present Irish Judges should retain their appointments, as in both previous Bills. The precedent of Canada, where provincial Judges, unlike the State Judges of Australia, are appointed and paid by the Federal Government, is certainly not relevant.

LAW COURTS.

The Federal analogy, except in one particular noticed under the next heading, has no application to Ireland. Only one provision of any importance is needed, namely, that Appeals, in the last resort, should be to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council instead of to the House of Lords. The Judicial Committee is the final Court of Appeal for the whole Empire, and, strengthened by one or more Irish Judges, should hear Irish Appeals. It is true that the tribunal has been subjected to some criticism lately, especially from Australia. Federal States naturally wish to secure pre-eminent authority for their own Supreme Courts. But the tribunal is, on the whole, popular with the colonial democracies, and the argument from distance and expense does not apply to Ireland. At the end of an interesting discussion at the last Imperial Conference, in which suggestions were put forward for strengthening the Judicial Committee by Colonial Judges, it was agreed that new proposals should be made by the Imperial Government for an Imperial Final Court of Appeal in two divisions, one for the United Kingdom, another for the Colonies. If that step is taken, the position of Ireland will need fresh consideration.[180]

DECISION OF CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS.[181]

The validity of an Irish Act which has received the Royal Assent will, like that of a Colonial Act which has received the Royal Assent, be determined in the ordinary course by the Irish Courts, with an ultimate appeal to the Judicial Committee, which should be strengthened for the occasion by one or more Irish Judges. But both the previous Home Rule Bills made the convenient provision that the Lord-Lieutenant should have the power of referring questions of validity arising on a Bill, before its enactment, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for final decision. There is a useful Canadian precedent for this provision, in the Imperial Act passed in 1891, for giving the Governor-General in Council power, in the widest terms, to refer, inter alia, questions touching provincial legislation to the Supreme Court of Canada, with an appeal from it to the Judicial Committee.[182] To follow this precedent would not involve any Federal complications.

EXCHEQUER JUDGES.

If Ireland controls her own Customs and Excise, no provision for this tribunal appears to be necessary, unless it be that some counterpart is needed for the Colonial Courts of Admiralty.[183] The Bill of 1886 (Clause 20) limited the jurisdiction to revenue questions. The Bill of 1893 (Clause 19) widened it to include "any matter not within the power of the Irish Legislature," or "any matter affected by a law which the Irish Legislature have not power to repeal or alter." The minds of the authors of this clause were evidently affected by the Federal principle which involves two judicial authorities—one for Federal, one for provincial matters. There seems to be no reason for embarking on any such complications in the case of Ireland.

SAFEGUARDS FOR EXISTING PUBLIC SERVANTS IN IRELAND.[184]

Retrenchment, and in some departments drastic retrenchment, will be needed in the Irish public service, just as it was needed in the Transvaal after the grant of Home Rule to that Colony. It is highly desirable that statutory provision should be made safeguarding existing interests. No such provision was made in the case of the Transvaal, and some bad feeling resulted. The past responsibility for excessive Civil expenditure lies, of course, on Great Britain, as it lay in the case of the Transvaal, and on grounds of abstract justice it would have been fair in that case for Great Britain to have assumed a limited part of the expense of compensating retrenched public servants. The practical objections to such a policy are, however, very great. In this, as in all matters, Ireland will gain more by independence than by financial aid, however strongly justified. All payments should be a direct charge upon the Irish Exchequer, not, as in some cases under the Bill of 1893, upon the Imperial Exchequer in the first instance, with provision for repayment from Ireland.

FINANCE.

I summarize the conclusions already indicated in previous chapters:

1. Fiscal independence, with complete control over all Irish taxation and expenditure.

2. Initial deficit to be supplied by a grant-in-aid, diminishing annually and terminable in a short period, say, seven years.

3. Future contribution to Imperial services to be voluntary.

4. Remission to Ireland of her share of the National Debt, and relinquishment by Ireland of her share of the Imperial Miscellaneous Revenue.

5. Imperial credit for Land Purchase to be extended as before, by loans guaranteed on the Consolidated Fund, under any conditions now or hereafter to be made by the Imperial authorities.

Loans to the Public Works Commissioners to be optional.

REPRESENTATION AT WESTMINSTER.

To cease.

CONFERENCE BETWEEN THE IRISH AND IMPERIAL AUTHORITIES.

This is a very important point, because friendly consultation, as at present with the Colonies, will take the place of Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament, and will prove a far more satisfactory means of securing harmony and co-operation. Arrangements similar to those of the Imperial Conference, only more precise and efficient, and of a permanent character, should be made for consultation between the Irish and British authorities on all subjects where the interests of the two countries touch one another. The need for more frequent consultation with the Colonies is being felt with increasing force, and although no permanent consultation body has yet been created, special ad hoc conferences have recently been held—for Defence in 1909, and for Copyright in 1910—in addition to the quadrennial meetings, where a vast amount of varied topics are discussed, and the most valuable decisions arrived at.[185]

What the precise machinery should be in the case of Anglo-Irish relations I do not venture to say. The Ministers of the respective countries will be so easily accessible to one another that there would seem to be no need for the frequent attendance of a powerful personnel at joint meetings. But a Standing Committee, with a small official staff, would be necessary.

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.[186]

For amendment of the Home Rule Act itself it is not possible to make any statutory provision. Like all Constitutional Acts, it will only be alterable by another Imperial statute, which, if it were needed, should be promoted by Ireland. But one of the most important clauses in the Act itself will be that defining Ireland's power to amend her own Constitution without coming to Parliament. I venture to repeat the view that this power should be as wide as possible, consistently with the maintenance of the Imperial authority, and subject, of course, to provisions prescribing—(1) a time-limit for the initial arrangements; (2) the method of ascertaining Irish opinion; and (3) the majority in the Legislature, or in the electorate, or in both, necessary to sanction a constitutional change.[187] If a Home Rule Constitution, passed into law in the heat of a party fight at Westminster, proves to be perfect, a miracle will have been performed unparalleled in the history of the Empire. At this moment a Committee of Ireland's ablest men of all parties should be at work upon it, with an instructed public opinion behind them. So only are good Constitutions made, and even the very best need subsequent amendment.

CONCLUSION

Is it altogether idle to hope that some such body will yet come into existence, if not in time to influence the drafting of the Bill, at any rate to bring to bear upon its provisions the sober wisdom, not of one party only in the State, but of all; and so, if it were possible, to give to the charter of Ireland in her "new birth of freedom" the sanction of a united people?

Home Rule will eventually come. Within the Empire, the utmost achieved by the government of white men without their own consent is to weaken their capacity to assume the sacred responsibility of self-government. It is impossible to kill the idea of Home Rule, though it is possible, by retarding its realization, to pervert some of its strength and beauty, and to diminish the vital energy on which its fruition depends. And it is possible in the case of Ireland, up to and in the very hour of her emancipation, after a struggle more bitter and exhausting than any in the Empire, to heap obstacles in the path of the men who have carried her to the goal, and on whom in the first instance must fall the extraordinarily difficult and delicate task of political reconstruction. They will be on their mettle in the eyes of the world to prove that the prophets of evil were wrong, to show sympathy and inspire confidence in the very quarters where they have been most savagely traduced and least trusted, and they will have to exhibit dauntless courage in attacking old abuses and promoting new reforms. They will need their hands strengthened in every possible way.

The help must come—and it cannot come too soon—from the working optimists of Ireland, from the hundreds of men and women, of both parties and creeds, who are labouring outside politics to extirpate that stifling undergrowth of pessimism which runs riot in countries denied the light and air of freedom. All these people agree on the axiom that Ireland has a distinct individual existence, and that her future depends upon herself. No one should dare to stop there. Let him who feels impelled to stop there at any rate act with open eyes. In expecting to realize social reconstruction without political reconstruction—however divergent the aims may now seem to be—he expects to achieve what has never been achieved in any country in the Empire, and to achieve this miracle in the very country which has suffered most from political repression, and possesses the most fantastic system of government to be found in the King's dominions. The thing is impossible, and if at bottom he feels it to be so, and inclines sadly to the view that political servitude is but the least of two evils, I would only venture to suggest this: Is it not a finer course to stake something on a risk run in every white community but Ireland rather than to face the certainty of half achievement? And is it not, after all, a sound risk to trust the very men who now respond to the appeal for self-reliance, mutual tolerance, and united effort in their private affairs, not to renounce these qualities and abuse the rights of citizenship when the public affairs of their country are under their own control?

As for the risk to Great Britain, I have only this last word to say: Let her people, not for the first time, show that they can rise superior to the philosophy, as fallacious in effect as it is base and cowardly in purpose, which sets the safety of a great nation above the happiness and prosperity of a small one. Within the last few weeks the wheel has turned full circle, and the almost inexplicable contradiction which has existed for so long between Unionism and Imperialism has been illuminated with a frank cynicism rare in our public life. It is being said that the freedom given to Canada cannot be given to Ireland, because the separation from the Empire theoretically rendered possible by such a step would be immaterial in the case of Canada, which is distant, but perilous in the case of Ireland, which is near. If this be Imperialism, it should stink in the nostrils of every decent citizen at home and abroad.

It is true, to our shame, that, by little more than an accident, Canada obtained the freedom which gave her people harmony, energy, and wealth in the teeth of this mean and selfish doctrine. But Lord Durham took a higher view. Let me recall the memorable words which he added to his long and brilliant argument for liberty as a source, not only of domestic regeneration, but of affection and loyalty to the Motherland: "But at any rate our first duty is to secure the well-being of our colonial countrymen; and if, in the hidden decrees of that wisdom by which this world is ruled, it is written that these countries are not for ever to remain portions of the Empire, we owe it to our honour to take good care that, when they separate from us, they should not be the only countries on the American continent in which the Anglo-Saxon race shall be found unfit to govern itself."

Lord Durham was doubly right; in his prophecy of the closer union liberty would promote, and in elementary law which he laid down, of moral obligation which, whatever the result, he held superior to dynastic calculations. It is a fact of ominous significance that the intellectual successors of the men who most hotly repudiated both these doctrines in 1838 are being driven by pressure of their Irish views to revive that repudiation in 1911, and to revive it in the midst of the most effusive protestations of the need for still closer union with a Colony which would either have undergone the fate of Ireland or have ceased to be a member of the Empire if their philosophy had triumphed. I do not believe there is any conscious cant in that flagrant contradiction, but I do firmly believe that so long as their error about Ireland poisons in them the springs of Imperial thought, some element of fallacy lies in any Imperial policy they undertake. In common prudence, at any rate, they should avoid telling Canada, while beckoning her nearer to the heart of the Empire, that they only gave her freedom because she was so far.

But I rely still on an awakening, on a fundamental change of spirit. The Empire owes everything to those who have disputed, sometimes at the cost of their lives, illegitimate authority. Some day the politicians who now spend sleepless nights with paste and scissors in ransacking the ancient files of the world's Press for proofs that Mr. Redmond once used words signifying that he aimed at "separation"—whatever that phrase may mean—will regret that they ever demeaned themselves by such petty labour, and will place Mr. Redmond among the number of those who have saved the Empire from the consequences of its own errors.