linen industry, and did not object to Ireland adopting that industry if she would abandon woollens. Later on, we find that the Irish shipping industry was severely hit by an Act excluding Irish shipping from the foreign trade. The glass industry, the silk and glove industries were also penalised. The brewing industry was attacked, not on temperance grounds, but because of competition with English beers.

These shameful incidents in our past history have generally been forgotten by Englishmen ; they are bitterly remembered by Irishmen. Yet curiously enough the recital of these past wrongs is made by Irishmen to serve as an argument for the re-establishment of a political relationship between the two islands which would render possible the repetition of many of the worst of the ancient wrongs. As long as the Union endures, so long is it impossible for England to destroy Irish industries by hostile tariffs; but if Ireland is to have a separate Parliament with a separate fiscal system she must be prepared for the possibility of the exclusion of her products from their nearest and most profitable market. Yet so far are present-day Irish politicians from realising this danger that many of them are now arguing that Ireland's commercial interests can only be safeguarded by the erection of a tariff wall between Great Britain and Ireland. This view is expressed by the two Irishmen who were members of Lord Balfour of Burleigh's Committee. They accepted the principle of imperial preference, but refused to sign the letter to the Prime Minister advocating that principle because no recognition had been made of the special case of Ireland, and they demanded that the same 'fiscal liberty which is at present enjoyed by the self-governing 'Dominions should be extended to Ireland.' This can only mean that the signatories, Mr. John O'Neill and Mr. Richard Hazleton, are of opinion that Ireland ought to be free to exclude British products from the Irish market. But if Ireland is to have this freedom, a reciprocal freedom must be conferred upon Great Britain, and if this island is once more to be ruled by a protectionist spirit-the anti-Irish legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may again be enacted.

It is a pity that Irish politicians of to-day, while feeding the passions of the Irish people by recalling the fiscal wrongs which Ireland suffered in the past, have not taken the trouble to examine the cause of those wrongs. The leaders of Irish

political life in the eighteenth century fully understood both the cause and the remedy. It was the protectionist spirit which led England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to destroy Irish industries, and it was against the measures which resulted from that spirit that Irishmen rebelled. The revolt of the American colonists gave a lead and an opportunity to the Irish colonists. The Irish volunteers were formed, and the demand they put forward was for free trade.' In 1779 Grattan moved a resolution in the Irish Parliament declaring that 'It is by no temporary expedient, but by free trade 'alone, that this nation is now to be saved from impending 'ruin.' This declaration was emphasised by the volunteers, who paraded with two field-pieces bearing on their muzzles the legend Free Trade, or this.'

It must be explained that the phrase 'Free Trade' as then used did not mean freedom from import duties (Irish import duties were relatively low), but freedom for Irishmen to export their produce where they chose, and especially freedom to trade direct with the English plantations. The English manufacturers strongly objected to this last point. They said that Ireland would be getting all the benefit of the British Empire and that England would be bearing the whole cost of imperial defence. Pitt attempted to strike a bargain between these opposing forces, on the basis that Ireland in return for Free Trade with the colonies should make a further contribution to the British Exchequer. But this proposal was not welcomed by either party. Then it was that sprang up the demand for union in order to bring Ireland under the same fiscal system with England, and to compel her to pay for the advantages she would derive from liberty to trade with the British possessions.

A closely similar proposal had already been made by Adam Smith, not only for Ireland but for the Plantations as well. This proposal, outlined a hundred and forty years ago, is one of the most remarkable features of the Wealth of Nations.' It may almost be described as the culmination of Adam Smith's great work. He leads up to it by reviewing the fiscal obstacles to internal trade which existed in many European countries. He shows how some of the provinces of France were subjected to taxation from which others were exempt; how some were treated from the fiscal point of view as parts of France, others as foreign countries; how specific prohibitions

were laid on the export of some commodities from one province to another. With regard to Italy he says:

'The little duchy of Milan is divided into six provinces, in each of which there is a different system of taxation with regard to several different sorts of consumable goods. The still smaller territories of the Duke of Parma are divided into three or four, each of which has, in the same manner, a system of its own.'

In contrast with these and other foreign countries Great Britain possessed the advantage of a uniform system of taxation which removed the necessity for fiscal restrictions upon internal trade, so that 'goods may be carried from one end of 'the kingdom to the other without requiring any permit or 'let-pass, without being subject to question, visit, or examina'tion.' This 'freedom of interior commerce,' Adam Smith argues, 'is perhaps one of the principal causes of the prosperity of Great Britain.' He then presses home his conclusion :

'If the same freedom in consequence of the same uniformity can be extended to Ireland and the Plantations, both the grandeur of the State and the prosperity of every part of the Empire would probably be still greater than at present. . . .

All the invidious restraints which at present oppress the trade of Ireland, the distinction between the enumerated" and "nonenumerated" commodities of America, would be entirely at an end. The countries north of Cape Finisterre would be as open to every part of the produce of America as those south of that Cape are to some parts of that produce at present. The trade between all the different parts of the British Empire would, in consequence of this uniformity in the Custom-house laws, be as free as the coasting trade of Great Britain is at present. The British Empire would thus afford within itself an immense internal market for every part of the produce of all its different provinces.'

But Adam Smith saw clearly enough that his conception of a great British Empire-united by a system of complete internal free trade, and further strengthened by a greatly extended freedom of commerce with foreign countries could only be realised through political union. He saw that it would be necessary to enlarge the British Parliament into the 'States 'General of the British Empire,' and he also saw how that proposal for inter-imperial free trade would be opposed by the private interests of many powerful individuals and the 'confirmed prejudices of great bodies of people.' Nevertheless he asked leave of his readers to indulge in a speculation which 'can at worst be regarded but as a new Utopia, less amusing

certainly, but not more useless and chimerical than the old ' one.'

That great speculation still remains unrealised, except so far as Ireland is concerned. There the anticipations of Adam Smith have been fully justified. The breaking down of the tariff barriers between Great Britain and Ireland, which unfortunately was not completed till a quarter of a century after the Act of Union, has been a moral boon to the greater island, a material boon to the lesser. No Englishman or Scotchman is any longer tempted to suppress the industries of Ireland; her people have reached a level of material prosperity never approached before. The silly fiction latterly put about that England adopted her present fiscal policy, the policy of free imports, regardless of the interests of Ireland, is absolutely without foundation. As it happens, the very earliest pamphlet that Cobden wrote in favour of free trade contained an account of his impressions of the poverty of Ireland ten years previously. It is sufficient to quote what he says of Dublin in 1825: *

The river Liffey intersects the city, and ships of 200 tons may anchor nearly in the heart of Dublin. The small number of shipping betrays their limited commerce. It is melancholy to see their spacious streets (in some of which the whole trade of Cheapside might with ease move to and fro) with scarcely a vehicle in their whole extent. While there is so little circulation in the heart can it be wondered that the extremities are poor and destitute!'

Nor ought it to be forgotten that Cobden's agitation for the abolition of the Corn Laws received the active support of many Irishmen, including the great Irish leader, Daniel O'Connell, who spoke at many of Cobden's biggest meetings, vehemently urging that the Corn Laws had driven the Irish people to destitution. And even politicians with the shortest memories ought to be able to recollect that the final blow to the Corn Laws was the Irish potato famine. The story is told in a few concise sentences by an Irishman, who for many years led the Nationalist Party in the House of Commons, Justin McCarthy: ‡ 'In the autumn of 1845 the potato rot began in Ireland. The great cry all through Ireland was for the opening of the ports.

*Morley's Life of Cobden,' p. II.

† See, for example, O'Connell's speech at Manchester on Jan. 13, 1840, quoted in Prentice's History of the Anti-Corn Law League.' A Short History of Our Own Times, p. 74.

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The Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin issued a series of resolutions declaring that the potato disease was expanding more and more, and the document concluded with a denunciation of the Ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament together before the usual time for its assembling.'

As Lord Morley writes in his 'Life of Cobden': 'It was the ́ rain that rained away the Corn Laws.'

Nor is there any ground for the assertion that Irish agriculture suffered any special and peculiar injury from the opening of the ports of the United Kingdom to the wheat of the world. On this point the testimony of another well-known Irishman, the late Judge Shaw, may be quoted. Writing in 1902 in the Saturday Review' for September 27th of that year, Judge Shaw said:

'I have lived all my life in Ireland, and I have been brought into close contact with all sorts and conditions of men in Ireland, both north and south. In my boyhood I used to hear the farmers of the County Down talk about the poverty, the struggles, and miseries they and their fathers endured between 1815 and 1845 when Protection was at its height. I have seen with my own eyes the prosperity which the same farmers enjoyed for thirty years after the Repeal of the Corn Laws. . . . It is true that since 1878 farming has not been so profitable in Ireland as it was for thirty years before. But the farmer is far from being ruined. He has at least maintained the standard of comfort and living which he acquired in his thirty years of great prosperity.'

That was in 1902. In 1911 Mr. T. P. Gill, Secretary of the Irish Department of Agriculture, and formerly a prominent Nationalist Member of Parliament, called public attention in Dublin to the remarkable progress achieved by Ireland both in commerce and in agriculture.* In the same year Mr. T. W. Russell, M.P., a strong Home Ruler, speaking on November 3rd in Manchester, said: 'People talk about "poor Ireland," ' but I have the opinion that relatively Ireland is doing as well 'as any part of the Empire.' † Coming down to the year 1916, we find the Nationalist party in the House of Commons issuing to the world a manifesto in which they bear testimony to the general prosperity of Ireland, and in particular to the prosperity of the Irish labourer. The evidence is overwhelming that

*Irish News, August 8, 1911.

+ Manchester Guardian, November 4, 1911.

Quoted in the EDINBURGH REVIEW for July 1916.