The Open Secret of Ireland

erious, elusive, inscrutable. It is impossible to govern her, declare these theorists, because it is impossible to understand her. She is the femme incomprise of modern politics. Her tem

understood it." This is all very well in its way, and a climate of incomprehension may suit orators and metaphysicians admirably; but it will not do for politics. The party or people that fails to make its programme understood is politically incompetent, and Ireland is assuredly safe from any such imputation. She has her spiritual secrets, buried deep in what we may call the subliminal consciousness of the race, and to the disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the inspiration of a new literature. But in politics Ireland

ates of America once found himself out of spirits. He decided to go out of life, and being thorough in his ways he left nothing to chance. He set fire to his cabin, and, mounting the table, noosed his neck to a beam, drank a large quantity of poison, and, as he kicked over the table, simultaneously shot himself through the head and drew a razor across his throat. Later on the doctor had to fill in

ver quarrel there may be as to causes, the facts are not disputed. Pitt and his friends promised that th

he most prominent features is its want of industry and of capital. How are these wants to be

ophesied white the moving finger of history began, from the very day of the Union, to write black.

Commissions and private inquirers. Let us note some of these as summarised

s and 925 hands employed. In 1800 there were 900 hands employed on ratteens and friezes in Roscrea; in 1840 the industry had completely disappeared. In 1800 there were 1000 flannel looms in County Wicklow; in 1840 there was not one. In 1800 there were 2500 looms at work in Dublin for the manufacture of silk and poplin; in

omatic. Mr Pitt had promised to blend Ireland with the capital and industry of Great Britain; he blended them as the edge of a tomahawk is blended with the spattered brains of its victim. We have glanced at the condition of manufacture. Lest it should be assumed that the til

metimes not even so much to cover them. Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes; and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to st

the cause as well as the antecedent of this decay? No economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to answer in th

ting force in economic life. No instance can be cited of a modern people of E

my in England, "is full of the record of inefficiency caused in varying degrees by

eactions, are like lead poured into the veins. It lowered the vital resources of Ireland.

e from real life. For there is no one in the world so ready as your modern Englishman to deny that he is a man in order to prove that he is a business-man. Fortunately we can establish for t

d Ireland of the capital which would have enabled her to transform the technique of her manufactures, and so maintain the ground

, England was able to defeat the Titan, Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin of her collar. But the Union made her task impossible. Lord Castlereagh was quite right in pointing to the accumulation of capital as the characteristic advantage of England. Through centuries of political freedom that process had gone on without interruption. Ireland, on the contrary, had been scientifically pillaged by the application to her of the "colonial system" from 1663 to 1779; I deliberately exclude the previous waste of war and confiscation. She had but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, despite her brilliant success in that period, she had not tim

the export of capital from Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that process. Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed the Irish till; from the first

Minister won't trust to interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. He must have her purse within his own grasp. While three hundred men hold it in Ireland

eign policy. By it Ireland was swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817 her funded debt was increased from ￡28,541,157 to ￡112,684,773, an augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years following the Union

damned in a definition. But it was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs of th

ehind. And it was a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled between 1790 and 1833. Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr D'Alton in his "History of the County Dublin," a book quite innocent of politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not less than ￡3,000,000, and in 1830 no

the same period. In other words, the effect of the Union was to withdraw from Ireland during the thirty years that settled the economic structure of mode

tain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of ￡250,000,000 on the Boer War. We know that in economic history effects are, in a notable way, cumulative; so clearly marked is the line of continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a nail in all England that could not be traced back to savings made before t

d of her industry to strengthen the predominant partner, and to help him to exclude for a time from these islands that pernicious F