The Open Secret of Ireland

st-Union history of linen with that of cotton. Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of mercantilism. Within cert

inery and the new processes, and to weather the tempest of competition. Cotton, on the other hand, was a very recent arrival. It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave promise of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital told more and more as changes in the technique of transportation and production ushered in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival, involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart,

abolished. Dublin especially would suffer from this arrangement, for the duty there on coals imported was is. 8-4/5d. per ton, while that in the rest of Ireland was only 9-1/2d. This was because a local duty of 1s. per ton existed in Dublin for

es such as Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George Moore, and Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the Society appointed a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture, commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how things stood with regard to coal. At the time of

rohibition, all the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circumstance that, in the metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior, superior, probably, to any other city or town in this

numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the side of the Protestant North. In my part of the country the people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate."

rt in 1838 which practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate "to accomplish so important

uld be urged to take the work into its own hands, thereby saving the cost of Private Bill legislation. Promises were also made that the lands necessary for railway construction would be given free of cost. Similar resolutions were adopted at an

ce was not yet lost. During the Great Famine of 1847 the Opposition proposed to raise, ￡16,000,000 by State loans for the construction of railways as relief works. A suggestion so sane could not hope to pass. It was in fact rejected; the

the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability of extending the English Poor Law to Ireland. Their report is a pioneer document in the development of economic thought. Just as t

d be unsuitable for Ireland, because after unchecked demoralisation by profuse out-door relief in England, the Work-house system was devised in order to make the lazy and idle seek ordinary employment which could be

ention programme outlined a scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did, demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to stand a chance. There

e that calamitous pageant. Our interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as against government from Dublin. Even had Grattan's Parliament remained, the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that Parliament was an assembly controlled by landlords who, for the most part, bel

e, its bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in another way. Souchon in his introduction to the French edition of Philippovich, the great Austrian economist, observes with great truth that England has not even yet developed any sort of Agrarpolitik, that is to say any systematic Economics of Agricultu

al. In 1829 the question assumed a fresh urgency, in consequence of the eviction campaign which followed the disfranchisement of the small hol

l. The Westminster Parliament clapped the "agitators" into prison, and while they were at work breaking stones stole their programme.... But I have promised to spare the reader the detailed hideousness of this Inferno, and this section must close without a word said about that miserable triad

ns: first, because it illustrates the fundamental wro

o its inner law of development. The sin of the Union was that it imposed on Ireland from without a sort of spiked strait-jacket which could have no effect but to squeeze the blood and breath out of every interest in the country. What was meat to England was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this

value of ￡44,958,000 sterling was grown in Ireland according to the statistical r

ople. But the logic of Unionism worked on other lines. The government opened the ports, cheapened corn, and made rents harder to pay. At the same time they passed a new Coercion Act, and reorganised the police on its prese

We are sick of that caricature which depicts Ireland as the mad heroine of a sort of perpetual suttee, in which all the interests of the present are immolated on the funeral-pyre of the past. But let us come closer to things. How do you clean a slate except by liquidating the debts of which it keeps the record? The late Vicomte de Vogu? wrote an admirable novel, "Les Morts qui Parlent." The dead are always speaking; you cannot stop their strong eloquence with a mouthful

o sense in saying to him: "There, I have given over bludgeoning you. Why on earth don't you get up, and skip about like me?" If you have been robbing a man's till for ten years, and then decide-by the way you have not yet decided-to leave off, there is no sense in saying to him: "Why the devil are you always hard up? Look at me doing the same sort of business as you on absolutely equal terms, and I'm able to keep two motor-cars and six servants." But that is precisely what is s

oke her industrial tradition, injured her credit, depressed her confidence. You forced upon her a fiscal system devised to suit your needs in utter contempt of hers. To clean that slate y

omy of the country was stricken with a sort of artificial an?mia. Then very late in the day you enact in shreds and fragments a programme of reform proposed half a century before by the leaders of the Iris

ndment. You muddled the Poor Law; and, in the workhouses which you thrust upon us, 8000 children are year by year receiving on their lives t

uck of England you are allowed what others were not allowed, the opportunity of penitence and reform. The messengers of the new gospel are at your doors, offering you in return for the plain rudiments of justice not only forgiveness but friendship. It is for you to accept or reject. We, the Irish, whom you have wronged, look to your decision with interest rather than with concern. Why should we be concerned? Our flag has been an Aaron's serpent to swallow yours. Your policies, your ambitions