ds.
That gives us some idea of the old Irish land system, whose overthrowal
began only in 1870; a system under which the landlord put no capital
into the land, though his rent represented the full profits of the
tenant's capital and labour, less an amount equivalent to a bare
subsistence wage, governed by competition.

The present influence upon Ireland of the Imperial fiscal system, now
that peasant proprietorship has been half accomplished, is another
matter upon which I shall have to say more presently, when we have
completed our review of Anglo-Irish finance. Let us return to the point
we had reached: that free trade with the outside world and the
equalization of taxation between Great Britain and Ireland approximately
coincided in point of time, and were also contemporaneous with rapid and
continuous growth in the wealth and population of Great Britain, and a
steady and continuous decline in the Irish population. We know now,
moreover, though nobody knew it then, because the calculation was not
yet made, that Ireland was paying a large contribution to Imperial
services, over and above her local expenditure. In the half-century
between 1810 and 1860 she had paid an average yearly sum of nearly four
millions, and a total sum of nearly two hundred millions. In the year
1859-60, when the now equalized spirit duties were raised to 10s., she
paid L5,396,000; a sum considerably more than double the expenditure on
Irish services, and equivalent to no less than five-sevenths of the
revenue raised in Ireland.

Parliament gave no serious attention to any of these phenomena from the
time of the fiscal union in 1817 until after the introduction of Mr.
Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill in 1893. No settled conclusions were
arrived at as to the relative wealth of the two countries, as to the
capacity of Ireland to bear the British scale of taxation, or even as to
the amount of revenue derived from and expended in the countries
respectively, with the consequent contributions made to common Imperial
services. A Committee sat in 1864-65, which compiled some interesting
information and heard some important witnesses, but ignored the main
questions at issue and produced what Sir Edward Hamilton described later
as an "impotent" Report. Sir Joseph MacKenna, an able Irish banker,
again and again, between 1867 and 1876, pleaded for an inquiry into
Anglo-Irish finance, alleging gross injustice in the incidence of Irish
taxation, and obtai