is overtaxed was rebutted
by the late Unionist Government was that the balance is restored by the
amount of money spent in the administration of that country. When the
complaint is heard that she is contributing at this day no less a sum
than,L9,750,000 to revenue, the answer is made that she has no grievance
since the cost of Irish services amounts to more than L7,500,000, the
balance, a paltry two and a quarter millions, forming her Imperial
contribution.

Ireland is being bled to death, and to her complaints the answer is that
she is being expensively administered. To fleece a poor man of his
pittance and to justify the action by telling him that it is on every
appurtenance of a spendthrift to which he objects that it is being spent
is scarcely to provide a satisfactory justification. The two cases are
exactly parallel, and it is a weak position which has to entrench itself
behind the fact that the cost of government per head is in Ireland
double what it is in England.

The country is against its will saddled with a Viceregal Court, of which
the Lord Lieutenant enjoys a salary twice as great as that of the
President of the United States. The government is conducted by more than
forty boards, only one of which is responsible, through a Minister in
the House of Commons, to the country. Official returns show that
Scotland, with a population slightly larger than that of Ireland,
possesses 942 Government officials as against 2,691 in Ireland. In
Scotland the salaries of these public servants amount to less than
L300,000, while in Ireland the corresponding cost is more than
L1,000,000 per annum, showing that the average salaries in the poorer
country are considerably higher than in the richer. Of the L7,500,000
devoted to Irish services, L1,500,000 goes to the Post Office and
Customs, while one half of the remainder is consumed by the salaries and
pensions of policemen and officials.

To take a single example--the Prison Boards of Scotland and Ireland work
under identical Acts, dating from 1877. It is instructive, therefore,
to compare the conditions of the two. The estimates for the year 1905
were calculated on the assumption that there were 120 fewer prisoners a
day in Irish prisons than in Scotland. In spite of this the cost of the
Irish Board for the last year of which I have seen the figures was
L144,597, and that of the Scottish Board was only L105,588. The ratio
between these figures is as 1.3 to 1, which is in