Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/102

 late Government had refrained from this measure, presumably regarding Ireland as already over-taxed m proportion to her resources, and Mr. Disraeli still objected to the proposal as inequitable. In Ireland it was considered deliberately and contemptuously unfair, and a. storm of resistance arose. As the Tories opposed it it could not be carried without the assistance of the Irish members, and it was thought impossible they could assent to it. But the dependence of Mr. Keogh's confederates on the Treasury and on their ecclesiastical patrons in Ireland was complete, and they believed they could defy popular resistance. On the second reading only one Irish member was absent. Of those present seventy-two voted against the Bill, but thirty-two went into the Government lobby. To me the financial relations of the two countries seemed more shamefully unjust than their political relations, for it is not difficult to believe that when a nation was held down by armed force, as Ireland was at the Union, and compelled to accept an agreement at the point of the bayonet, her pocket was rifled at the close of the performance. The National Debt of England at the Union was sixty times greater than that of Ireland, our only National Debt having been created by money spent by English officials chiefly in the systematic corruption and final purchase of the Irish Parliament. The countries had separate exchequers, but they were amalgamated seventeen years later, and Ireland made responsible for all the National Debt of England by a device almost too shameful for belief. The leaders of Protestant Ascendancy, and O'Connell for half a century after, exposed and denounced the injustice. Yet the system was not remedied, but intensified. At the end of the war with Napoleon, when taxes were reduced, the stronger partner effected a reduction of £100, in her own taxes, for every 20s. reduction conceded to Ireland. The Imperial expenditure was managed on the same principle. It had been demonstrated in Parliament ten years before Mr. Gladstone's Budget that in the naval expenditure for the defence of the Empire, for every pound spent in Ireland six hundred pounds were spent in Great Britain. With such a record it was past human patience to see a gentleman come down with austere countenance to propose as a beneficial measure new duties on