THE LATEST HUSH GRIEVANCE.
IF any politician needs evidence of the injury worked by the Irish Viceroyalty he has only to read the mighty Blue- Book just issued on Irish taxation. There he will find Ireland treated by members of Parliament on both sidesof the House, by officials, and farmers—men like the O'Donoghue and men like Sir S. Northcote, as if it were a separate country, with separate interests, circumstances, and aspirations. Imagine any other division of the Empire, Cornwall or Yorkshire, Wales or Scot- land, pleading that it ought not to bear an equal share of imperial taxation, that its circumstances were exceptional, that it was guaranteed by treaty right against the action of the common Estates. Yet that is the claim put forward by Ireland, and so far admitted by the Government that they submitted to an inquiry into the allegation. The Committee, which includes Colonel Dunne and Sir Frederick Heygate, Lord Stanley and Mr. Hennessy, Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Lowe, has not presented its report, but it has presented the evidence taken and the reports submitted for approval by various members of its own body—Colonel Dunne, Sir Stafford Northcote, the O'Donoghue, and others. Of these the report of the chairman, Colonel Dunne, on the one side, and Sir Stafford Northcote on the other, are by far the best, and the two together present as exhaustive a view of the question as it is possible to obtain when men are at variance as to the fundamental axiom of the argument. Irishmen are not yet agreed, and consequently Irish and Englishmen are not likely to agree, whether the Union is to be regarded as a permanent treaty between two independent States, or as a treaty having for its object the extinction of the need for treaties between them. That question lies at the root of the matter, and though Englishmen will be apt to consider it settled for at least the last half century, Irishmen are by no means universally of the same opinion. Colonel Dunne, for example, holds that if the Union let can be modified Ireland lies at the mercy of the British majority, quite forgetting that the object of Union was to raise Ireland out of a position of dependence into an integral part of the Empire, with full share in proportion to its population of representation and power. As the gist of the Irish assertion is that Ireland under the Act of Union ought to contribute to Imperial burdens only in the proportion of two to fifteen, it is hard to perceive how, till this question is settled, any conclusion whatever can be arrived at or even attempted. The point is either the construction of a Treaty or the incidence of certain Acts of Parliament, and if there be no treaty cadit qucestio, for no man contends that Parliament has deliberately raised, the taxation of Ireland higher than that of the other sections of the united kingdom. If there is such a treaty valid for all time then it is just possible that the separate Irish debt was unlawfully in6reased ; Colonel Dunne affirms that propositiou roundly, and Sir Stafford Northcote, though he tries to explain it away, admits that Ireland borrowed some 30,000,0001. more than she ought to have done to meet the expenses of the Revolutionary War. He affirms indeed, and justly, that this money was raised because Ireland paid less than her proportion of taxes, but that only pushes the question one step further back. If Parliament could legally raise the full proportion of taxes and could not legally add to the separate debt, then Parliament cannot now take advantage of its own wrong, and Ireland has actually one genuine and serious grievance. As a matter of fact of course we cannot accept any such conclu- sion. Whether the 'Union was a treaty between two coun- tries, or substantially an act by which each surrendered all separate rights, one point seems sufficiently established. The framers of the -Union contemplated thorough amalgamation, a real and perfect unity under certain contingencies which occurred in 1817, which were declared by the United Parlia- ment to have occurred, which the Irish members admitted to have occurred, and which have been held to have occurred ever since. Parliament since 1817 has legislated for Great Britain and Ireland as if they were one undivided country, passing it is true local acts as it passes local acts for Scotland or Lancashire, Norfolk or Sheffield, but localizing them only out of the plenitude of its power. To argue at this time of day that the Empire is not an unit, or, in other words, that Parliament is restricted by laws other than those of nature is to restore the Heptarchy. Irishmen retain of course their right of revolution for adequate cause, as the Scotch also retain it, or the East Anglians, or the population of Peckham Rye, but to talk of rights guaranteed by a treaty which Irishmen have set aside a hundred times is a mere anachronism. Even O'Connell while supporting Repeal allowed that it must be effected either by revolution or by Act of Parliament, thus assigning to the United Legislature the most absolute conceivable power over both the kingdoms. An argument therefore which starts with discussing the very existence of the Empire may be in- teresting as a quaint speculation, but it can have no meaning in politics. The United Kingdom must for political purposes be taken as in existence, and being in existence with one debt, one revenue, and one supreme authority, its sections cannot by possibility owe money to one another. If they ever did the debt has been long since condoned by mutual arrangements intended to extinguish the existence of debt in the common right of property. John may owe money to Mary, and if John and Mary are wed the amount owed by the bridegroom may be matter of conversation, but it cannot by any contrivance be made matter of legal action. There was no settlement. The very basis of the arrangement of 1817 was that there should be no settlement, that liabilities and property should be held in common, and the Irish by assenting to those arrangements put themselves out of court. They must now if they plead injustice show that they are unfairly taxed as a section of the Empire, and this also they have essayed to do. They must, we think, be considered to have most signally failed. So far from Ireland paying national taxes fixed at a higher ratio than those of the rest of the United Kingdom, she actually pays less, Lord Ripon having relieved her of the assessed taxes upon the ground not that she was Ireland, but that they cost more to collect than they yielded to the Exchequer. For the rest she pays exactly the same under the several schedules and in the same manner, the object of successive Chancellors of the Exchequer having been to equalize all taxation between the two divisions. The Irish members do not dispute this point, but they argue with characteristic inability to perceive the meaning of words that equality is not equality, inasmuch as Ireland is a poorer country than England. More than one-half the evidence taken was addressed to this point, witness after witness alleging that the taxation was unequal because from bad agriculture and other causes the capital of Ireland was proportionately so much less ,than that of England. That is true, and so also is it true that a tax of 2d. per lb. on sugar falls on the man with seven shillings a week twice as heavily as it falls on the than with fourteen. But then so does the price of the sugar. The Irish might as well ask that all prices should vary in the ratio of purchasers' incomes, as ask that indirect taxation should vary in the proportion of wealth. It is no doubt much more expensive to an average Irishman to buy whisky at 2s. 6d. a quart than to an average Englishman, but the only way to redress the balance is to do as is done with untaxed articles, viz., to consume less. Otherwise the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be compelled to establish a differential duty on everything, arranged every year by a new assessment, to tax sugar at one rate in Dorset and at another in Yorkshire, to grant drawbacks in Bristol on goods going to Ireland and exact new duties in Cork on the same goods going to Bristol. Indeed even this would not meet the justice of the case, for Smith of Bristol might be a poor man and Jones of Bristol a rich one, and the duty paid by the grocer must be made to depend on the average probability of his selling to so many Joneses and Smiths. To say, as Mr. Edward Senior says, that Ireland is an island, and therefore separable, is nothing to the purpose. So is Skye, so is the Isle of Wight, so is all Scotland north of the Caledonian Canal, so is any part of Englund across which it is physically possible to draw a cordon of custom-houses.• The argument from poverty is an excellent one when the plea is to raise a revenue by direct taxation alone,—though even in that case some direct taxes must fall on unequal means, —but it has no meaning as a plea for arranging an addition to price so as to meet the varying needs of individuals possessed of unequal wealth. Adjustment in that case, even if theoretically fair,—which we doubt just as we doubt whether shopmen should sell the same boots for prices varying with the customers' means,—would be physically impossible. No brain could devise the means of making the tax vary with sufficient sensitiveness, no revenue meet the resulting expenses of collection.
But, continue the Irish advocates, our taxation has increased much faster than yours. "In the ten years," says Colonel Dunne, "between 1852 and 1862 the taxation of England increased by 20 per cent. and that of Ireland by 53.6 per cent." Very likely, but as the increase still did not equalize Irish taxes with those of England, that only proves that Ireland owes us the profit produced by her previous ex- emptions. But our local taxation is higher? That is greatly to be deplored, but as the principle of assessment is the same the fact only proves that Ireland, like Lancashire now and Shoreditch always, has very heavy local demands. The weight of the local taxation may make the expediency of uniformity question- able, no imperial necessity compelling us to maintain the poor in Scotland and England by the same machinery, but it does not prove its injustice. Finally, it is said, we receive less than you do back again out of the revenue. That is simply an assertion, even if true, that Ireland offers less favourable terms to Government than other portions of her Majesty's dominions. No conceivable extent of political corruption could prevent her having a Monopoly of supply if she pro- duced the article at cheaper rates, for if Government never gave a contract except to the people of Man, the latter would for their own interest fulfil the contract by buying wherever the article was to be had the cheapest. Napoleon tried to put England in quarantine, as Ireland fancies herself put, and his own Marshals supplied his own indents for boots by whole- sale orders on London. The truth is Ireland is a poor country, which left to its own resources ought to be lightly taxed, but which pays for its share of the trade, colonies, and careers of a very rich one by bearing its share of its partner's taxation. Scotland, under precisely similar circumstances, does exactly the same thing, with this practical difference. When Scotch- men find they have not enough they emigrate, win fortune, and return with their grievance removed. Irishmen ask somebody else to remove it for them. When Ireland has a grievance she pleads that as a separate country she ought to be considered separately from England ; when Scotland has one she pleads that being part and parcel of Britain she will be attended to just as much as Yorkshire. The result of those two systems is shown in the comparative condition of the Lothians and the county of Dublin, the poor land enriched by thrift and expenditure till it bears an unequalled rental, the rich land impoverished by neglect and bad culture till it scarcely pays its taxes. The Irish have many remediable grievances which we have been among the first to acknowledge, but unfair taxation is certainly not proved to be among them.
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