3\ The New Zealand 7 ABLET^ 'THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1907. 'UNION' FINANCE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 1, 3 January 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1907. 'UNION' FINANCE

the intellect against them as unwelcome visitors, as British scientists of the eighteenth century lowered portcullis and raised drawbridge for a long time against the results of French research. . The other, and. perhaps still more abysmal, form of prejudice is that which coerces too resistant facts — licking and shaping and altering them to suit preconceived views and theories. This is a reversal of the sound principle that' theories must be made to suit the facts, not facts to suit_ the theories ; and that when a fact comes into collision with a theory, it is as if a ' coo ' came into collision with Stephenson's locomotive— sac much the waur for the theory. Scientists are aware that two light-waves may so * interfere ' as to produce complete darkness. And in an analogous way, a ■ discussion, even when well - informed and luminous on both sides— often fails to leaye the issue clear. Take, for instance, the case for and against bimetallism. But mere ignorance settles no dispute. And even the tight-shut eyes and the deprecative Pooh-pooh of the rare New Zealand daily that is opposed to selfgovernment in another part of the Empire, in no way affect the facts advanced by Mr-. Devlin to sustain the charge of over-taxation of Ireland. The matter t has long passed the stage of discussion. It was proved to overwhelming demons Oration by the Reports -(and especially the Final Report) of the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland.

The provisions of the Act of Union required that Ireland should pay (1) the annual charge upon her debt contracted before the legislative Union, and (2) two-seventeenths of the joint expenditure of the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, when Pitt, Castlereagh, and their confreres determined the financial terms of the Act of Union, they did so, not on the basis of the -normal years 1790-179'J, but on the basis of- the abnormal period, 1799-1800. % They assumed,' says Lough; 'that Ireland could continue to pay the amount she had then paid. This was the fatal error against which both countries have been struggling ever since. 1 The last farthing of the amounts mentioned above was charged year by year. But the taxes could not pro-

RTHUR Phelps will have it that the most fatal form of bigotry is that which is produced by -reading- only one side of a question. But there are two deeper depths ~to which unreasoned bias may. reach. There -is tha prejudice which deliberately closes eyes and ears against disconcerting and inconvenient facts— bangs and bolts the door of

duce it— falling short by- about £400,000 in each of the years 1801 and 1802, and (despite doubled duties on spirits, malt, teas, and tobacco) by much larger sums in 1804 and 1811. The limits of the country's 1 taxable capacity had been plainly passed. Here is the- result as stated in the able work on the Financial Relations by Mr. Lough, M.P. :—

' Only the sums which have been set out were actually collected, the balance being added to the preUnion debt. In the seventeen- years ' (to 1817) 'the total amount required for her separate charges and her share of the joint expenditure was, roundly, a hundred and sixty-two millions. Of this sum she paid about half, and the other moiety was added to her debt, wlAch amounted at the ciose of >4he period altogether to about a hundred and thirteen millions'. . . At the commencement, the debt of Ireland was to the debt of Great Britain as one is to fifteen and a half. The .amounts added to each during the seventeen years were .as ' one is to six and a half; and the increase, was 294- per cent, in the Irish debt,' while it was only •65 per cent, in the .debt of Great" Britain.'

In the period under consideration (1801-1817) Ire=Hand's debt arose from a ratio, of one to fifteen and a half to a ratio of two to se\enteen to the debt of -Great Britain. Then it pleased the Westminster Parliament to withdraw the modest financial ' protection ' that the Act of Union had given to the; poorer countiv. Fiscal distinctions between the two nations wi;i\j abolished ; "by some strange freak of Looking(hiiss Land reasoning, it was decided that the disproportionate increase in Ireland's debt had made uer all the more fit to bear the burden of equal taxation with her richer neighbor ; and the last state of the home of the western Celt became worse than the- first. -

Between 1820 and 1850 Imperial taxation in England was reduced by one-third (from '£3 10s to £2 7s 8d per head).' In Ireland it remiAned practically the same (14s 5d per head in 1820 and 13s 11 in 1850). Between 1841 and 1851, famine, pestilence, and wholesale evictions reduced the population of -the country

by 1,622,739 souls-r-despite the natural increase that took place during that teriible decade- of concentrated woe. The ' Statist ' (the leading English financial paper) points out in the course of a recent article that the repeal of the Corn Laws at the -beginning of the great famine smote the Irish farmers terribly, converted vast areas of "cultivated land into pasturage, turned adrift ' immense numbers of laborers,' and sent them thronging into the ~city_ slums or hurrying across the seas to America or the British colonies. And 1 be it noted that in Ireland 'the sufferings of agriculture' (as the ' Statist J remarks) were not, as in the richer country, England, ' made up for by the increased prosperity of manufactures, industry, and " trade ' ; for * in Ireland there were practically no manufactures and very little trade.' "Yet this period -of ruin, of ' complete economic and social revolution ' (as the 'Statist,' calls it) was chosen by the. -Westminster- Parliament for the imposition of fresh fiscal burdens upon a broken -and impoverished country. In the famine years the starving and pest-stricken people were ' relieved ' by loans amounting to four and a half millions, sterling. Repayment of the loan (with interest)* began forthwith— while the hinged coffins were still at their ghastly work. When the repayment of the famine loans had been in good part effected," the balance was, as an act of grace, '.remitted '—in consideration of the new taxation that had been imposed and was to be imposed upon the unhappy country, already bled white, and exhausted by the death agony of Forty-six and of. Black Forty-seven. It was a shrewd .bargain, as the following extract from Lough's work amply shows : 1 The taxes imposed between 1853 and 1860 have produced at least three millions a year for forty years. This sum capitalised would amount to well over two hundred millions. And this is the price that Ireland has paid for the trivial relief of four and "a half millions in 1846-7.'

The Financial Relations Committee declared ' that the Act of Union imposed upon Ireland' a burden which as events showed, she- was unable to bear ' ; that r the relative taxable capacity of Ireland ' 'is not estimated by any- of us as exceeding; -one^twentdeth of- that of England '—as against, the Imperial charge of twoseventeenths expending over a century ; ' that- the increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 1853 .and 1860 was not justified by the then existing circum--stancc ' ; and that it added an -'unfair burden of about two and a quarter million per annum to the' already undue drain upon the poorer country's resources. During the -past contuiy the Briton has had his Imperial taxation halved ; the Irishman has had his doubled— while ■ in about fifty years the population that has to meet , these increased exactions has decreased by fifty per cent. .The -drain still goes drearily on, "and the burden still grows heavier. And ..all this, let it_ be borne. in mind, is independent of the colossal folly and extravagance of the " services inside Ireland I—the1 — the ' Castle ' with" its forty departments, the military police, the judiciary and the horde of useless and high-salaried placemen that are fastened like vampires upon the veins of the country. ' When everything is said, the fact remains ', says the ' Statist ', ' that the decay of Ireland during the past sixty-five years is mainly the result of thepolicy of England— a policy adopted not,- of course, to injure Ireland, but to benefit England ; still a policy which incidentally has had the result of, in the first place, destroying the one great Irish industry, and, in the second place, of burdening Ireland with a taxation altogether out of proportion to her resources '.