Before Mr. Gladstone was converted to Home Rule, Home Rule finance attracted little attention. That eminent statistician, Sir Robert Giffen, made, indeed, in 1885, a singular suggestion to the _Statist_ newspaper, viz., that the Irish landlords should be bought out at the cost of the Imperial Exchequer, and that the rent charge, which would then be payable by the purchasing tenant, should be given to an Irish authority, in lieu of payments from the Exchequer, for the internal administration of Ireland.
Again, Sir Robert wrote an article in the _Nineteenth Century Review_, March, 1886, a few weeks before the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill, to show how unimportant, from a financial point of view, Ireland had become to us, and to suggest the expediency of devising some form of Government under which the special needs and circumstances of that country would receive more and better attention than they did under the existing arrangements. His figures might be, in some instances, doubtful, perhaps even incorrect, but it can hardly be denied that he made good his point. Sir Robert was, we see, greatly in advance, not only of the ordinary Briton, but of financial experts generally, both as regards the land question and also that of the Government of Ireland.
Perhaps the most able thinker and writer on economic questions in the second half of the nineteenth century was the late Mr. Bagehot, and, in proof of the general indifference to Irish questions in England, it is notable that his collected works, ranging over a wide field in politics and literature, contain no paper on the government or condition of Ireland. Yet he had witnessed O’Connell, the famine, the depopulation of Ireland, the Committee on Irish Taxation, and the Fenian outbreak in 1866.
In 1890 Mr. Goschen, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the Conservative Government, moved for a Committee of the House of Commons to consider the financial relations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The Committee was instructed to inquire into the equity of their financial relations in regard to the resources and population of the three kingdoms. It had hitherto been much discussed whether Ireland could be regarded as a separate financial entity from the rest of the kingdom. The Irish Taxation Committee of 1864, of which Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Lowe were prominent members, had refused to admit the principle of such separate entity, and that had been generally the Conservative contention. But, in the reference to the Committee of 1890, the Conservative Government accepted the principle. The Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 were, of course, based upon it. Thus, 1890 marks an important advance in the discussion, and thenceforward, by consent of both parties, the separate “entity” was established.