The difficulty will extend through all the ramifications of public expenditure. Ireland, through no fault of her own, against her persistent protests, has been retained in a position which is destructive to thrifty instincts. A rain of officials has produced an unhealthy thirst for the profits of officialdom. No one feels responsibility for the money spent for national purposes, because no one in Ireland _is_, in any real sense, responsible. There is no Irish Budget or Irish Exchequer to make a separate Irish Government logically defensible. The people are heavily taxed, but, rightly, they do not connect their taxes with the expenditure going on around them. On the contrary, their mental habit is to look to Great Britain as the source of grants, salaries, pensions. And the worst of it is that they are now at the point of being financially dependent on Great Britain. After more than a century of Union finance, after contributing, all told, over three hundred and twenty millions of money to the Imperial purse over and above expenditure in Ireland, they have now ceased to contribute a penny, and are a little in debt. As we shall see, when I come to a closer examination of finance, the main factor in producing this result has been the Old Age Pensions. The application of the British scale, unmodified, to Ireland is the kind of blunder which the Union encourages. Ireland, where wages and the standard of living are far lower than in England, does not need pensions on so high a scale, and already suffers too much from benevolent paternalism. It was an unavoidable blunder, given a joint financial system, but it has gravely compromised Home Rule finance.