om Dublin the gods decreed that she should have for
portion the hard indifference and savage taxation of Westminster.
Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, stripped of the capital
that would have served as a commissariat of advance in that crucial
struggle, she went down.

I am not to make here the case for Ireland in respect of over-taxation.
It was made definitely in the Report of the Childers Commission, a
document which no Englishman reads, lest in coming to the light he
should have his sins too sharply rebuked. It has been developed and
clarified in many speeches and essays and in some books. To grasp it is
to find your road to Damascus on the Irish Question. But for the moment
we are concerned with but one aspect, namely, the export of capital from
Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that
process. Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all
rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union
arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they
combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical
technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed
the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk,
and appropriated it for her own nourishment. One has a sort of gloomy
pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we
were not duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons--in
those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom--tore
the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare
his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said:

"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, t