not exist. It was the perfectly correct course for the
Treasury to take in dealing with the task set before them, and, as we
shall see, it provides the only basis on which to construct the
balance-sheet of a financially independent Ireland.

The insolubility of the second problem--that of discovering the "true"
revenue of Ireland and Great Britain respectively--arises from the
difficulty of tracing the passage of dutiable articles from one part of
the kingdom to the other, and of tracing the incidence of direct imposts
such as income-tax and stamps. The great bulk of Irish revenue is
derived from indirect taxes on commodities, liquor, tobacco, tea, sugar,
etc. Since the consumer pays the tax, revenue is rightly credited to the
country of consumption. The tax, for example, on tobacco manufactured in
Ireland may be collected in Ireland, but the revenue from Irish-made
tobacco exported to and consumed in Great Britain is rightly credited to
Great Britain. The converse holds true. Half the tea consumed in Ireland
has paid duty in London, but the whole of the revenue from tea consumed
in Ireland must be credited to Ireland. Now, since 1826, no official
records had been kept by the Customs-houses of the transit of goods
between Ireland and England, except in the solitary case of spirits. The
data, therefore, did not exist, and do not exist now, except in the case
of spirits, for an accurate computation. This is frankly confessed by
the Treasury officials. They base their published figures on certain
arbitrary methods of calculation which have never been submitted to any
public inquiry, and which, as they admit, contain an element of
guesswork. The matter is an exceedingly important one to Ireland,
because ever since 1870 an increasingly heavy deduction has been made by
the Treasury from her "collected" revenue, and her "true" revenue has
proportionately diminished. Part of this deduction is no doubt due to
the fact that her exports of tobacco and liquor have, in recent times,
much exceeded her imports, but the margin for error is nevertheless
large. Mr. Gladstone, in framing his Home Rule Bill of 1886, was so
sensible of the inherent difficulties of the calculation that, while
retaining Customs and Excise under Imperial control, he credited to the
Irish Exchequer the whole of the revenue collected within Ireland. On
the balance of Anglo-Irish exchange in dutiable articles, as roughly
estimated at that time, this provision mea