facts and the choice, Ireland would not
hesitate, but she must know the facts and understand the nature of the
choice.

II.

THE DEFICIT.

Let us deal at once with the question of the deficit. It is
inconceivable surely that the existence of a deficit should be used as
an argument against financial independence, much less as an argument
against Home Rule in general. Will anyone be found to say that an island
with a fertile soil, several nourishing industries, and a clever
population of four and a half millions, is to be regarded, whatever its
past history, as incapable of supporting a Government of its own out of
its own resources? Let nobody be tempted by the fallacy that, given
time, Ireland will regain financial stability under the fiscal Union,
and at a later stage, perhaps, be more fitted to bear the burden of
fiscal independence. The supposition is chimerical. The present system,
besides being radically vicious in a purely scientific sense, undermines
the moral power of Ireland to secure her own regeneration.

It is now 1911. The deficit, once a large surplus, came into being only
two years ago. It was the direct and inevitable result of a fiscal Union
against which Ireland has for generations unceasingly protested, and it
was a result actually foretold in 1896 by Lord Welby and his two
colleagues. It could have been averted, as they pointed out, only by a
form of Home Rule giving financial independence to Ireland. But the
warning was older than the Report of the Financial Relations Commission.
Mr. Gladstone told the House of Commons in 1886, when introducing his
Home Rule Bill, that no limit could be set to Irish expenditure under
the Union; he and Sir William Harcourt repeated the warning in 1893, and
if the reader will study the debates on the financial clauses of the
Bill of 1893,[136] he will find pages of bitter diatribe founded on the
small net contribution from Ireland to Imperial services for which the
revised financial scheme provided. Ireland, said the Opposition, was to
make money out of Great Britain, and escape her fair proportion of
Imperial charges. Mr. Chamberlain showed that, with allowance for
payment from the Imperial purse of part of the cost of Irish police, the
net initial contribution was about one-fortieth, and asked: "Is Irish
patriotism a plant of such sickly growth that it has to be watered with
British gold?" The taunt was as pointless as it was cruel, for although
the Union h