alf, must eventually be brought about
if Ireland is to hold up her head in the face of the world.

The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of public
expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her
persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is
destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials has produced an
unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. No one feels
responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one
in Ireland _is_, in any real sense, responsible. There is no Irish
Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government logically
defensible. The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not
connect their taxes with the expenditure going on around them. On the
contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain as the source
of grants, salaries, pensions.

And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being
financially dependent on Great Britain. After more than a century of
Union finance, after contributing, all told, over three hundred and
twenty millions of money to the Imperial purse over and above
expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and
are a little in debt. As we shall see, when I come to a closer
examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has
been the Old Age Pensions. The application of the British scale,
unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union
encourages. Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far
lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and
already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was an
unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it has gravely
compromised Home Rule finance.

For acquiescing in this and similar grants, beyond the ascertained
taxable resources of the country; for the general deficiency of public
spirit and matured public opinion in Ireland; for the backwardness of
education, temperance legislation, and other important reforms, the
Irish Parliamentary parties cannot be held responsible. They are
abnormal in their composition and aims, and, beyond a certain limited
point, they are powerless, even if they had the will, to promote Irish
policies. That is the pernicious result of an unsatisfied claim for
self-government. It is the same everywhere else. While an agitation for
self-government lasts, a country is stagnant, retrograde, or, l