The Times of Friday publishes a statement from its Parliamentary
correspondent to the effect that the Home Rule Bill has now been drafted and that it is a "reproduc- tion, more or less in skeleton form, of the Home Rule Bill of 1893." The Government's present intentions, we are told, are: (1) That the Irish Customs and Excise shall remain under Imperial control, despite the Report of the Financial Committee which sat last summer. (2) That there shall be a separate Irish Exchequer, into which the revenue collected from Customs and Excise will be paid. (3) That there shall he a very liberal financial subsidy from the Imperial to the Irish Exchequer as well as the acceptance of responsibility for certain Irish charges—Irish Land Purchase being, of course, one of them. (4) That the Irish members shall be reduced to about seventy, which is almost exactly the num- ber to which they ought to be reduced unless the votes of Englishmen are permanently to have much less electoral value than those of Irishmen. (5) That Ireland shall make no contribution to Imperial expenditure or to the National Debt. (6) That the Irish representatives shall be subject to the limitations of an "In-and-Out" clause.
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