[31]overtaxed was rebutted by the late Unionist Government was that the balance is restored by the amount of money spent in the administration of that country. When the complaint is heard that she is contributing at this day no less a sum than,£9,750,000 to revenue, the answer is made that she has no grievance since the cost of Irish services amounts to more than £7,500,000, the balance, a paltry two and a quarter millions, forming her Imperial contribution.
Ireland is being bled to death, and to her complaints the answer is that she is being expensively administered. To fleece a poor man of his pittance and to justify the action by telling him that it is on every appurtenance of a spendthrift to which he objects that it is being spent is scarcely to provide a satisfactory justification. The two cases are exactly parallel, and it is a weak position which has to entrench itself behind the fact that the cost of government per head is in Ireland double what it is in England.
The country is against its will saddled with a Viceregal Court, of which the Lord Lieutenant enjoys a salary twice as great as that of the President of the United States. The government is conducted by more than forty boards, only one of which is responsible, through a Minister in the House of Commons, to the country. Official returns show that Scotland, with a population slightly larger than that of Ireland, possesses 942 Government officials as against 2,691 in Ireland. In Scotland the salaries of these public servants amount to less than £300,000, while in Ireland the corresponding cost is more than £1,000,000 per annum, showing that the average salaries in the poorer country are considerably higher than in the richer. Of the £7,500,000 devoted to Irish services, £1,500,000 goes to the Post Office and Customs, while one half of the remainder is consumed by the salaries and pensions of policemen and officials.
To take a single example—the Prison Boards of Scotland and Ireland work under identical Acts,
[32]dating from 1877. It is instructive, therefore, to compare the conditions of the two. The estimates for the year 1905 were calculated on the assumption that there were 120 fewer prisoners a day in Irish prisons than in Scotland. In spite of this the cost of the Irish Board for the last year of which I have seen the figures was £144,597, and that of the Scottish Board was only £105,588. The ratio between these figures is as 1.3 to 1, which is in nearly the same proportion as is the number of the officials on the two boards—namely, 622 in Ireland and in Scotland 467, and this, too, in spite of the fact that further statistics show, namely, that there are five convicted criminals in Scotland for every three in Ireland.
These are a few facts which show the value of the case for the present state of affairs, based on the assumption that over-taxation is balanced by profligate expenditure. The maintenance—to take only one point—of a police force about half the size of the United States army, when at the present time white gloves—the symbol of a crimeless charge—are being given to the judges on every circuit, is a state of affairs which is intolerable, while the small proportion which in the returns Ireland is shown to bear of the Imperial contribution is the result of the inclusion of the Viceregal and Civil Service charges, not, as should be the case, in the Imperial account, but in the separate Irish account.
As an instance showing how exorbitant exactions defeat their own end by diminishing, and not raising, the available revenue, it should be noted that in 1853 an income tax of 7d. in the pound raised £200,000 more than did an income tax of 8d. in the pound at the date of the Royal Commission. Of the remedies which are suggested, the alteration of the Fiscal system, by making abatements in the Irish Excise and Customs, is not likely to be attempted. Reduction of expenditure, liberating money which may be made to serve a useful purpose, is obviously the first
[33]step, but any scheme of allocation of large sums for Irish development, without full and proper financial control, will undoubtedly fail to meet the case. The multiplication of irresponsible boards must be stopped, and to what extent anything, save economies in expenditure, can be effected without far larger changes remains a moot point. Of one thing, at any rate, one may be certain—the present Liberal Government when in Opposition joined forces with the Irish members in driving home the tremendous admissions of the Royal Commissioners, and it is impossible to think that, now they are in power, they will repudiate their obligations, the more so as the present Chancellor of the Exchequer last year announced the intention of the Government to see how far it is possible to adjust the financial relations between the two kingdoms on a fairer basis.
Sir Hercules Langrishe, the friend and correspondent of Edmund Burke, is said to have accounted for the swampy condition of the Phoenix Park by saying—"The English Government are too much engaged in draining the rest of the kingdom to find time to attend to it."
Enough has been said to show that the process of which Sir Hercules spoke is still going on. One would have thought that counsels of prudence would have made an end of it. It remains to be seen whether the uncontestable facts to which they themselves have subscribed will prevail with the Government. "The liberality, the justice, the honour of the people of England" are concerned in it now, as truly as when Pitt spoke. Moreover, it is one of the instances in which the claims of justice and of expediency coincide. The findings of the Financial Relations' Commission fully justified the attitude of the Irish Party to the proposal, under Mr. Gladstone's Bill, that the Irish contribution to the Imperial Treasury should be one-fourteenth of that of Great Britain, while Mr. Parnell declared that it ought to