only £1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great
Britain of £3,691,684. For 1829-30 the tribute was £4,156,576.

Let us now inquire how things stood with regard to absenteeism. This had
existed before the Union'; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to
Johnson's "Dictionary" he will find it damned in a definition. But it
was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of
Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs
of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and
more material evidence in those fallen and ravaged mansions which now
constitute the worst slums of our capital city.

One figure may be cited by way of illustration. Before the Union "98
Peers, and a proportionate number of wealthy Commoners" lived in Dublin.
The number of resident Peers in 1825 was twelve. At present, as I learn
from those who read the sixpenny illustrateds, there is one. But when
they abandoned Ireland they did not leave their rents behind. And it was
a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled
between 1790 and 1833. Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr
D'Alton in his "History of the County Dublin," a book quite innocent of
politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not
less than £3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than £4,000,000, an
under-estimate. If we average these figures over the period we find that
during the first thirty years of Union, that is to say during the most
critical phase of the Industrial Revolution, not less than £105,000,000
of Irish capital was "exported" from Ireland to Great Britain through
the channel of absenteeism.

Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute in similar fashion, and
taking the lowest estimates, I am unable to reach a less total than