That the Union to some extent failed in the beneficent effects which it
was calculated to produce in Ireland is only another instance of the
working of the "curse of mis-chance" which has so often, before and
since, interposed to thwart the intentions of statesmen in their
dealings with the two countries. Pitt, Castlereagh, and Cornwallis, the
three men chiefly concerned in planning the change, were all agreed in
explaining that the Union was not a policy complete in itself, but was
only the necessary foundation upon which a true remedial policy was to
be based. As Lord Cornwallis said at the time, "the word 'Union' will
not cure the ills of this wretched country. It is a necessary
preliminary, but a great deal more remains to be done." Catholic
Emancipation, a series of parliamentary, educational, financial, and
economic reforms, and the abolition of the Viceroyalty, the visible
symbol of separatism and dependence, were all essential portions of
Pitt's scheme. But Pitt was destined to sink into an early grave without
seeing any of them materially furthered. Treacherous colleagues and the
threatened insanity of the King blocked the way of some of them:
England's prolonged struggle for existence against the power of
Napoleon, involving as it did financial embarrassment and a generation
of political reaction, accounted for the rest.
Pitt and Castlereagh resigned on the King's refusal to accept their
advice, "and so," as Lord Rosebery says,[14] "all went wrong." It was
"like cutting the face out of a portrait and leaving the picture in the
frame. The fragment of policy flapped forlornly on the deserted mansions
of the capital." A generation of agitation, strife, and discontent was
to pass before Emancipation was carried, and the reforms had to wait
still longer. Meanwhile a wonderful change of front had taken place. The
leading opponents of the Union--Plunket, Foster, Beresford--even Grattan
himself--came to accept it, and, in some cases, figured as its warmest
defenders. And the Catholic Party, whom we have seen so strongly
supporting the Union, gradually grew into opponents. Daniel O'Connell,
whose brother and uncle were the leading supporters of the Union
candidate for Kerry, started a formidable agitation first for
Emancipation and then for Repeal of the Union. In the former he
succeeded because enlightened public opinion in both countries was on
his side: in the latter he failed utterly, both parties in Great Britain
and a large section in Ireland being inflexibly opposed to any such
reactionary experiment. In the end O'Connell died disillusioned and
broken-hearted, and the Repeal movement disappeared from the field of
Irish politics till revived many years later in the form of Home Rule.
But whilst recognising the fact that the Union, owing to the causes
stated, failed partially, and for a time, to respond to all the
anticipations of its authors, readers must be warned against accepting
the wild and woeful tales of decay and ruin that were recklessly
circulated for propagandist purposes by O'Connell and the Repealers.
Many people who are content to take their facts at second hand have thus
come to believe that the legislative Union changed a smiling and
prosperous Kingdom into a blighted province where manufactures and
agriculture, commerce and population fell into rapid and hopeless
decline. Needless to say, things do not happen in that way: economic
changes, for better or for worse, are slow and gradual and depend on
natural causes, not on artificial. Ireland has not, as a whole, kept in
line with nineteenth-century progress, and her population, after a
striking increase for over forty years, showed under peculiar causes an
equally striking decrease; but to assert that her course has been one of
universal decay and of decay dating from the Union is to say what is
demonstrably untrue.
It was inevitable that a city of very limited industry like Dublin
should suffer from the disappearance of its Parliament, which brought
into residence for some months in every year some hundreds of persons of
wealth and distinction. It was also inevitable that the mechanical
inventions to which we have already alluded--the steam-engine, the
"spinning jenny," and the "mule"--which revolutionised the world's
industry, should have their effect in Ireland also. Under primitive
conditions, with lands almost roadless and communications slow,
difficult and costly, the various districts of any country had of
necessity to produce articles of food and clothing to satisfy their
requirements, or they had to go without. With the progress of invention,
and with the opening up of the world by roads and canals, a totally
different state of things presents itself. Industries tend to become
centralised--the fittest survive and grow, the unfit wither away. This
is what occurred in many districts of England and Scotland, and the
course of events was naturally the same in Ireland.
When we read of small towns now lying idle, which in the eighteenth
century produced woollen cloth, linen, cotton, fustian, boots, hats,
glass, beer, and food products, it simply means that a more highly
organised system of industry has in its progress left such districts
behind in the race. The woollen manufacture has centred in Yorkshire,
cotton in Lancashire, linen in Belfast, and so forth--one district
dwindled as others advanced and tended to monopolise production, without
the legislature having anything to say to it. To say that this or that
manufacture is not so prosperous in Ireland as it was a century ago
before power looms, spindles, steamships, and railways came to
revolutionise industry, is simply to say that Ireland, like other
countries, has had its part, for better or for worse, in the great
world-movement of nineteenth-century industry.
The figures of Irish exports and imports lend no countenance to the
story of decay setting in with the Union. Taking the two decennial
periods, before and after the Union, the figures are as follows:--[15]
Total value Total value
of imports. of exports.
1790-1801 ... ... £49,000,000 £51,000,000
1802-1813 ... ... £74,000,000 £63,000,000
----------- -----------
Increase ... £25,000,000 £12.000,000
an increase of over fifty per cent. in imports, and over twenty-three
per cent. in exports in the ten years after the Union as compared with
the ten years before it.
Taking single years the result is similar. The amalgamation of the two
Exchequers and the financial re-arrangements that followed, put an end
to the accurate record of exports and imports until quite recently, but
the increase during the early years of the Union and also over the whole
country is unmistakable. The average annual value of Irish exports at
the time of the Union was, according to Mr. Chart.[16] £4,000,000. In
1826 they had increased to £8,000,000, a corresponding increase being
recorded in imports. Coming down to the period of the Financial
Relations Commission (1895), that very cautious and painstaking
statistician, the late Sir Robert Giffen,[17] roughly estimated Irish
imports at £25,000,000 and exports at £20,000,000. Since that time the
Irish Agricultural Department has been created, and has undertaken the
collection and tabulation of such statistics. Turning to their latest
report we find that the imports had in 1910 attained the relatively
enormous figure of £65,000,000, and the exports £65,800,000, a total of
over £130,000,000 in place of nine or ten millions, at the very outside,
of the time of the Union. And it is worth noting in addition that, for
the first time in these recorded tables, Ireland's exports exceed her
imports.
But we are assured with triumphant and invincible despondency that
population has decreased alarmingly. The movements of population since
the time of the Union have been, it may be admitted, very remarkable,
but the figures are double-edged and require a more careful handling
than they generally receive. If we are to assume, as the prophets of
gloom will have it, that increase and decrease of population are an
infallible test of a country's growth or decay, then Ireland for nearly
half a century after the Union must have been the most prosperous
country in Europe. The population of Ireland, which in 1792 was
estimated at 4,088,226, had increased in 1814 to 5,937,856, in 1821 to
6,801,827, and in 1841 to 8,196,597. In other words, the population,
like the trade, of the doomed island had more than doubled since the
Union. We doubt if any European country could say as much.
Then came the great disaster, the potato famine of 1846-47, which,
undoubtedly, dealt a stunning blow to Irish agriculture. It was not the
first, nor the worst, of Irish famines--there is evidence that the
famines of 1729 and 1740 were, proportionately, more widespread and more
appalling in their effects. But, occurring as it did, in the middle of
the nineteenth century, with the press of the world as witnesses, it
attracted immense attention, and the nations, whom England, then high
and mighty in the undisputed supremacy of the doctrines of _laissez
faire_ and free trade, were not slow in retorting on their mentor. The
State, it was laid down dogmatically by the economists, must not do
anything to feed the starving people, because that would interfere with
the principle of private enterprise; and as there was naturally no
private enterprise in wide stretches of country where landlord and
tenant, shopkeeper and labourer, were involved in common ruin, the
people starved. For the same reason, the sufferers must not be paid to
do useful work, so they were set to make roads that led to nowhere--and
that have been grass-grown ever since--and to build walls that had to be
pulled down again.
It was a ghastly specimen of doctrinaire dogmatism run mad, and though
it was not the fault of the Government so much as of the arid doctrines
of ill-understood economics which then prevailed in the schools, it did
more than anything to embitter the relations between the Irish people
and the Imperial Government. The death-rate from famine and famine-fever
was appalling. The poor law system--then a new experiment in
Ireland--broke down hopelessly, and agitators were not slow to improve
the occasion by denouncing the "callousness" of the Imperial Government.
Nations, as a rule, recover from such calamities as famine, war, and
pestilence with surprising quickness; but there were certain incidents
connected with the famine of 1846-47 that intensified and perpetuated
the evil in the case of Ireland. We have already referred to the
high-and-dry doctrines of _laissez faire_ then in the ascendant, and any
real or permanent recovery of Irish agriculture was rendered practically
impossible by England's adhesion to the doctrine of free imports, by the
abolition of the Corn Laws, and by the crushing increase of taxation
under Mr Gladstone's budgets of 1853 and the succeeding years.
Ireland was entitled under the Act of Union to "special exemptions and
abatements" in taxation, in consideration of her backward economic
condition. All Chancellors of the Exchequer till Mr. Gladstone's time
respected these exemptions, and although no one could suggest, in view
of Ireland's recent progress, that she could have been permanently
exempted from the burdens imposed on the British taxpayer, it will be
admitted that the time chosen by Mr. Gladstone for abruptly raising the
taxation of Ireland from 14_s._ 9_d._ per head to 26_s._ 7_d._ was
inopportune, not to say ungenerous.
Sir David Barbour, in his minority report on the Financial Relations
Commission, perhaps the most carefully thought out and the most
practical of all the many reports emanating from that heterogeneous
body, gives a table of the "estimated true revenue" extracted from Great
Britain and Ireland respectively from 1819 to 1894. This table shows
that the revenue raised from Ireland was increased between 1849-50 and
1859-60 from £4,861,465 to £7,700,334, and he adds: "It will be observed
that a great and rapid rise took place in the taxation of Ireland during
the decade 1850-1860. This great increase was due to the equalisation of
the spirit duties in the two countries, and the extension of the Income
Tax to Ireland. The special circumstances of Ireland do not appear to
have received due consideration at this time. Many arguments of a
general character might be employed to justify the equalisation of the
spirit duties, and the imposition of an Income Tax, but Ireland was
entitled under the Act of Union to such exemptions and abatements as her
circumstances might require, and the time was not opportune for imposing
additional burdens upon her."
Irish Agriculture was thus almost simultaneously struck down by the
greatest famine of the century, which swept away two million of the
population, disabled for resuming the competition by the free admission
of foreign grain, which in the long run rendered successful corn-growing
in Ireland impossible, and saddled with an additional two and a quarter
millions of taxation. When remonstrated with, Mr. Gladstone retorted
flippantly that he could not see that it was any part of the rights of
man that an Irishman should be able to make himself drunk more cheaply
than the inhabitant of Great Britain. The taunt would have possessed
more relevance if whisky had been an article of importation. Seeing,
however, that it was an article of manufacture and export, employing
directly or indirectly much capital and labour, the injury to Irish
industry was very serious, many distilleries and breweries being obliged
to close their doors.