was even a party in England who desired to prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore, except by boats built and manned by Englishmen.' To no purpose did Molyneux and Swift pour forth vehement remonstrances against restrictions which, as they truly said, had never been imposed upon any country, never heard or read of, either in ancient or modern story.' Whether out of revenge or out of jealousy, the object of keeping Ireland idle and poor was remorselessly persevered in; the Irish Parliament, from fear and hatred of their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen, co-operating with the English Houses in this iniquitous and insane policy. And in one way it succeeded, if it produced mischievous and fatal effects in another.

'It appeared useless to persist' in any form of Irish industry, 'and a general commercial despondency prevailed. The leading manufacturers at once emigrated to England, to America, or to the continent. Many thousands of Irish Protestants took refuge in the colonies; and the possibility cf balancing the great numerical strength of the Catholics was for ever at an end.'

One fruit of this legislation was not so much to extinguish competition as to invigorate a more dangerous rivalry. The prohibition of lawful trade naturally created illicit traffic. A smuggling trade with France sprang up and grew rapidly.

'Wool was secretly shipped from every Irish bay, a great impetus was given to the French woollen manufacture, which was the most serious rival to that of England, and another was added to the many powerful influences that were educating all classes of Irishmen into hostility to the law' (L. ii. 213).

Even this was not the whole of the evil. The destruction of profitable industry 'threw the whole population for subsistence on the soil,' which in so precarious a climate could not be relied upon to maintain them. The destitution became universal; 'in twenty years there were at least three or four of absolute famine.' Nicholson, Bishop of Derry, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury that-

'never, not even in Picardy, Westphalia, or Scotland, had he beheld such dismal marks of hunger and want; he dilates on the miserable hovels, the almost complete absence of clothing, and tells how, one of his carriage horses having been accidentally killed, it was surrounded at once by fifty or sixty famished cottagers, struggling desperately to obtain a morsel of flesh for themselves and their children' (ib. 216).

Both Mr. Lecky and Mr. Froude agree in attributing also to the jealousy of the English manufacturers the rejection of a proposal which, if it had been carried out, must, indeed,

have brought about not only the removal of those commercial restrictions, but with it the removal also of the ill-feeling which they had engendered, we mean the proposal of a legislative union with England; of a complete political incorporation of the three kingdoms. It is a strange specimen of political inconsistency that the very Administration which courageously and wisely forced union on the Scotch against their will, refused it to the Irish when they begged for it. No act of policy seems more utterly unaccountable. The leading Roman Catholics were not unwilling to acquiesce; and every class of Protestants, lay peers, bishops, members of the House of Commons, which formally petitioned for it, and, above all, the merchants and traders of every class, were eager for it. There is no sentence in Mr. Froude's three volumes with which we more fully agree than that in which he affirms that—

...

no excuse can be pleaded for Queen Anne's ministers, or for the English nation, whose resolution they represented, in rejecting these overtures of the Irish Parliament. The offered union was thrown away, when it would have been accepted as the most precious boon which England could bestow . . was thrown away in the meanest and basest spirit of commercial jealousy. No rational fear of possible danger, no anxiety to prevent injustice, no honourable motive of any kind whatever can be imagined as having influenced Lord Nottingham or the persons, whoever they were, who were generally responsible for the decision. In fatal blindness they persuaded themselves that the union would make Ireland rich, and that England's interest was to keep her poor.'

And he brands the decision further, not only as a fatal rejection of an opportunity of terminating the existing grievances of Ireland, but as the cause and seed of fresh evils. From this one act, as from a scorpion's egg, sprang a fresh and yet uncompleted cycle of disaffection, rebellion, and misery' (i. 303). He truly adds that 'opportunities occur in the affairs of nations which, if allowed to pass, return no more.' History affords few more striking examples of this aphorism than that of the Irish Union. At the beginning of the last century it was, as we have seen, refused to the Irish when it might have been granted with graciousness, and would have been received with thankfulness. At the end of the same century it was forced upon them in spite of the most vehement resistance, by means which would have been absolutely discreditable had it not been so indispensable to the safety of both countries that the measure be carried at all hazards. And it is so far from having since produced that general satisfaction in Ireland which would have been its fruit

had it been granted when it was originally solicited, that throughout the two last reigns a clamour for its entire, or at least its partial repeal, has been constantly put forward by a body professing to be the peculiarly Irish party: and, though repudiated by the general good sense and loyalty of the vast majority of the nation, has furnished a host of noisy demagogues with an election cry, and a plea for keeping up a continued agitation as well in as out of Parliament.

The best parallel we can discover for the civil policy of England towards Ireland in the early part of the eighteenth century is its religious policy in the reign of Elizabeth. At a time when common sense would have dictated making the reformation popular by making it easy, legislation stepped in to forbid the use of the Prayer-Book in Irish, in order, forsooth, to compel the people to learn English, The contrary policy in Wales, prompted probably by Tudor partiality for the land whence sprang the royal race, made Wales a stronghold of Churchmanship, till the corrupt use of patronage by the Hanoverian dynasty in favour of alien Whigs, ignorant of the native language, left the Principality a prey to Dissent.

The one praise that can be given to the English Government of Ireland for the next three-quarters of a century, if indeed it be praise, is that it was consistent with itself. Even when Viceroys of high character and brilliant capacity were sent over, and there was more than one such, he was so hampered with instructions from England, and so completely regarded as a mere instrument to carry out the jobs of the Home Government, that he was powerless for good, and either sullenly acquiesced in measures which he disapproved, or endeavoured to save his reputation by deserting his post, and crossing over to England. For years absence from Ireland was the rule, residence at the Castle the exception. The celebrated Lord Carteret was one of the first who fixed his abode in Dublin: and his viceroyalty was marked by the job which the genius of Swift has rendered the most notorious of all the malpractices in Irish history, Wood's patent, by which, to gratify the rapacity of one of the King's foreign mistresses, a Birmingham manufacturer was authorised to pour into the kingdom a mass of copper coinage tenfold as much as its trade required. Lord Chesterfield was another; and to his sagacity and energy the North of Ireland is mainly indebted for the extension and prosperity of her linen trade; which, though first established above a century before, had previously made but slow and fitful progress. In spite of the promise of Queen Anne's ministers to aid it, it had, as we

have seen, been discouraged and severely impeded by the same all-pervading appetite for monopoly of the English manufacturers which had extinguished the woollen trade. But Chesterfield had a clear perception of his duty to the people whom he was sent to rule, and an honourable ambition to distinguish his government by some real and permanent benefit to the nation. He arrived in Dublin in the summer of 1745, only a few days before the Chevalier Charles Edward landed in Scotland. The weak ministry of Pelham feared lest a large body of the Irish might espouse a cause which they identified with their religion; and at so critical a moment gave their new Lord Lieutenant freer liberty to carry out his ideas than he might otherwise have found. Under his discerning and resolute sway the English Government at last began to fulfil their promise to compensate Ireland for the destruction of her woollen trade by the encouragement of her linen manufacture. Linens were admitted free of duty into England; bounties were applied to promote their exportation to other countries: and so efficacious were these measures, that Belfast, the head-quarters of the trade, stigmatised a century before by Milton as a village 'in a barbarous nook,' and which in the last years of George II. contained less than nine thousand inhabitants, now almost rivals Dublin itself in population, and falls little short of the capital in its contributions to the revenue.

But, if Ulster began to thrive, the general condition of the country was still one of abject poverty and misery. Years of absolute famine, as we have seen, were not unfrequent. And it is strange to read that, while the people were starving, there was a large exportation not only of cattle, but of meat to France. Not that the growth of this trade, in Mr. Lecky's opinion, was an unalloyed benefit to the people. On the contrary, it aggravated the general distress by leading the landowners and farmers to convert arable land into pasture, a course which deprived the great bulk of the labourers of their ordinary employment. It may perhaps be questioned whether Mr. Lecky's arguments on this point are consistent with the genuine principles of political economy; and whether it can eventually benefit any nation to encourage production of a kind for which a land is less suited, at the expense of another for which soil and climate are more favourable. That every part of Ireland is better adapted for the cultivation of green crops than of grain is questioned by no practical farmer. But any sudden or rapid change must produce severe temporary distress among the class most affected by it; and un

doubtedly numbers of the poor were thrown out of work, and for a while reduced to the most severe distress. What relief they found came not from the State, but from individual charity. In the famine of 1741, Archbishop Boulter 'fed thousands of the Dublin poor with meal for many weeks at his single expense.' Yet so inveterate is Mr. Froude against the English Church and Churchmen, that the very page which records this splendid munificence of the Archbishop, whose name is still honoured in Ireland, contains a sneer at both his profession, and a want of personal religion which he chooses to impute to him. Archbishop though he was, he was free from the cant of his profession. Throughout his voluminous correspondence the name of God scarcely appears, if at all' (i. 403, note). Yet he presently admits that there is scarcely a single sentiment in his most confidential letters at the publication of which he need have blushed,' and allows him to have been 'an eminently sincere man: upright, honourable, and straightforward; and, to the utmost of his ability, which was really considerable, he laboured for the true good of Ireland' (i. 610).

But the utmost endeavours of a single individual could do but little to alleviate such wide-spread misery. Elizabeth's poor-law had never been extended to Ireland, and it was only in Dublin and Cork that workhouses had been established, and a rate established for their support; while even the regulations of these charities were made curiously subservient to the prejudices of the governing authorities; and 'a very significant provision was made that the children of the Cork and Dublin workhouses might be exchanged, in order to prevent the possibility of Catholic parents interfering with the Protestant education of their children (L. ii. 254). For, if there were no enactments doing anything directly to relieve distress, there was a whole body of laws which indirectly increased it, by perpetuating the hostility between those of different religions, between the Protestants, of whatever denomination they might be, and the Roman Catholics. A wise Government would have striven to unite all classes, to keep religious divisions, which could not be prevented from existing, at least as much as possible out of sight; but the penal laws of Ireland seemed as if they had been studiously devised for the express object of perpetuating and embittering them, by forcing them on the notice of both Protestant and Roman Catholic in the most offensive manner; marking the superiority of the former in a way which could not fail to foster arrogance and injustice in the one, and fierce