reland cause any great increase of expense; but
since the great bulk of Irish external trade is with Great Britain,
there will unquestionably be a certain amount of inconvenience and
expense both to Ireland and Great Britain in submitting merchandise on
both sides of the Irish Channel to the passage of a Customs barrier.

That seems to be the limit to which criticism can justly go in the case
of Ireland and Great Britain. That is as far as it goes in the analogous
case of New Zealand and the Australian Commonwealth, where a small
island State has a separate Customs system from that of a large,
wealthy, and populous neighbour of the same race, and with many
identical interests. That is as far as it goes in the parallel case of
little Newfoundland and the great Dominion of Canada. Neither the
Dominion nor the Commonwealth claim that proximity, power, and racial
identity give them the right to control the trade and taxation of their
small independent neighbours, nor does the smallest friction result from
the mutual independence. On the contrary, both the Dominions and the
Commonwealth were founded on that vital principle of a pre-existent
State independence surrendered voluntarily for larger ends. The whole
Empire depends on the principle of local autonomy, and, above all, on
the principle of local financial autonomy. Endeavours in America to
sustain the opposite theory led to disaster. We have for generations
regarded it as perfectly natural that the self-governing Colonies should
have Customs systems of their own, even when they are used for the
purpose of imposing heavy duties on goods coming from the Mother
Country, and we know that that liberty has borne fruit a hundredfold in
affection and loyalty to the Imperial Government. Until the Union of
Great Britain and Ireland it was regarded as equally natural that
Ireland should have control of her own Customs, along with all other
branches of revenue. Even after the Union, although there was no Irish
control over anything Irish, it was recognized, until the fiscal
unification of the two countries in 1817, that Irish conditions required
a separate Customs system, which, in fact, existed until 1826.[140] How
fiscal unification and the subsequent abolition of separate Customs was
brought about I have told in Chapter XI. It is not a pleasant story. To
say the least, the conditions, moral and material, were not such as to
warrant the inference that there is any inherent necessi