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
£300,000, while in Ireland the corresponding cost is more than
£1,000,000 per annum, showing that the average salaries in the poorer
country are considerably higher than in the richer. Of the £7,500,000
devoted to Irish services, £1,500,000 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