civil servants wantonly quartered upon her revenue. It would seem, from the above figures, that the 4397 officials already mentioned were all civil servants battening upon moneys provided by the Irish taxpayer; it would seem that, as regards Scotland, all Scottish work was done by 944 persons in North Britain. But, fortunately or unfortunately, the extraordinary comparison suggested by the Commissioners' Report is capable of an explanation undetected by the learned Professor, but supplied by the Secretary to the Treasury in the House of Commons. From this highly-placed minister we learn that the figures (i.e. 4397 officials in Ireland and 944 in Scotland) are not strictly comparable'; also that the figures for Ireland include, inter alia, in addition to Government officials' salaries, the emoluments of a large number of clergymen of the Church of Ireland, paid by the representative body of the Church, to which nothing in the figures for England and Scotland corresponds'; and that under the head of salaries, etc.' are included salaries, annuities, pensions, stipends, fees, wages and perquisites or profits assessable under the rules for charging tax.' He tells us, moreover, that of the 4397 Government officials assessed to income tax in Ireland,' no less than 2527 receive their 'salaries, etc.' from sources other than the Irish votes, and of these 2190 do not receive a penny out of moneys provided by Parliament. This analysis, therefore, leaves only 1870 Irish officials whose salaries are above the income-tax line and are included in Irish Parliamentary expenditure, instead of 4397, as the Professor imagined; so that he will only be able to wreak his reductions and economies upon this lesser figure, if the whirligig of fortune should ever compel him to carry his theories into practice, and we may well be pardoned if we are already sceptical as to the value of his proposals. The foregoing examination, then, discloses the melancholy fact that the only economies suggested in Irish expenditure to meet Irish liabilities by Nationalist financial experts will conduce (a) in regard to Old Age Pensions, to lower and not to raise the standard of living among the aged poor in Ireland; (8) in regard to the Constabulary, merely to transfer the cost from one estimate to another, or to reduce the efficiency of administration; and (y) to cripple the Civil Service of the country if indeed, now that, the necessary corrections have been made in the Professor's figures, anything at all can be saved under this head.

I suggest, therefore, that all these proposals are, for the practical purpose of the reduction of debt, almost wholly illusory; and that, under any Home Rule scheme, Ireland must be saddled

* Professor Kettle and his colleagues in the new University will be included in the next Report of the Commissioners as Irish officials drawing 'salaries, etc., above the income-tax line.'

with a deficit so enormous and so inevitable that nothing but British credit and British cash can extricate her from immediate bankruptcy. I need not stay to argue what moral or material claim Ireland can justly put forward for still further assistance from the taxpayers of Great Britain to enable her to meet her liabilities, for this aspect of the question has already been. exhaustively and most effectively examined by Mr. Edgar Crammond in the October issue of this Review. I will only add that it will take a very long time to persuade the people on this side of St. George's Channel that their own pressing claims upon the British Exchequer are to be indefinitely postponed that is to say, until the pecuniary and political demands of Irish Nationalists are completely satisfied.

Elementary justice to Ireland, then, demands that Home Rule should be resisted on the primary grounds that we have no valid proof that she desires it, that she cannot afford it, and that consequently the concession of it would hamper and delay all her present advances towards contentment and prosperity. The worst enemies of Ireland are those of her own household, who create and foment agitation among those whom they ought to love and cherish, and who are paid their wages for this miserable work not by the people on whose behalf they arrogantly pretend to speak, but out of funds subscribed largely by professed enemies of Great Britain beyond the seas. To these men the evidences of an Ireland growing daily in material happiness and self-reliance are worth nothing; they are only variants of the 'flesh-pot ' argument, and may be treated as negligible. But Great Britain has her duty even to these men, to save them from themselves and their country from the inevitable results of their headstrong machinations. Earlier in this article I indicated my conviction that no ordinary strife will certainly follow in Ireland if a Home Rule Bill be passed; for the loyal minority in Ireland (who, by the way, contrive to be loyal without the bribe of Home Rule to make them so) have a very present fear for the future of their wives and families when the government of Ireland is controlled by a Nationalist Legislature directed by a hierarchy which has, to the profound regret of all men, identified itself with the fortunes of the Home Rule party. The news that they are promised guarantees' that they shall not be down-trodden as a minority moves them to derision. They know what these paper guarantees are worth; for has not Mr. Dillon himself proclaimed (at Salford, November 21, 1911) that he attached no importance to these guarantees at all. He did not believe that artificial guarantees in an Act of Parliament were any real protection'? And when Mr. Redmond makes specious promises about 'respecting the rights of minorities,' the loyal population of Ireland hears but an echo of the same words used when the Local Government Act

was passed in 1898, and notes that (thanks once again to the despotism of the United Irish League) the Unionists of Munster, Leinster and Connaught have only fifteen representatives out of nearly seven hundred members on the County Councils of those. provinces. There will be neither toleration nor respect for the minority in Ireland under Home Rule, of that we may be perfectly sure; for these high-sounding words are as empty of real meaning as is the promise to maintain the supremacy of the Imperial Parliament-a patent imposture upon the credulity of the British people. For what does it mean?-that wherever the Imperial Parliament judges that the Irish Parliament is acting ultra vires, the latter will give way. Does any sane person imagine that an Irish Parliament would do anything of the kind? If so, he must be reminded of Mr. Redmond's article in this Review (October 1892), before the introduction of the second Home Rule Bill: We would expect a clause in the Home Rule Bill to specifically provide an undertaking that, while the Irish Parliament continued in existence, the powers of the Imperial Parliament to legislate for Ireland would never be used'; and of the same gentleman's speech in Parliament on the 14th of February 1893 (after the introduction of the Bill), to the effect that there should be no appeal to the Imperial Parliament on the acts of the Irish Executive. It will be remembered that Mr. Gladstone gave the British Privy Council status to interfere if the Irish Legislature exceeded its powers; but it was pointed out at the time that, even if the Privy Council in London so acted, there was no power short of armed force to enforce its judgment. As Mr. Chamberlain said, 'The weapon of the veto breaks in your hands the very first time you attempt to use it.' If, by granting a Parliament to Ireland a nation' Great Britain grants the whole control of Irish administration to an Irish Executive, she abandons ipso facto her real supremacy. It is futile to imagine that the Imperial Parliament retains any supreme authority whatever over the subordinate institution if, as Mr. Redmond has decreed, it is neither to legislate for Ireland nor to interfere on occasion with the legislation of an Irish Parliament. If, on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone's safeguards -ineffective as they still seem-are to appear in the Bill of 1912, then the old struggle against British interference will begin all over again, and finality' will be as far off as ever.

It cannot be too strongly impressed upon English and Scottish

Cf. Mr. John Redmond, July 18, 1902, at Cork: We have in our hands a weapon recently won . . . of freely elected County Councils and District Councils, who, to-day, form a network of Nationalist organisations all over Ireland.'

We have before us the best chance which Ireland has ever had of tearing up and trampling under foot that infamous Act of Union.' Mr. John Redmond, December 15, 1909.

Liberals, who are inclined to vote for Home Rule in order to get the Irish Question out of the way,' that they cannot have effective safeguards for British supremacy and a complete cessation of Nationalist agitation provided in the same Bill. If they intend, in order to protect the minority in Ireland from the fate of the Protestants in Quebec, to retain supreme control over Irish legislation, they will be for ever encountering Nationalist efforts at Westminster to gain further independent powers, and therefore we shall be no nearer to securing the whole time of the British Parliament for dealing with British affairs. In this matter, I am bound to say, I think that logic rests with the Nationalist party. If Home Rule is to be granted in order that Ireland, for the first time in history, may become a nation, her legislators are bound to try and secure for that nation independence from outside control and full liberty to increase her revenues to equal or surpass her expenditure. From their point of view they are right to seek control of customs and excise, and to demand the power to levy tariffs upon exports and imports if such seem profitable in their eyes. We know that Mr. Redmond stands where Parnell stood,' and Mr. Parnell's attitude. on this question of tariffs was very illuminating. At Wicklow in October 1885 he used these words:

6

I claim this for Ireland, that if the Irish Parliament of the future considers that there are certain industries in Ireland which can be nursed by Protection . . . that Parliament ought to have power to carry out that policy; and I tell English Radicals and English Liberals that it is useless for them to talk of their desire to do justice to Ireland when, with motives of selfishness, they refuse to repair that most manifest injustice of all, the destruction of our manufactures by England in times past.

But, if these powers are to be granted, it is hardly necessary to point out that all effective security for British loans 10 (now amounting to very large sums indeed) is thereby abolished, and that in the matter of commercial treaties international complications of the gravest possible character may easily ensue. Such large powers would, of necessity, include the lesser powers of levying taxation that would fall most hardly upon the mercantile classes who form the bulk of the loyal minority, and yet the British Parliament would have to stand aside in silent disapproval and see that minority suffer.

One further point remains to be touched upon, for I do not propose in this article to refer to the question of the retention or dismissal of the Irish members now in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, nor to the difficulty of deciding what are Imperial and what are Irish affairs: these problems utterly baffled Mr. Gladstone (as he frankly admitted), and they are not more likely to be solved at the hands of lesser men. I want rather

1° Over 230,000,000l. has been advanced by Great Britain in gift and loan to Ireland since the year 1879.

to refer to the tendency exhibited in certain quarters to set up the decrees of the Vatican above the laws of the land, and the consequent intrusion of priests quâ priests upon the secular administration of the country. This is what is meant by the ' religious difficulty' in Ireland, and it is not to be overcome by shirking it. Once again I try to view the problem honestly from the standpoint of our opponents in this matter, and once again I admit the relentless logic of their position. The Roman Catholic Church is the Church of the majority of the Irish people, and to its decrees its congregations are bound to conform. The Roman Church holds itself responsible for the welfare of its flock both in this world and the next, nor does it draw a hard-andfast line between spiritual and worldly or political concerns. Hence the Ne temere' decree, forbidding mixed marriages, which has wrecked and will yet ruin many innocent lives: hence the recent promulgation of a well-known ukase, forbidding ecclesiastics to be sued in the civil courts of the country without episcopal consent, under pain of excommunication for all concerned. It is worth noting that if these writs are to run in Ireland, in conjunction with Mr. Redmond's veto upon Imperial legislation or interference, there can be no exercise of British Parliamentary supremacy of any kind whatever, and there can be no doubt of the parlous position of the minority under such despotic conditions. For the Church of Rome holds every species of Absolutism dear, be it Papal, Kingly, or Popular, and is ready to ally itself with each in turn; the same nature being common, as Aristotle has truly said, to demagogue and courtier. When, then, the democracy demands self-government, and the Church demands from the democracy discipline and obedience, it does not require the eye of a seer to forecast which will be the supreme power in the land. It will certainly not be the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. But those who live in Ireland know full well the tremendous power already wielded by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the priesthood in that country. The Nationalists make infinite use of it; they invite the parish priest to be chairman of every branch of the United Irish League throughout town and country; he constantly presides at branch meetings; he allows collections to be held on behalf of the League outside his chapel gates after High Mass on Sundays; he often makes spirited speeches on its behalf, and he has frequently been known to use his influence to the detriment of those who do not see eye to eye with him in matters political. And he is, I suppose, within (what he considers) his rights in so doing, when we recollect the words of Archbishop Walsh in September 1885 :

As priests, and independent of all human organisations, they have an inalienable and indisputable right to guide their people in this momentous proceeding as in every other proceeding where the interests of Catholicity as well as the interests of Irish nationality are involved.