buted it is my contention to prove.

The closing years of the eighteenth century in Ireland, coinciding as
they did with the achievement of Parliamentary independence, witnessed
in that country a remarkable growth of national prosperity. Up to the
year 1795 the taxation of the country never exceeded one and a half
millions of pounds, and the National Debt was not more than one million.
In the succeeding years the French war and the rebellion of '98 swelled
the expenditure, as did the maintenance of an armed force in the
country, which was the corollary of the rebellion, and that process
which Lord Cornwallis, the Lord Lieutenant, described as "courting those
whom he longed to kick," by which the Act of Union was passed, added
another million and a half to the national expenditure.

The result of the various causes was that in the year 1799-1800 the
taxation of the country had risen to three millions, and the National
Debt amounted to just under four millions of pounds.

It is necessary to enter into these details, because it was on the basis
of the years 1799-1800, and not on that of a year of normal expenditure,
such as was 1795, that Pitt and Castlereagh framed the financial clauses
of the Act of Union, which were to establish the taxable relations
between Great Britain and Ireland.

Having said so much we need not pause to consider how far the financial
clauses were justified. It will suffice to say that they provided that
Ireland should pay two-seventeenths of the joint expenditure of the
United Kingdom, together with the annual charge upon her pre-union debt.
One should add, however, that the Irish House of Lords protested that
the relative taxable capacities of Ireland and England did not bear to
each other the ratio which the Act enunciated of 1 to 7-1/2, but in
reality of 1 to 18.

It was no part of Pitt's scheme that there should be fiscal union. A
separate Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer, drawing up an Irish budget
and regulating an Irish debt, remained after the union of the
legislatures. Speaking in 1800 on this very point Lord Castlereagh
declared that:--

"It must be evident to every man that if our manufactures keep pace in
advancement for the next twenty years with the progress they have made
in the last twenty, they may at the expiration of it be fully able to
cope with the British, and that the two kingdoms may be safely left like
any two countries of the same kingdom to a free competition."