"But the noble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly. Ireland, he says, must contribute to every war, and the Minister won't trust to interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. He must have her purse within his own grasp. While three hundred men hold it in Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out of his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over and lay it at his feet, and then he will have full and uncontrolled power."
So it came about. Even before the Union Grattan's Parliament had, of its own free will and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into debt for the first time to help England against France. But, as Foster indicated, the Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of their resources. They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became a necessary
ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland was swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817 her funded debt was increased from £28,541,157 to £112,684,773, an augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years following the Union she paid in taxes £78,000,000 as against £31,000,000 in the last fifteen years preceding the Union. After the amalgamation of the Exchequers in 1817 the case becomes clearer. In 1819-20, for instance, the revenue contributed by Ireland was £5,256,564, of which only £1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great Britain of £3,691,684. For 1829-30 the tribute was £4,156,576.
Let us now inquire how things stood with regard to absenteeism. This had existed before the Union'; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to Johnson's "Dictionary" he will find it damned in a definition. But it was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and more material evidence in those
fallen and ravaged mansions which now constitute the worst slums of our capital city.
One figure may be cited by way of illustration. Before the Union "98 Peers, and a proportionate number of wealthy Commoners" lived in Dublin. The number of resident Peers in 1825 was twelve. At present, as I learn from those who read the sixpenny illustrateds, there is one. But when they abandoned Ireland they did not leave their rents behind. And it was a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled between 1790 and 1833. Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr D'Alton in his "History of the County Dublin," a book quite innocent of politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not less than £3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than £4,000,000, an under-estimate. If we average these figures over the period we find that during the first thirty years of Union, that is to say during the most critical phase of the Industrial Revolution, not less than £105,000,000 of Irish capital was "exported" from Ireland to Great Britain through the channel of absenteeism.
Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute in similar fashion, and taking the lowest estimates, I am unable to reach a less total than £120,000,000 for the same period. In other
words, the effect of the Union was to withdraw from Ireland during the thirty years that settled the economic structure of modern industry not less than £225,000,000. Let me draw the argument together in words which I have used elsewhere, and which others can no doubt easily better:
"We have heard, in our day, a long-drawn denunciation of a Liberal government on the score that it had, by predatory taxation, driven English capital out of the country, and compromised the industrial future of England. We have seen in our own day gilt-edged securities, bank, insurance, railway, and brewery shares in Great Britain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of £250,000,000 on the Boer War. We know that in economic history effects are, in a notable way, cumulative; so clearly marked is the line of continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a nail in all England that could not be traced back to savings made before the Norman Conquest. A hundred instances admonish us that, in industrial life, nothing fails like failure. When we put all these considerations together, and give them a concrete application, can we doubt that in over-taxation and the withdrawal of capital we have the prime causa causans of the decay of Ireland under the Union?"
In this wise did Pitt "blend Ireland