pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we
were not duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons--in
those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom--tore
the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare
his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said:

"But the noble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of
Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly. Ireland, he
says, must contribute to every war, and the Minister won't trust to
interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. _He
must have her purse within his own grasp_. While three hundred men
hold it in Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out of
his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over and lay it at his
feet, and then he will have full and uncontrolled power."

So it came about. Even before the Union Grattan's Parliament had, of its
own free will and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into debt
for the first time to help England against France. But, as Foster
indicated, the Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of
their resources. They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became
a necessary ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland was
swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr
Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen
years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817
her funded debt was increased from £28,541,157 to £112,684,773, an
augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years
following the Union she paid in taxes £78,000,000 as against £31,000,000
in the last fifteen years preceding the Union. After the amalgamation of
the Exchequers in 1817 the case becomes clearer. In 1819-20, for
instance, the revenue contributed by Ireland was £5,256,564, of which