litical and therefore the economic
development of Ireland have been deliberately and forcibly arrested. I
do not say malignantly, because there was no malignant intention. But
the action, if mistaken, was deliberately and consistently sustained.
Much of Irish industrial talent was lost irrevocably before the old
industrial restrictions were removed. There remained the land, an
immense source of potential wealth, if properly developed under a
rational system of agrarian tenure. For the best part of a century after
the Union, the agrarian tenure, dating from the first genuine
colonization of Ireland, when the land was confiscated wholesale and the
peasantry enslaved, was maintained by force of arms. Thirty years ago
(if we date from the Land Act of 1881) we began to change this tenure
into another equally defective, though far more favourable to the
tenant. A little later, but only eight years ago, on a thorough and
systematic scale, we began the parallel policy of Land Purchase. Even
now, having transferred half the land to peasant ownership, and placed
the other half under judicial rents, many of our statesmen are unwilling
to give Ireland the control of its own affairs. On the contrary, step
by step with the economic enfranchisement of the farmers, has gone the
policy of destroying their personal and political independence, and
forcing them to look outside their own country for financial aid, by
spending money upon Ireland which Irishmen have no direct responsibility
for raising. What a travesty of statesmanship! First, having assisted
the farmer to buy his own land, to clap him on the back with "Now, my
fine fellow, you are a free man." In the same breath to tell him that he
is not fit to have a direct voice in the management of his own country's
affairs, and to try and reconcile him to this insult by sapping that
very independence of character which the acquirement of a freehold has
begun to instil in him.

I described in Chapter IX. how a number of patriotic Irishmen, working
both at industrial and agricultural development, have striven to
counteract this fatal tendency, and to persuade their countrymen to rely
on themselves alone. But I venture to repeat what I said then, that
without the bracing discipline of Home Rule, and, above all, of the
financial Home Rule, these efforts are doomed to comparative failure.

It is absolutely necessary to produce an equilibrium between revenue and
expenditure in Ireland, as in