een carried into law.[150]

I wish to speak with the utmost respect of Lord MacDonnell and the other
patriotic Irishmen who have advocated this kind of financial solution.
There was a time when it might have been good policy for Ireland to
obtain any--even the smallest--financial powers of her own as a lever,
though a very bad lever, for the attainment of more. But we ought now to
make a sound and final settlement, and I do earnestly urge upon all
those who have Irish interests at heart to reject schemes which merely
evade, if they do not actually aggravate, some of the pressing
difficulties of the Irish problem of to-day. The fact that Contract
finance works well in India is _prima facie_ a reason why it should not
work well in Ireland. It does not exist, and it could not be made to
show good results, in any community of white men. If anyone is disposed
to trace a faint analogy--which in any case would be a false
analogy--with the lesser of the two small subsidies given by the
Dominion of Canada in aid of the Provincial administrations,[151] let
him imagine what the moral and practical consequences would be if,
instead of constituting a small fraction of the provincial income, this
subsidy were increased to a lump sum calculated by the Dominion
Government as correct and sufficient for the whole internal government
of the Province. And the pernicious results in a Canadian Province would
be trivial beside the pernicious results in Ireland, where the whole
system of expenditure and revenue needs to be recast; where large
economies are needed, together with additional outlay on education; and
where above all, the sense of national responsibility, deliberately
stifled for centuries, needs to be evoked. Nothing could be more cruel
to Ireland than to give her a fictitious financial freedom, and then to
complain that she did not use it well. No nation could use freedom well
under the Contract system of finance, whether based on a fixed grant or
on revenue derived from Ireland. It is not in human nature to reduce
expenditure unless the reduction is reflected in reduced taxation. Every
official threatened with retrenchment, even in the services under Irish
control and, _a fortiori,_ in the services outside Irish control, would
have a grievance in which the public would sympathize, while resentment
at an unequal fiscal union would be unabated. Irish statesmen, like any
other men in the same position, would be exposed unfairly to t