or example, the small farmers. That is a kind of
measure which the farmers would, if necessary, willingly agree to, in
order to balance the accounts of a financially independent Ireland, but
it is not the kind of measure they would care about when their national
finance was dictated by Great Britain. If one cared to make a
dialectical point, one could add that a common argument against Home
Rule is a fear of oppressive taxation of the rich or oppressive taxation
of North-East Ulster, at the hands of an Irish Parliament, through high
direct imposts. The fear is one of those which scarcely need serious
discussion. If Irish statesmen were as black as their most industrious
traducers paint them, they could not by any ingenuity invent any new
direct tax which would not hit all the provinces equally, saving perhaps
a tax on pasture ranches, which would hit North-East Ulster least; while
super-taxes on the exceptionally rich, if they were worth the trouble of
collecting, would drive wealth out of a poor country at the very moment
when it was most urgently necessary to gain the confidence of investors
and the few wealthy residents.

With regard to (c), Mr. Gladstone's various devices for obtaining from
Ireland a contribution to Imperial services possess now only a
melancholy and academical interest, because, without an elaborate
manipulation of the accounts, so as to disguise their true significance,
no such contribution can possibly be obtained. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone
provided for an annual payment from Ireland, fixed in amount for thirty
years; in 1893 for the contribution of a _quota_--namely, one-third--of
her "true" annual revenue from Imperial taxes, to run for six years, and
then to be revised. His calculations were conditioned to some extent by
_(d),_ the part payment from the Imperial purse of the cost of Irish
Police, coupled, of course, with continued Imperial control of that
Police, pending its replacement by a new civil force. It is easy enough
in ways like this to show a balance in Ireland's favour, and, at the
same time, to cripple the responsibility of the Irish Legislature by
transferring selected services from the Irish to the Imperial side of
the account. We can extend the process to Old Age Pensions, the Land
Commission, and what not. As I have repeatedly urged, this course is
radically unsound. As for the Police, there can be no responsible
government without control of the agents of law and order.

By cred