Five Years. Average Average Revenue. Expenditure. L L { 1785-1790 1,246,000 1,247,000 Before Union ---{ 1790-1795 1,340,000 1,646,000 { 1795-1800 2,100,000 4,601,000 { 1801-1806 3,643,000 7,270,000 After Union ---{ 1806-1811 4,885,000 9,061,000 { 1811-1816 5,927,424 13,188,000 The scandal could no longer be overlooked. It was impossible to raise the Irish taxes. Their yield was already showing signs of diminishing. But the Act of Union had provided for the situation which had arisen. One of the sections of the famous Clause 7 enacted that if and when the separate Debts of the two countries should reach the proportion of their respective Imperial contributions, Parliament might, if it thought fit, declare that all future expenses of the United Kingdom should be defrayed indiscriminately by equal taxes imposed on the same articles in both countries, "_subject only to such exemptions and abatements in favour of Ireland as circumstances may appear from time to time to demand_." The framers of this section had anticipated that the English Debt would sink to the level of the Irish Debt. Anglo-Irish finance teems with grim jokes of this sort; but the section was useful in either event. With its terms before them, a Committee sat to consider the state of Ireland, with the result that, by an Act which came into operation on January 5, 1817, the Exchequers, Debts, revenues, and expenditures, but not as yet the taxes, of the two countries were amalgamated. In Professor Oldham's words,[100] "the corpse of Ireland's insolvency was huddled into the grave, and no questions were to be asked." The whole expenditure, Imperial and local, of the United Kingdom, Ireland included, was to be defrayed out of a Consolidated Fund, and the arrangements, therefore, for a separate Irish contribution on a fixed basis to Imperial services were cancelled. Henceforth her Imperial contribution, for anyone who troubled to calculate it, was represented by the excess of revenue raised within Ireland over the expenditure in Ireland. A mutual free trade was also established, not instantaneously, but in the course of a few years. By 1824 all duties, as between Ireland and England, had ceased, and in 1826 the custom-houses ceased to record the transit of goods between England and Ireland, except in articles such as spirits, on which a different excise duty was charged. No statistics were compiled, therefore, of Anglo-Irish trade until ninety years later, when the Irish Department of Agriculture began to prepare returns. Such was the origin of our Customs Union against the world (for, needless to say, those were still the days of high Protection),