unds; (3) Payments to Local Taxation Accounts.

In other parts of Return No. 220 will be found the details of
expenditure in these various classes:

(1) The Salaries and Pensions need not detain us long. The principal
item is judicial salaries, L102,000, as compared with L282,000 for
England, which has more than eight times the population of Ireland.
Another item, L20,000 for the Lord-Lieutenant, is double the sum
allotted to any Colonial Governor, even of the Dominion of Canada, which
has nearly twice the population of Ireland. But the extravagance lies,
not in the cash amount, but in the fact that the Irish Lord-Lieutenancy
is, under present conditions, an anomalous institution. No Irishman
would grudge a penny of the sum if the Lord-Lieutenant, like a Colonial
Governor, presided over a responsibly governed Ireland.

(2) Road Improvement and Development Funds. This category is blank for
the year 1910-11. There will be payments for the current year which will
swell the Irish expenditure.

(3) Payments to Local Taxation Accounts, L1,477,500. This raises an
intricate subject, into which I cannot enter in great detail. It is well
known that the whole system of relieving local taxation out of Imperial
taxation needs thorough revision. Meanwhile Ireland, like other parts of
Great Britain, has been allotted at various times a multitude of
different grants under various Acts, but principally under the Local
Government (Ireland) Act, 1898, and the Finance Acts of recent years.

Local Government on the British pattern was, as I have already
described, extended to Ireland only in 1898. The money now raised in
Ireland by Local Taxation is about L4,800,000, exclusive of the Grants
in Aid which we are now considering, and which appear, rightly, on the
national balance-sheet because they come from the common purse.[120]
They are based on different principles, and originated in many different
ways. Some are fixed annual sums, determined either by some arbitrary
standard or (as in the case of the Licence Duty grants and the Customs
and Excise grants[121]) on the Irish proceeds of certain duties in a
year taken as standard. The Estate Duty grants still vary with the total
product of duties in the United Kingdom, and are still allocated on the
proportion settled by Mr. Goschen in 1888--namely, 9 parts to Ireland,
11 to Scotland, and 80 to England.[122] If the proportion were to be
revised now, and, on Mr. Goschen's method, made to c