We think ourselves called upon to protest against a measure so ruinous to our country, and to place the responsibility of its consequences upon such persons as have brought it forward and supported it.'[157] The Treaty of Union left Ireland, financially, still a separate country, paying a fixed contribution for the uses of the State. The great war with France soon broke out again; England was involved with Napoleon in a life-and-death struggle; her fiscal resources were strained to the utmost; her expenditure became prodigious for a series of years. In these circumstances, the debt of Ireland rose from L28,000,000 to upwards of L112,000,000; and her taxation from about L2,500,000 to about L4,500,000; while the debt of Great Britain advanced from some L446,000,000 to some L737,000,000, and her taxation from some L24,000,000 to L54,000,000; the taxation of Ireland being by the head about L1 in 1816, that of Great Britain being about L5, the figures sixteen years before being 10_s._ and L3. The immense increase in the debt of Ireland, much greater in proportion than that of Great Britain, was certainly due to a large extent to the fact--and this was frankly admitted by Grattan--that the poorer country could not keep pace with the richer in the gigantic charges of the war; the case, it has justly been remarked, may be compared to a case of this kind: 'If one man, A, who has been living at the rate of L100 per annum, arranges to keep house with another man, B, who has for some time been living at the rate of L700 per annum, and to spend L1 for every L7 which B spends, then so long as B continues to live at the same rate as before, the expenses of A will not be increased. But if B begins to live at the rate of L2100 a year, A will have to spend L300 a year, and if his means are not sufficient for this, he must become bankrupt.'[158] Allowing, nevertheless, for all this, it is not the less certain that the calculations of Pitt and Castlereagh were utterly falsified by the event, and that the warnings of Foster, Grattan, and other well-informed Irishmen, besides the protests made in the Irish Parliament, were verified to the fullest extent; as has been remarked by a distinguished English expert, 'The calculations of Mr. Pitt and Lord Castlereagh, the ministers who promoted the Union, and who declared that Ireland would be able to pay, and ought to pay, two-seventeenths of the joint expenses of the United Kingdom, turned out to be mistaken, and the opinions of Mr. Grattan, Mr. Foster, and other Irish members, who denied that she would be able to contribute so large a proportion, are proved by the event to have been well founded.'[159]