he 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 L28,541,157 to L112,684,773, an
augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years
following the Union she paid in taxes L78,000,000 as against L31,000,000
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 L5,256,564, of which
only L1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great
Britain of L3,691,684. For 1829-30 the tribute was L4,156,576.

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 L3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than L4,000,000, 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 L105,000,000
of Irish capital was "exported" from Ireland to