On 21 April 1859, two days after parliament had been prorogued in anticipation of a general election, Lord Derby's Conservative government awarded a no-bid contract to the Atlantic Royal Mail Steam Navigation Company for the conveyance of mail and telegraphic messages between Galway and North America.Footnote 1 Until the collapse of the so-called ‘Galway Company’ five years later, the Galway packet-boat contract was the subject of recurrent controversy in the House of Commons, taking a place among such perennial topics of Irish debate as the grant to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, tenant right, and non-denominational education. Historians of British politics and Anglo-Irish relations, to the extent that they have noticed the dispute over the contract at all, have tended to depict it as a straightforward episode of high politics. According to the conventional interpretation, a desire to capture Irish votes during a period of parliamentary factionalism motivated the Conservatives to award a subsidy to the company while in office, and deterred the Liberals from rescinding it unconditionally after they returned to power.Footnote 2 This article, in contrast, maintains that the disagreement over the Galway packet-boat contract cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. Rather, it argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the subsidy. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state. Indeed, the general principles underpinning the decision to support – or withhold – state aid had significant implications for the continued political integration of Ireland into the United Kingdom.
I
‘From the beginning’, Alvin Jackson has recently observed, ‘union appealed primarily…to a sense of individual, sectional, or national advantage, and not generally to any higher ideal’.Footnote 3 The British–Irish Act of Union (1800) was, of course, an economic and fiscal as well as a constitutional arrangement, with its sixth article facilitating the establishment of a free trade zone in the British Isles, and its seventh article providing for the amalgamation of British and Irish finances.Footnote 4 Proponents of the Union had, during the debates on its passage in 1799–1800, courted Irish support by emphasizing the economic benefits that Ireland could expect to realize from the measure, in terms of the introduction of capital and industry, the increase of trade, and the gradual diffusion of British prosperity to the western island.Footnote 5 The association of political integration with economic development, particularly in Belfast and its environs, remained a tenet of Unionist faith into the early twentieth century. Irish nationalists, in contrast, came to identify incorporation with economic decline.Footnote 6 Not surprisingly, historians have contended that the reality was more complex than these politicized assessments allowed, as the Union impacted different sectors of the economy in different ways at different times, with positive as well as negative repercussions.Footnote 7
Curiously, however, few studies have examined the role of politicians and civil servants in formulating Irish economic policy during the first eight decades of the Union.Footnote 8 The absence of scholarly interest in this subject is, perhaps, explicable with reference to the master narrative of the nineteenth-century state. Over the last quarter century, historians have stressed the commitment of late Hanoverian politicians, as well as their early and mid-Victorian successors, to laissez-faire economics. The British preference for a minimal state derived from a providential belief in the divine operation of the market, along with a prudential desire to dismantle – and prevent the subsequent revival of – the expensive and unpopular eighteenth-century war machine.Footnote 9 True, after 1830, successive governments intervened – albeit sporadically and with uneven results – in many aspects of society, and parliament laid the foundations of modern British capitalism by passing bankruptcy, labour, and company legislation.Footnote 10 But politicians also sought to remove the state from the economy through the maintenance of the gold standard, the imposition of free trade, the pursuit of balanced budgets, and the adoption of apparently neutral tax policies.Footnote 11 Thus, the state established society's basic economic mechanisms, and then withdrew. In Ireland, the British commitment to free markets and low public expenditure was demonstrated, with devastating effect, by the official response to the Great Famine.Footnote 12 The upshot was that, to borrow H. C. G. Matthew's oft-quoted dictum, ‘No industrial economy can have existed in which the State played a smaller role than that of the United Kingdom in the 1860s.’Footnote 13
This article does not mount a critique of the scholarly consensus that has crystallized concerning the emergence and operation of the laissez-faire state. Rather, it examines an anomalous area of the mid-Victorian economy, in which government remained an active presence, and which consequently became a locus of contrasting ideas about the responsibility of the Union state for Irish economic development. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the state invested what was, by its restricted standards, a considerable sum of money in privately owned steamship companies, through the provision of subsidies for the conveyance of mail by sea, including delivery to locations as close to London as the Channel Islands and as far from the metropolis as Australia.Footnote 14 By the fiscal year 1859/60, overseas mail contracts committed parliament to an annual outlay of some £977,000 on shipping subsidies.Footnote 15 Such contracts, which had first been offered in the 1830s, contributed little to the United Kingdom's total economic activity – Britain's gross national product was an estimated £668 million in 1861.Footnote 16 But by 1859/60, payments to mail contractors represented a not insignificant 1·4 per cent of total state expenditure, and 2·4 per cent of expenditure exclusive of debt service.Footnote 17 The government, in fact, spent approximately as much on shipping subsidies in that fiscal year as it did on elementary education throughout the United Kingdom.Footnote 18
From the early 1830s to the early 1850s, state intervention in shipping, as in a limited number of other sectors of the economy, was typically justified with reference to ‘market failure’, which in this case meant the inability of private enterprise to deliver a public good of its own accord.Footnote 19 As a parliamentary committee of 1853 had recognized, British predominance in steam shipping was crucial to the commercial and naval ascendancy of the United Kingdom, as well as to the more complete integration of the empire; yet without government assistance the country's merchant marine was unlikely to transition rapidly from sail to steam, because the costs of conversion were high and the benefits to any given company were uncertain.Footnote 20 By mid-century, public subsidies in the form of mail contracts had not only helped to launch such leading shipping lines as Cunard and the Peninsular & Oriental, but also continued to make the difference between profit and loss for these ventures, even after they had matured into major concerns.Footnote 21 At the same time, some politicians and businessmen had grown ambivalent about the contracts, on the grounds that they privileged established companies, deterred competition, and saddled taxpayers with a mounting expense that was only partially defrayed by postal revenue.Footnote 22 The parliamentary committee of 1853, reflecting these anxieties, had issued recommendations intended to regulate the award of overseas mail contracts, by simplifying them, subjecting them to a process of competitive bidding, shortening their duration, and all but discontinuing them along routes where steam shipping had become common.Footnote 23 Successive governments, however, had mostly ignored these permissive guidelines in the ensuing half decade.Footnote 24
II
When the Derby government formally approved the Galway packet-boat contract in April 1859, therefore, attitudes to a well-established practice were changing. The pursuit of a subsidy for the Galway Company had been initiated in 1858 by a pair of unlikely partners, John Orrell Lever and Father Peter Daly. Lever, an English businessman whose family was active in the Manchester textile industry, had diversified his commercial interests in the 1850s by establishing corn mills in Westport, County Mayo. This undertaking, in turn, had encouraged him to develop a regional steam shipping company, which operated between western Ireland and Liverpool.Footnote 25 Daly, a civic-minded but rather worldly parish priest, had already distinguished himself in Galway city as an energetic church builder, a substantial local landlord, and an entrepreneurial politician. By 1850, he had become the chairman of the town commission, a member of the harbour commission, and a director of both the Galway Gas Company and the Midland and Great Western Railway Company.Footnote 26 Daly had set his sights on the establishment of a packet station in Galway at the beginning of the decade, and in 1852 he had unsuccessfully lobbied senior officials in the first Derby administration, including the prime minister, for financial assistance.Footnote 27 In making this initial attempt to obtain public funding, Daly was emulating an earlier generation of municipal leaders, who in the two decades before the Famine had hoped to arrest Galway's economic decline by procuring state aid for harbour improvements.Footnote 28
In May 1858, Lever and Daly launched a campaign to secure government support for the infant Galway Company, which at this point did not even own a steamship.Footnote 29 The following month, the company sent its first vessel, a chartered steamer, to New York.Footnote 30 Their lobbying efforts had already paid a modest dividend by this time, as the Post Office placed a mailbag on board.Footnote 31 Rather fortuitously, only days after the Galway Company's first sailing, prolonged negotiations between the Cunard shipping line and the government of Newfoundland, for mail delivery to that colony, broke down.Footnote 32 Lever adroitly exploited the opportunity when it came to his attention, opening preliminary discussions with Newfoundland in July and incorporating the Galway Company under recently passed limited liability legislation two months later.Footnote 33 By the end of October, one of the company's directors, the Liberal English MP Lord Bury, had successfully negotiated a contract with the government of Newfoundland for monthly mail service to the colony, in return for a subsidy of £13,000 per year, beginning in January 1859. As a condition of the agreement – but in keeping with Lever's original intentions – the Galway Company's vessels were then to continue on to the United States. There was, however, one additional qualification: Newfoundland proposed to contribute only £8,500 for this service, with the remaining expense to be defrayed by the British government.Footnote 34 Given that the sum involved was derisory, and that the Treasury had already agreed to pay a portion of the subsidy during the earlier negotiations between Cunard and Newfoundland, this proved to be an acceptable stipulation. Accordingly, in December 1858 the British government approved the contract for one year.Footnote 35
This initial mail contract was principally useful to the directors of the Galway Company from a public relations perspective. The subsidy itself was far too small to ensure profitability, but once the Treasury had agreed to its terms the company's promoters orchestrated an impressive demonstration of public support throughout the United Kingdom.Footnote 36 During the winter of 1858–9, endorsements of the enterprise emanated from such distinguished and influential bodies as the Belfast, Dublin, and Edinburgh chambers of commerce, and from the Catholic hierarchy of Ireland. Leading business interests in London, including Rothschild's bank and the underwriters of Lloyd's, also voiced their approval, as did their provincial counterparts in Manchester, Birmingham, and other English industrial cities. In Ireland, municipal corporations and town commissions, including local officials in no less than twenty of the thirty-three parliamentary boroughs, joined merchants and bankers in advocating government assistance. Irish proponents of the company noted that, because no steamships travelling between America and Britain called at an Irish port, emigrants from the south and linen from the north had to be transported via Liverpool or Southampton, resulting in unnecessary delays and additional expenses. The same circuitous route also postponed the arrival of the American mail, which often contained remittances sent home by expatriates. The business community in Britain was attracted by the prospect of more rapid communication between the United States and the United Kingdom, as the Galway Company maintained that the favourable location of its Irish terminus, situated at one of the westernmost points of the British Isles, would enable it to reduce transatlantic travel times by two days.Footnote 37
By contrast, overt opposition to a public subsidy was muted within the United Kingdom, though a memorial sent to the Admiralty in December 1858 from the ‘Merchants, Traders, and Inhabitants of the City of Limerick, and of Noblemen, Magistrates, Gentry, Owners and Occupiers of Land of the adjoining Counties’ urged the superior merits of the Shannon ports when compared to Galway.Footnote 38 More significant, however, was the potential disapproval of the government of Canada, which until the mid-twentieth century remained distinct from that of Newfoundland. In November 1858, disappointed by the British government's recent decision to renew Cunard's transatlantic mail contract without soliciting tenders from competitors, the Canadian government sent a ‘remonstrance’ to the under-secretary of state for the colonies, calling the attention of the Colonial Office to the lack of Treasury support for Canadian steam shipping. The colonists hoped that Derby's ministry would grant a mail contract to the Montreal Ocean Steam Shipping Company, in order both to ease the financial burden on Canada (which was already paying a subsidy to the company), and to redirect emigrant and commercial traffic away from the United States and onto the St Lawrence River.Footnote 39 With momentum for a subsidy to the Galway Company building in January 1859, the Montreal Company applied directly to the Treasury for an opportunity to bid on any new contract, none-too-discreetly reminding the British government of Canadian support for its claims. This appeal was followed, in February, by a meeting between representatives of the Montreal Company and Treasury officials, and in March by a formal address to the queen on the subject from both chambers of the Canadian legislature.Footnote 40
By this time, negotiations between the British government and the Galway Company were well underway. Historians have conventionally interpreted the Conservative ministry's decision to award the packet contract as part of a coherent Irish policy, organized by Derby and his chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli. The two senior figures in the minority government, on this analysis, sought to secure the support of the small rump of Irish ‘independent opposition’ MPs – a remnant of the Independent Irish party that had briefly flourished at the beginning of the decade – while also appealing more broadly to Irish Catholics who had become disenchanted with the Liberal party.Footnote 41 Such an assessment, however, conceals the more complex internal dynamics of the Conservative party. Support for the Galway Company originated in Dublin Castle rather than Downing Street, with the viceroy of Ireland, Lord Eglinton, pressing the matter on sceptical colleagues in London. As the head of the Irish government, Eglinton's sensitivity to public opinion in Ireland was perhaps to be expected; but sensitivity did not guarantee receptivity, and the lord lieutenant's political convictions were also germane. A romantic paternalist who had organized the famous faux-medieval tournament of 1839 that bore his name, Eglinton had served as a Protectionist whip during the crisis over Corn Law repeal in 1846, and Derby had twice appointed him to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, in 1852 and again in 1858.Footnote 42 Eglinton's medievalism and protectionism both identified him closely with the high tory wing of the Conservative party.Footnote 43 In the first half of the nineteenth century, high tories had developed a distinctively ‘managerial philosophy’ of government.Footnote 44 Where economic policy was concerned, many of them advocated ‘an active state’ and ‘sought to promote…strategies which recognized Britain's imperial interests’.Footnote 45 In some circumstances, high tories were prepared to support increased public expenditure.Footnote 46 The goal of such intervention was to encourage ‘inter-dependence’ among ‘the various classes and interests’ in the state.Footnote 47
Eglinton's multifarious attempts to aid the Galway Company reflected the activist ethos of high toryism as much as the opportunism of a Conservative politician. The viceroy's intercession with the postmaster general in May 1858 was, apparently, instrumental in obtaining Post Office approval for the transport of mail on the company's maiden voyage across the Atlantic the following month. Eglinton attended the launch of Lever's second vessel in July, publicly extolling the economic benefits of the enterprise, which, he informed an audience of local worthies assembled to receive him at Galway's Railway Hotel, ‘bids fair to open to you a career of great and rapidly increasing commercial prosperity’.Footnote 48 That autumn, the lord lieutenant and his chief secretary, Lord Naas, arranged with the Admiralty to send a commission to Galway to assess the suitability of the harbour as a transatlantic terminus.Footnote 49 They also worked with G. A. Hamilton, financial secretary to the Treasury and MP for Dublin University, to obtain public assistance in anticipation of the commission's proposals.Footnote 50 As expected, the commissioners issued a favourable report in late November, while also recommending substantial alterations to the port for reasons of safety and convenience.Footnote 51 In the meantime, however, cost-conscious officials at the Board of Trade and the Admiralty had refused funding for improvements to Galway Bay when the company's promoters sought them, on the grounds that the necessary infrastructure ought to be provided by private enterprise.Footnote 52
Perhaps in consequence of this impasse, Eglinton adopted a more direct approach at the end of December. When a deputation to the Viceregal Lodge, headed by the lord mayor of Dublin, lobbied the lord lieutenant for ‘a grant to enable Mr. Lever and the promoters of the Packet Station at Galway to carry their enterprise into successful and efficient operation’, Eglinton pounced on the opportunity. In a reply designed to exert pressure on his colleagues in London, the lord lieutenant revealed the extent to which he was prepared to embrace high tory managerialism:
He was still as deeply interested in the success of that great enterprise as any person in Ireland could be, and he never hesitated to urge the question upon the favourable consideration of the Government at the other side. He was personally anxious to promote that great enterprise for the welfare of the country, and would not cease urging upon the Government the utility, and, he would say, the necessity of entertaining the question favourably…He would be glad that a large subsidy would be given at once, as such assistance would be used in the public service.Footnote 53
Having committed himself so explicitly, Eglinton then made a private appeal to Lord Derby, which underscored his willingness to employ public resources for Irish economic development. ‘The establishment of these steamers’, Eglinton impressed upon his chief, ‘opens a prospect of commercial activity in Ireland generally, & the west especially, which no one could have hoped for, & which requires a very small amount of fostering to become prosperous & permanent.’ The entire United Kingdom, he added, would also benefit from a quicker conveyance of mail and telegrams across the Atlantic than was possible from British ports. Addressing the political implications of the subsidy, the viceroy admitted that any gains in Ireland might be offset by losses in Britain. While urging upon the prime minister that ‘there is nothing we could do which would make us so popular in Ireland’, Eglinton also anticipated opposition from ‘the great Cunard interest…& probably all the officials in the Treasury, Post Office, & Admiralty’. He predicted, moreover, ‘the usual disinclination’ in Britain ‘to an Irish “job”’. In sum, the lord lieutenant was more confident of the economic merits of the subsidy than of its political benefits. He concluded his letter by warning that he and Naas would ‘be placed in a disagreeable position’ if the government denied ‘assistance’ to the company.Footnote 54
The ideological distinctiveness of Eglinton's position becomes apparent when the attitudes of Naas, Disraeli, and Derby – the other senior politicians involved in the discussion of a prospective subsidy – are considered. Naas, an Irish Protestant who had already served as chief secretary under Eglinton in 1852, was a central figure in the mid-Victorian Irish Conservative party, distinguishing himself as ‘a shrewd campaign manager…an efficient administrator’ and ‘an excellent electoral strategist’, according to Andrew Shields.Footnote 55 Like the viceroy, the chief secretary regarded the Galway Company sympathetically, and sought to secure public funding for the venture. Yet he did so for different reasons than the lord lieutenant. When calling the matter to Disraeli's attention in early January 1859, Naas cited the advantage of more expeditious communication across the Atlantic, as Eglinton had done in his letter to Derby. Alluding to recent disputes within the cabinet over naval expenditure, the chief secretary also suggested that the Galway Company's vessels, which could be made liable to emergency conscription by the terms of a postal contract, would make an inexpensive addition to the country's naval resources. But, as the Conservative party's principal Irish electioneer, Naas rested his support for a subsidy primarily on political grounds. ‘Nine Tenths of the People of Ireland’, he assured Disraeli, ‘have set their hearts on this project. The Mercantile community at Belfast are to a man in favour of it.’ ‘No subsidized Postal line of steamers’, he continued, ‘now departs from an Irish Port and it would be impossible to overestimate the political advantage that must accrue to a Govt. who would grant a sufft. sum to establish so important an undertaking.’Footnote 56 Notably missing from the chief secretary's analysis was any reference to the considerations of Irish economic development that so animated Eglinton.
Judging by the absence of comment in Disraeli's surviving correspondence, the chancellor of the Exchequer seems to have received Naas's proposal coolly. In the 1850s, Disraeli was intent upon pursuing a basically Peelite fiscal policy, predicated on low taxation and balanced budgets, which in turn necessitated modest levels of public expenditure.Footnote 57 Though desirous of Irish political support, he preferred to cultivate it through the relatively inexpensive dispensation of Irish patronage to Catholics and moderate Protestants.Footnote 58 The chancellor's lack of enthusiasm for a subsidy may be inferred from his insistence that the contract, when finally offered, contain a novel clause, which made the arrangement between the Galway Company and the government explicitly dependent upon the approval of the House of Commons.Footnote 59 In the early 1860s, when the subsidy became the subject of political controversy, Disraeli took little part in the parliamentary debates, and during one heated discussion an observer noted that the matter evidently embarrassed him.Footnote 60 When Disraeli did essay an extended defence of the contract, moreover, he emphasized the problem of market failure. ‘Philosophers and politicians’, he claimed in the Commons, ‘had long recognized’ the ‘importance’ of steam service between Ireland and America, while ‘merchants and traders had asserted that it was an object of the first necessity’. But when Conservative ministers sought to discover ‘whether there was any prospect of private enterprise, or private capital, unassisted and unsanctioned by the Government, taking it up…they learnt from all quarters that such supposition was quite illusory’. In this respect, Ireland was no different than England, where ‘for a long period of years’ the Treasury had subsidized ‘considerable and extensive services…to a very large amount’.Footnote 61 Such an explanation enabled Disraeli to justify the contract within the parameters set by classical political economy.
Initially, Derby was also ambivalent about the possibility of a subsidy. The prime minister's economic thought has been variously and rather contradictorily described, but Angus Hawkins has suggested that his knowledge of political economy was not deep, and that his whig education encouraged him to subordinate economic policy to the interests of his party.Footnote 62 Derby's decision to award a contract to the Galway Company, certainly, owed much to political calculation. He evinced little inclination to aid the company in the second half of 1858. When, in August, a deputation from Galway led by Daly and Lever waited on the prime minister to request a grant from the government for alterations to the port, Derby gave it a tepid reception. Daly's attempt to portray the company as a ‘national enterprise’, for instance, prompted a rejoinder from the premier, who described it as ‘a commercial speculation’. The deputation left London empty-handed.Footnote 63 Even Eglinton's entreaty at the close of the year, though it softened Derby, failed to convince him. ‘My impression’, he remarked in a letter to Disraeli, sent at the beginning of 1859 ‘is, if we give assistance, as I think we ought, it had better be done in the shape of permanent improvement of the Harbour (which will greatly benefit the Company) than in a direct subsidy to an amount far exceeding the value of the service rendered.’Footnote 64 Yet the government took no action for another seven weeks.
The result of the Galway city by-election of February 1859 was what ultimately changed Derby's attitude. At the beginning of the parliamentary session, the House of Commons had issued a new writ for a vacant seat in the borough, which Lever, with characteristic opportunism, decided to contest. Returned unopposed in the middle of the month, the new MP succinctly summarized his politics during his victory speech. ‘I am for the Packet Station’, he informed the enthusiastic audience that had gathered at the town's court house for the occasion, ‘and I hope to give my support to any Government that is ready to give us the Packet Station; and I do not expect to support that Government that will not do this justice to Galway, and to the British Empire (cheers)’.Footnote 65 Ten days later, Derby instructed the Treasury to negotiate a packet contract with the Galway Company.Footnote 66 By 21 April, the government had approved a seven-year subsidy for fortnightly mail and telegraphic service between Galway, Newfoundland, and the United States, commencing in June 1860, at the cost of £78,000 per annum. The prime minister authorized the arrangement against the recommendation of his own postmaster general, and without consulting the Admiralty, which was nominally responsible for all overseas mail contracts.Footnote 67 By treating it as an extension of the Galway Company's earlier agreement with the government of Newfoundland, Derby was able to circumvent the guidelines issued by the committee of 1853, which had endorsed open competition for new postal subsidies.Footnote 68
The contract was concluded in a rapidly changing political environment. On 1 April, the Liberal opposition in the House of Commons had defeated the second reading of the administration's reform bill, and ministers had announced the dissolution of parliament a few days later.Footnote 69 The engagement with the Galway Company was thus completed while politicians were in the midst of campaign preparations. Conservative candidates enjoyed a strong showing in Ireland at the ensuing general election, winning 55 of the 105 Irish seats, including one in Galway city, which again returned Lever.Footnote 70 But the fractious Liberal party – though composed of whig, Liberal, Radical, and Peelite elements that had found cohesive action difficult during the 1850s – secured a comfortable overall majority.Footnote 71
III
The ink on the Galway contract was scarcely dry when, in June 1859, the Liberal party reunited in order to turn out the Conservative government. Lord Palmerston succeeded Derby as prime minister, and William Gladstone replaced Disraeli as the chancellor of the Exchequer. The new administration's relationship with the thirty-one Irish Catholic MPs was fraught from the beginning, as the ministry's support for Italian nationalism set it in opposition to Irish Catholic opinion, which sympathized with the beleaguered Papal States.Footnote 72 Against this backdrop of strained relations, Gladstone's chancellorship had a significant impact on the fortunes of the Galway Company. His approach to public finance, though familiar to historians, must consequently be reviewed at some length. Gladstone had served with distinction as chancellor in the Aberdeen coalition half a decade earlier, and by 1859 he possessed a clear and coherent set of fiscal principles, developed under the tutelage of Sir Robert Peel, which centred on low taxation, balanced budgets, and minimal state expenditure. These were, it will be recalled, also tenets of Disraeli's financial creed, but Gladstone embraced them with a moral fervour that his rival lacked. In addition – and here Gladstone differed from Disraeli – the new chancellor believed in the importance of a disinterested state, which appeared to place the well-being of the national community over the sectional interests of the various groups within it. This commitment entailed the implementation of revenue and spending policies that seemed to be neutral, because they did not explicitly privilege any of the special interests within the United Kingdom. Finally, while Disraeli considered the chancellor's primary responsibility to be the provision of ways and means for other departments of government, Gladstone envisaged the chancellor as the guardian of the public purse. With this elevated conception of the office, he sought not only to eliminate bureaucratic waste and corruption, but also to enhance the chancellor's role in policy-making, in order to restrain expenditure whenever possible.Footnote 73
Gladstone consistently denied any particular hostility to the Galway contract, and his lack of enthusiasm for the Galway Company's subsidy was indeed symptomatic of his larger reservations about public support for private enterprise. In 1853, during his first term as chancellor, Gladstone had been instrumental in the appointment of the parliamentary committee on contract packets, which as noted above had sought unsuccessfully to regulate the award of postal subsidies.Footnote 74 His attention had been recalled to the subject during a desultory discussion of the impending agreement with the Galway Company in early April 1859, at which time he suggested that the House of Commons ought to review the contract before the government approved it.Footnote 75 Almost his first act after resuming the chancellorship was to establish a select committee on overseas mail and telegraphic contracts, with the intention of examining the entire subsidy system. In justifying the appointment of the committee in July, Gladstone revealed that packet contracts contravened his core fiscal principles. Not only did they represent a non-remunerative, and possibly unnecessary, outlay, but they also undermined the state's claim of neutrality, by obliging the government to favour certain interest groups at the expense of others. Gladstone disclaimed any specific desire to void the Galway contract when moving for the committee, but he acknowledged that it would come under review.Footnote 76 Given that Disraeli had included language subjecting the subsidy to the approval of the House of Commons, which had not yet been granted – and in the context of Gladstone's guarded remarks on the agreement in April – supporters of the subsidy suddenly began to perceive its vulnerability. Following the chancellor's announcement, a handful of Irish MPs expressed concerns that his covert object in constituting the committee was to annul the contract.Footnote 77 In Ireland, the Conservative and nationalist press elaborated and amplified these apprehensions.Footnote 78 This conspiratorial interpretation of Gladstone's behaviour was unjustified, as the committee had a broad remit. On the basis of its findings, the government subjected mail contracts to closer Treasury and parliamentary supervision, reaffirmed the principle of open competition when soliciting tenders, and sought to reduce or discontinue subsidies in busy sea lanes, where steam shipping was self-supporting.Footnote 79
At the same time, however, the appointment of the committee had a decidedly adverse effect on the prospects of the Galway Company, which the chancellor did nothing to mitigate. Until the committee completed its inquiry, ministers refused to submit the packet-boat contract to the Commons, or to promise that they would honour it.Footnote 80 Unfortunately for the directors and shareholders of the company, the committee sat over two parliamentary sessions, issuing four reports in the course of twelve months. Though it ultimately declined to offer an opinion on the Galway contract, its prolonged deliberations ensured that the government did not ask the House of Commons to sanction the subsidy until August 1860, nearly two months after the company was obliged, by the terms of the agreement, to commence sailings.Footnote 81 In the meantime, the Galway Company had been the focus of two of the committee's reports, in which Lever, the founder of the enterprise, had appeared in a decidedly unflattering light. The parliamentary investigation disclosed unsavoury political lobbying and sharp business practices, which Lever's evasive and occasionally misleading answers before the committee failed to conceal.Footnote 82
As a result of the protracted uncertainty surrounding the contract, the company had difficulty raising the capital needed for the construction of new ships, which it was obligated to supply by the terms of its agreement. It also experienced trouble meeting the operating costs of the service when it had to run in the absence of the subsidy.Footnote 83 The increasingly desperate board of directors attempted, in September 1859, to sell the contract to the rival Montreal Company, but Gladstone quashed its transfer with the support of the Peelite colonial secretary, the duke of Newcastle, on the grounds that the government could take no action until the committee had completed its inquiry.Footnote 84 Ministers rejected a second request to reassign the contract, made by the Canadian government with the consent of the Galway Company, in July 1860. With Gladstone absent from the decisive cabinet on account of illness, the Peelite duke of Argyll, who was temporarily serving as postmaster general, appears to have led the opposition to the proposal. A forceful but not especially subtle economic thinker, Argyll made little secret of his desire to void ‘one of the most monstrous engagements ever made’ by the state. If the Canadians were permitted to assume the subsidy, he tellingly predicted in a letter to Gladstone, ‘they will be strong enough to carry out the terms of the contract & there will be no hope of failure’.Footnote 85 Thereafter, Canadian opinion favoured the cancellation of the contract rather than its transfer.Footnote 86
Under unpropitious circumstances, the Galway Company's board sought to raise capital by appealing to the patriotic sensibilities of Irish investors. In August 1859, three of the company's five Irish directors helped to establish a committee of Irish shareholders, which worked to publicize the merits of the enterprise.Footnote 87 Thus, while the business was registered in England and English members initially predominated on its board, it enjoyed an influx of Irish investment between September 1859 and August 1860, at a time when its prospects were growing increasingly dim.Footnote 88 Although precise figures relating to the extent of Irish investment in the enterprise remain elusive, the chairman of the Irish committee, Denis Kirwan, estimated in June 1860 that 1,749 Irish shareholders had already purchased 17,500 shares valued at £10 each. The company had allotted about £451,000 in stock by August, so Irish investment accounted for no less than 39 per cent of its nominal capital value.Footnote 89 The Irish shareholders had sufficient influence to engineer the ouster of the discredited Lever in July, as part of a general reorganization of the company's leadership completed the following month. Six of the eleven directors on the reconstituted board were Irish, with William Malcomson, an Irish shipping magnate, installed as chair.Footnote 90
Neither the efforts of the restructured board nor the belated approval of the subsidy were enough to rescue the enterprise. In November 1860, the directors successfully applied to the Post Office for a temporary suspension of the contract, and though sailings to America briefly resumed in the spring of 1861 they proved impossible to maintain. In May 1861, the government finally terminated the subsidy, citing non-performance of the service.Footnote 91 The prolonged insecurity of the contract was not the only factor involved in the collapse of the venture. The high executive compensation awarded to Lever and his associates, who appear to have mismanaged the enterprise, contributed to its demise. A dispute between the reconstructed board and the Post Office concerning mail delivery to Newfoundland, after the company's contract with that colony had lapsed, also embittered relations between the directors and the government. Most importantly, design flaws and shoddy construction side-lined three of the four vessels the company built for transatlantic service, ensuring that sailings were erratic and that travel times on the slower ships which the company substituted for its own steamers were longer than permitted by the contract.Footnote 92 But inadequate capital undoubtedly contributed to its failure.
IV
The cancellation of the Galway contract met with widespread condemnation in Ireland, uniting politicians and opinion-makers otherwise separated by party and geography in criticism of the government. The opposition press intimated that the Liberals had annulled the subsidy at the behest of the rival Cunard interest, while even normally sympathetic newspapers lamented the administration's action.Footnote 93 By the end of May, resolutions supporting the renewal of the contract had been approved by public meetings, municipal corporations, and town commissions in such diverse locales as Dublin, Limerick, Mayo, and Armagh. Deputations to the viceroy and the premier, headed respectively by the lord mayors of Dublin and Belfast, requested that the ministry reconsider its decision.Footnote 94 Irish representatives in the House of Commons pressed the government on the subject repeatedly between mid-May and mid-June.Footnote 95 They were led on this issue by William Gregory, Liberal MP for County Galway, and a substantial landlord who resided at Coole Park, Gort.Footnote 96
When making the case for a restoration of the subsidy, Irish commentators devoted much attention to the details of the contract and the unusual circumstances surrounding it, in order to demonstrate that the directors and shareholders had been unfairly treated. Irish lobbying efforts were given added piquancy by the western island's deteriorating economic condition. Ireland had been experiencing unusually bad weather since the spring of 1859, which ended several years of prosperity and triggered the worst agricultural depression of the post-Famine period. In this context, public aid in any form – though not forthcoming – was urgently desired.Footnote 97
Irish advocacy of the subsidy, however, also reflected changing attitudes toward state intervention in the economy. The laissez-faire paradigm embraced by classical political economists, which had been widely influential in Ireland during the 1830s and early 1840s, was permanently discredited there under the combined impact of the Great Famine of the late 1840s and the severe agricultural downturn of the early 1860s.Footnote 98 During the Famine, Isaac Butt, an Irish intellectual and politician who had occupied the Whately chair of political economy at Trinity College Dublin between 1836 and 1841, published a series of pamphlets endorsing a more managerial state. Notwithstanding the Union, Butt distinguished Ireland as a separate economic unit from Britain, and insisted that only an active state, which imposed moderate tariffs, offered financial assistance for industry and agriculture, and adopted policies for the redistribution of underutilized land, could generate the full employment necessary to solve the problem of Irish poverty.Footnote 99 Butt's critique of laissez-faire, and his positive re-evaluation of public expenditure, anticipated attitudes that became prevalent among Irish economists between the mid-1850s and the late 1860s.Footnote 100
Although support for the Galway Company was expressed in the press and at public meetings, Irish members of parliament offered the most sustained justification of the subsidy. Parliamentary proponents of the contract naturally concerned themselves with the company's service record and the Palmerston ministry's conduct; but they also adduced more principled arguments in its favour, all of which implied support for a greater degree of government assistance for Irish economic development. The cornerstone of their case was that the Act of Union had been predicated on a promise of equality between the consenting parties, and that Ireland should consequently share ‘in a community of benefits’ with Britain.Footnote 101 Alluding to recent increases in Irish taxation, initiated by Gladstone in 1853 and continued under successive chancellors thereafter, they complained that British policy-makers were willing to treat Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom for the purpose of raising revenue, but refused to do so when disbursing it.Footnote 102 Such an approach to public finance, they warned, would stimulate nationalist discontent.Footnote 103 Viewed in this light, government economic policy could be regarded as central to the Anglo-Irish relationship, rather than as a matter of pounds and pence. ‘The question’, Lord Leitrim explained in the House of Lords, ‘was whether the people of Ireland were to have any benefit from the Union or not – whether Ireland was to be treated as part of the United Kingdom or as a colony?’Footnote 104
Critics of the ministry's decision also dilated upon the economic benefits of the subsidy. While packet contracts might interfere with free competition between rival concerns in Britain, one Irish Conservative MP claimed, ‘it was impossible to have competing companies in Ireland, because they had not the wealth’. The choice, in other words, lay between a publicly assisted packet station at Galway, and none at all.Footnote 105 Gregory maintained that the indirect effect of government investment in the Galway Company was considerable. The prospect of steam communication between Connaught and America had encouraged the construction of two railroad lines to Galway, intended to link the town to Belfast, and – via Limerick and Cork – to Waterford. In Galway itself, municipal and county authorities had approved rate increases for the improvement of the harbour and the erection of docks. Local worthies had also launched a private subscription to render the port more suitable for large steamships. The government subsidy, moreover, had actually fostered competition between shipping lines in Ireland, as the establishment of the Galway Company had prompted Cunard and the Montreal Company to make Cork and Londonderry, respectively, transatlantic ports of call.Footnote 106 Presumably with such developments in mind, Lord Dunkellin, who sat for Galway city, insisted that the subsidy ‘could not fail’ to ‘encourage…industry and promote…commerce’ in Ireland.Footnote 107 After all, as the independent opposition MP for Dungarvan, J. F. Maguire, observed, ‘one successful enterprise led to another’.Footnote 108 Though the Irish analysis was neither particularly sophisticated nor expressed in the abstract language of the economists, it pointed to a proto-Keynesian appreciation for the economic stimulus generated by state expenditure.
Finally, the defenders of the contract denied that the state characteristically functioned as a neutral referee between competing interests. On the contrary, they cited instances in which the government had forgiven debts owed by public bodies, and refused to enforce the penalties of contracts with other private companies for non-performance.Footnote 109 They also identified occasions on which local economic or electoral considerations appeared to have influenced the conduct of members of parliament.Footnote 110 Such examples were produced primarily to demonstrate that the government's behaviour toward the Galway Company was unusually punitive. But they also raised the broader question, posed by Gregory, of ‘whether, while English enterprise is met with favour, Irish enterprise is [to be] met with every disfavour?’Footnote 111 The implication, of course, was that the state ought to acknowledge its role in the economy, and employ its resources more deliberately in order to foster Irish development.
The groundswell of Irish discontent occurred at a delicate moment for the Palmerston administration, and requests for a renewal of the subsidy divided the cabinet. In April 1861, Gladstone had introduced a budget proposing – for the second time in as many years – to abolish the paper duties. Opposition to their repeal in the House of Lords had scuttled his proposal in 1860, and prospects for the budget of 1861 remained uncertain in mid-May, when the ministry announced the revocation of its agreement with the Galway Company.Footnote 112 The debate on the paper duties commenced at the end of the month, with some parliamentary observers expecting the Irish vote to prove decisive.Footnote 113 Recognizing that a defeat on the budget would imperil the existence of the ministry, Palmerston sought to recalibrate the government's position on the subsidy. ‘We were no Doubt financially right in putting an end to the Galway contract’, he admitted to the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, two days before the debate began, ‘but I fear we shall prove to have been politically wrong as far at least as the House of Commons is concerned.’Footnote 114 On the evening of the crucial division, the prime minister attempted to placate the aggrieved Irish MPs by expressing approval for a transatlantic packet station in Ireland, without committing himself to the Galway Company specifically.Footnote 115 Russell demonstrated similar flexibility on the subject. While privately averring that the agreement with the company ‘should have been annulled last autumn’, publicly the foreign secretary was prepared to distinguish between the Galway contract, which he contended had been properly terminated, and the more general policy of awarding a subsidy for transatlantic steam service from Ireland.Footnote 116 Such guarded gestures of sympathy failed in their immediate purpose, as 73 of the 105 Irish MPs voted against the budget and only 15 supported it, with the remainder absenting themselves from the House.Footnote 117 The ministry barely survived the division, with its small majority made possible by Conservative abstentions.Footnote 118
In the aftermath of this narrow escape, and under continued pressure from a united phalanx of Irish MPs, Palmerston and his whig allies reopened the question of the subsidy. In June 1861, the lord president of the council, Earl Granville, assured the House of Lords that the government was prepared to give ‘a full, fair, and impartial consideration’ to any proposal for a re-establishment of the packet service from Galway to America. More significantly, so did Argyll's replacement as postmaster general, Lord Stanley of Alderley.Footnote 119 Later in the month, the prime minister conceded a select committee to examine the abrogation of the contract, which was chaired by Gregory, the Liberal MP for County Galway.Footnote 120 Gregory's carefully balanced report, adopted by the committee in July, justified the government's decision to end the subsidy, while also suggesting that the Galway Company merited favourable reconsideration because of the long delay in approving the contract.Footnote 121 With the private encouragement of the viceroy, Lord Carlisle, Palmerston seized upon the report to promise that his administration would restore the subsidy if the company's directors could demonstrate an ability to maintain the packet service.Footnote 122 Presumably to pre-empt Peelite resistance, the prime minister pledged the government without the cabinet's consent.Footnote 123
Palmerston and the whigs were more concerned about the political implications of the decision to void the contract than with considerations of public policy. Yet their tractability also brought deeper ideological currents to the surface. As a substantial landlord in western Ireland, Palmerston had accepted government loans in the 1820s and 1830s to improve his estate there, and in the House of Commons he employed the language of aristocratic paternalism to justify the government's volte face:
I think that we ought to look at Ireland in the same manner as a large landed proprietor would look at a portion of his property, the natural resources of which were not fully developed, and with respect to which any moderate and judicious outlay of capital would amply be repaid by the increased value it would give to his estate in general.Footnote 124
Significantly, the prime minister's whig supporters on this occasion – including Russell, Stanley of Alderley, Carlisle, and Granville – hailed from the Foxite wing of the party. Their approach to the contract, while certainly expedient, was also consistent with their political heritage, with its emphasis on responsiveness to public opinion and the constructive potentialities of state intervention, as well as its relative unconcern with the nostrums of classical political economy.Footnote 125
Other sections of the Liberal party proved less placable. Gladstone and his Peelite colleagues remained conspicuously silent on the subject of the subsidy during the debates on the paper duties, though the chancellor of the Exchequer, who had staked his reputation on their repeal, had the most to lose by a defeat on the budget. In June, when Palmerston and the whigs intimated a willingness to reconsider the contract, Gladstone refused to follow suit. Instead, the chancellor made clear that appeals for expenditure based on geography and nationality contravened his ideal of the disinterested and efficient state. Members of parliament who urged a renewal of the contract primarily in order to benefit Ireland, he claimed, ‘treated it…as a matter of distribution of grace and favour’. ‘But such a view’, Gladstone insisted, was ‘perfectly destructive of public administration, and if adopted would open a fountain of political corruption so large and so foul that the corrupt transactions of former times would be eclipsed and forgotten’. ‘We are not’ he cautioned, ‘to regard these contracts as favours conferred on one part of the country or the other, but…the whole question is what service is necessary for the country as a whole, and what is a just remuneration to be given for that service?’Footnote 126 Though the other Peelites said little in public, Argyll was horrified when the prime minister committed the government to a renewal of the subsidy later in the summer, privately complaining that ‘Pam has fairly done us about the Galway contract.’Footnote 127
Gladstone was content to wait on events. When, following a substantial corporate reorganization, the Galway Company's new directors applied for a restoration of the subsidy, the chancellor protested.Footnote 128 The company, he argued in a lengthy minute approved by the cabinet in November 1862, still possessed neither sufficient steamships nor adequate capital to maintain a reliable transatlantic service.Footnote 129 Once again, however, Palmerston outmanoeuvred his Peelite colleague. In February 1863, despite the fact that the directors had not yet addressed the chancellor's concerns, the prime minister announced that his administration would reinstate the contract once the company's vessels were fit for service.Footnote 130 In the event, officials at the Treasury moved more deliberately than the premier, approving the last of the company's four steamships for use only in May, and refusing to renegotiate the conditions of the earlier agreement, in a manner more favourable to the company, in June.Footnote 131 The contract, consequently, was not renewed until July.Footnote 132
In the meantime, Palmerston's declaration of February had provoked opposition from some advanced Liberals and Radicals, demonstrating that the Peelites were not alone in their misgivings about the subsidy. The left wing of the Liberal party, led on this issue by the outspoken Scottish proponent of retrenchment and free trade, William Baxter, had expressed occasional disquiet with the contract earlier in the decade, and ministers had to suppress an unexpected revolt on the back-bench in the course of the session.Footnote 133 The hostility of advanced Liberals and Radicals was given its fullest expression when Baxter moved a resolution condemning the proposed Galway contract in March. Baxter and his sympathizers contested the subsidy, in part, for impeccably orthodox economic reasons. Baxter, for example, maintained that such agreements inhibited open competition and distorted the market.Footnote 134
Antipathy to the contract also derived from an older tradition of radicalism, which endorsed a minimal state because of enduring concerns about government corruption.Footnote 135 Baxter voiced these fears as well, denouncing the agreement between the ministry and the company as ‘a political job’ and warning that its acceptance by parliament ‘might pave the way for practices which might be common in the lobbies of the Capitol at Washington, but which would not be tolerated in the British House of Commons’.Footnote 136 For Sir John Trelawny, Radical MP for Tavistock, the political manoeuvres surrounding the subsidy called to mind ‘parliamentary govt. in the days of Walpole’.Footnote 137 One MP, more cynically, observed that the contract ‘was a job in the sense in which every Government has jobbed heretofore, and every Government will job hereafter; it was a wasteful and indiscreet expenditure of public money for the purpose of making political capital’.Footnote 138 Though Baxter's resolution was defeated, he mustered 46 votes against the subsidy, with only 109 MPs dividing in its favour.Footnote 139 Critics of the agreement, however, need hardly have bothered to oppose it. The restructured Galway Company proved unable to fulfil the requirements of the contract, and in 1864 the directors applied to the government for a suspension of its service. After failing to sell the subsidy or merge with a rival line, the board began to wind up the company in July.Footnote 140 Shareholders lost over £800,000 in the liquidation, with Irish investors having apparently contributed between one sixth and two-fifths of the total capital.Footnote 141
V
In the short term, as other historians have pointed out, the dispute over the Galway contract contributed to the sour relationship between the Palmerston government and the Irish MPs, while facilitating a rapprochement between the Conservatives and Ireland.Footnote 142 But it is also possible to discern a longer-term significance to the episode, which has escaped notice. The controversy helped to clarify attitudes to Irish expenditure in both the Conservative and the Liberal parties. From the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s, the Conservatives under Sir Robert Peel had been generally hostile to government spending on Irish economic development, an aversion that derived partially from Peel's liberal tory ideological commitments, and partially from his experience of Irish governance as chief secretary in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 143 Thereafter, with Peel purged from the party as a result of his support for the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Conservatives had an opportunity to reconsider their approach to economic intervention in Ireland. During the Famine, Lord George Bentinck had famously advocated a loan of £16 million for Irish railroad construction, but the party had been in opposition and the suggestion had failed to gain traction.Footnote 144 Though the short-lived Conservative government of 1852 had evinced little interest in fostering Irish commerce or industry, the award of the Galway contract in 1859 was, as at least one contemporary commentator recognized, consistent with Bentinck's vision of state-aided economic growth in the western island.Footnote 145 Eglinton's death in 1861 removed from the scene the high tory most well-disposed to Irish public expenditure, and the Conservative governments of the 1860s and 1870s did not attempt to repeat the experiment of 1859. This was unsurprising, given the reluctance with which Derby and Disraeli had granted the Galway contract. But another observer, Lord Robert Cecil, proved more receptive to the Irish critique of laissez-faire. In the months following the final suspension of the Galway contract, Cecil argued forcibly, though anonymously, that government ought to disregard the principles of classical economics and adopt a more managerial role in the Irish economy. Some two decades later, as the marquess of Salisbury, he presided over an ambitious project of Irish economic development, with the avowed intention of undermining support for Irish nationalism.Footnote 146
A commitment to increased Irish public expenditure, ironically, represented a point of convergence between late Victorian Conservatives and their nationalist opponents. Isaac Butt, who had criticized laissez-faire at mid-century, launched the home rule movement in the 1870s in part because he believed that British politicians would never adapt UK economic policy to Irish needs.Footnote 147 Butt's formidable successor as leader of the home rule party, Charles Stewart Parnell, similarly favoured a greater degree of state involvement in the economy.Footnote 148 In the 1890s, spurred by the report of a royal commission, which concluded that the Union had resulted in the over-taxation of Ireland, nationalists in the post-Parnell era again pressed for additional public spending.Footnote 149
While the Conservatives moved toward the nationalist position on public expenditure and economic management, the Liberals travelled in the opposite direction. The whigs had offered some limited support for the economic modernization of Ireland before the Famine, primarily by establishing the Irish Board of Works in 1831.Footnote 150 Their commitment to free market economics during the Famine, of course, has been the subject of sustained criticism.Footnote 151 But Foxite indifference to political economy, and sympathy for state intervention, made some whigs potentially amenable to public assistance for Irish enterprise, as their flexibility on the Galway subsidy revealed. Gladstone's preference for a disinterested, minimal state, in contrast, encouraged a more disciplined approach to Irish expenditure, which the rapid collapse of the Galway Company appeared to vindicate. In the aftermath of the company's failure, Gladstone firmly and successfully resisted proposals, emanating from Dublin Castle, for Irish public works grants. ‘Nothing’, he explained to the viceroy in 1864, alluding to the Galway contract, ‘can be more deplorable in my opinion than the effect of the granting system, as it has been known in former times, & as we found it springing up again in 1859 when we took office, in the forms of subsidy & otherwise.’Footnote 152 Gladstone's aversion to Irish public expenditure was shared by advanced Liberals, such as John Bright, who could still refer contemptuously to ‘the Galway packet job’ so late as 1867.Footnote 153
By the end of the decade, following Palmerston's death and Gladstone's appointment as prime minister, Peelite fiscal policy had established its ascendancy within the Liberal party. Gladstonian public finance was flexible enough to accommodate interference with the contractual relationship between Irish landlords and their tenants, as well as loans for Irish public works and land purchase.Footnote 154 But other forms of state aid were granted begrudgingly, if at all. In the early 1870s, for example, whig politicians found Gladstone and the majority of the cabinet successfully obstructing their attempts to smother the nascent home rule movement through the provision of economic assistance in the form of state railway purchase.Footnote 155 During his first and second ministries, Gladstone also sought to contain costs related to the Irish civil service, judiciary, and police.Footnote 156
To the extent that Irish acquiescence in the Union was dependent upon the material benefits that the connection with Britain could deliver, Gladstone's restraining influence unintentionally stimulated Irish nationalism. At the same time, a desire to insulate the British taxpayer from the costs of Irish economic development also encouraged Gladstone himself to regard Irish self-government positively. Urging the favourable consideration of Irish local government upon a reluctant colleague in 1883, Gladstone warned of ‘the pressing & even menacing questions of public works, peasant proprietary, loans to cultivators, emigration, & the like’, which confronted the Liberal government in Ireland, and he cited his ‘desire to get a good Irish buffer placed between the Imperial authority and those numerous wants of Ireland which have always pressed hard upon us, and for which we are in danger of becoming more & more responsible’.Footnote 157 In the final analysis, attitudes toward Irish expenditure were intimately related to the broader constitutional questions that exercised politicians in the United Kingdom after 1870. The controversy surrounding the Galway contract represented the rather modest opening debate in a dispute that continued, with much higher stakes, in the late Victorian era.
