ENGLISH OPPOSITION TO EFFORTS OF THE IRISH PARLIAMENT IN FAVOUR OF
IRISH TRADE.
Mr. Fox, speaking in the British House of Commons on the 17th of
May, 1782, as a responsible Minister of the Crown, thus stated the
nature and effect of the legislation of the English Parliament with
reference to Irish trade: "The power of external legislation had
been employed against Ireland as an instrument of oppression, to
establish an impolitic monopoly in trade, to enrich one country at
the expense of the other."[63] The English Government was, previously
to the Revolution of 1782, able to dominate the legislation of the
Irish Parliament under the provisions of Poynings' Law. That power
was used to induce the Irish Parliament to pass laws prejudicial
to the liberties or the commerce of their country, and to prevent
the enactment of laws for the protection of Irish liberty, and the
development of Irish industrial energies. Thus, when the English
Houses of Parliament addressed William III. on the subject of the
Irish woollen trade, both Lords and Commons suggested that the King
should use his influence to induce the Irish Parliament to restrain
that manufacture, without rendering English legislation for the purpose
necessary. A few days after these Addresses were presented, the
King wrote to Lord Galway, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, as
follows:--
"The chief thing that must be prevented is that the Irish Parliament
take no notice of this here, and that you make effectual laws for the
linen manufacture, and discourage as far as possible the woollen. It
never was of such importance to have a good session of Parliament."[64]
Ireland was thus, in the words of Mr. Froude, "invited to apply the
knife to her own throat."[65] "The Irish Houses, in dread of abolition
if they refused, relying on the promise of encouragement to their
linen trade, and otherwise unable to help themselves, acquiesced."[66]
The enactment which they passed was temporary. Hely Hutchinson says
that this law has every appearance of being framed on the part of the
Administration. The servile body who assented to it soon had reason to
know that to tolerate slavery is to embrace it. The law did not satisfy
the English Parliament, who passed the perpetual enactment to which
reference has been previously made.[67] This is, however, one of the
few instances in which the Irish Parliament was prevailed on to pass
laws in restraint of their own trade. Even in this case the destruction
of the woollen industry was not considered complete until English
legislation gave it a final blow.
The direct attacks on Irish trade were almost exclusively the work of
the English Parliament; while the English Privy Council strangled at
its birth every beneficial enactment of the Irish Parliament.
The following instances will explain and illustrate the difficulties
with which the Irish Parliament had to contend in every effort to
promote the material prosperity of their country:--
"With," says Mr. Froude, "their shipping destroyed by the Navigation
Act, their woollen manufactures taken from them, their trade in all
its branches crippled and confined, the single resource left to those
of the Irish who still nourished dreams of improving their unfortunate
country was agriculture. The soil was at least their own, which
needed only to be drained, cleared of weeds, and manured to produce
grass crops and corn crops as rich as the best in England. Here was
employment for a population three times more numerous than as yet
existed. Here was a prospect, if not of commercial wealth, yet of
substantial comfort and material abundance."[68]
After some further observations, Mr. Froude thus proceeds:--"The
tenants were forbidden in their leases to break or plough the soil.
The people no longer employed were driven away into holes and corners,
and eked out a wretched subsistence by potato gardens or by keeping
starving cattle of their own on the neglected bogs. Their numbers
increased, for they married early, and they were no longer liable, as
in the old times, to be killed off like dogs in forays. They grew up in
compulsory idleness, encouraged once more in their inherited dislike of
labour,[69] and inured to wretchedness and hunger; and on every failure
of the potato crop, hundreds of thousands were starving. Of corn very
little was grown anywhere in Ireland. It was imported from England,
Holland, Italy, and France, but in quantities unequal to any sudden
demand. The disgrace of allowing a nation of human beings to subsist
upon such conditions forced itself at last on the conscience of the
Irish Parliament, and though composed of landowners who were tempted
as much as others to let their farms on the terms most profitable to
them, the House of Commons in 1716 resolved unanimously to make an
effort for a general change of system, and to reclaim both people and
country by bringing back and stimulating agriculture. They passed a
vote that covenants which prohibited the breaking soil with the plough
were impolitic, and should have no binding force. They passed heads
of a bill, which they recommended with the utmost earnestness to the
consideration of the English Council, enjoining that for every hundred
acres which any tenant held he should break up and cultivate five, and,
as a further encouragement, that a trifling bounty should be granted by
the Government on corn grown for exportation.
"And what did England answer? England which was so wisely anxious for
the prosperity of the Protestant interest in Ireland: England which
was struggling so pathetically to make the Irish peers and gentlemen
understand the things that belonged to their peace? The bounty system
might or might not have been well calculated to produce the effect
which Ireland desired. It was the system which England herself
practised with every industry which she wished to encourage, and it
was not on economic grounds that the Privy Council rejected a Bill
which they ought rather to have thrust of their own accord on Irish
acceptance. The real motive was probably the same which had led to
the suppression of the manufactures--the detestable opinion that to
govern Ireland conveniently Ireland must be kept weak. Although the
corn consumed in Ireland had been for many years imported, the English
farmers were haunted with a terror of being undersold in their own
and foreign markets by a country where labour was cheap. A motive so
iniquitous could not be confessed, but the objections which the Council
were not ashamed to allege were scarcely less disgraceful to them. The
English manufacturers having secured, as they supposed, the monopoly
of Irish wool on their own terms, conceived that the whole soil of
Ireland ought to be devoted to growing it. The merchants of Tiverton
and Bideford had recently memorialised the Crown on the diminution of
the number of fleeces which reached them from the Irish ports. They
attributed the falling off to the contraband trade between Ireland and
France, which shortened their supplies, enhanced the price, and gave
the French weavers an advantage over them. Their conjecture, as will
be hereafter shown, was perfectly just. The contraband trade, as had
been foreseen when the restrictions were imposed, had become enormous.
But the Commissioners of the Irish Revenue were unwilling to confess
to carelessness. They pretended that the Irish farmers, forgetting
their obligations to England, and thinking wickedly only of their own
interests, were diminishing their stock of sheep, breaking up the
soil, and growing wheat and barley. The allegation, unhappily, was
utterly untrue. But the mere rumour of a rise of industry in Ireland
created a panic in the commercial circles of England. Although the
change existed as yet only in desire, and the sheep-farming, with its
attending miseries, was increasing rather than diminishing, Stanhope,
Walpole, Sutherland, and the other advisers of the English Crown, met
the overtures of the Irish Parliament in a spirit of settled hostility,
and, with an infatuation which now appears insanity, determined to keep
closed the one remaining avenue by which Ireland could have recovered
a gleam of prosperity.
"The heads of the Bill were carried in Ireland without a serious
suspicion that it would be received unfavourably. A few scornful
members dared to say that England would consent to nothing which would
really benefit Ireland, but they were indignantly silenced by the
friends of the Government. It was sent over by the Duke of Grafton,
with the fullest expectation that it would be returned. He learnt
first with great surprise that 'the Tillage Bill was meeting with
difficulties.' 'It was a measure,' he said, 'which the gentlemen of the
country had very much at heart, as the only way left them to improve
their estates while they were under such hard restrictions in point of
trade.' 'It would be unkind,' he urged, in a second and more pressing
letter, 'to refuse Ireland anything not unreasonable in itself. He
conceived the Corn Bill was not of that nature, and therefore earnestly
requested his Majesty would be pleased to indulge them in it.'
"Stanhope forwarded in answer a report of the English Commissioners of
Customs, which had the merit of partial candour. 'Corn,' they said, 'is
supposed to be at so low a rate in Ireland in comparison with England,
that an encouragement to the exportation of it would prejudice the
English trade.'
"The Lords Justices returned the conclusive rejoinder that for some
years past Ireland had imported large quantities of corn from England,
which would have been impossible had her own corn been cheaper. 'They
could not help representing,' they said, 'the concern they were under
to find that verified which those all along foretold who obstructed the
King's affairs, and which his friends had constantly denied, that all
the marks they had given of duty and affection would not procure one
bill for the benefit of the nation.'
"The fact of the importation of corn from England could not be evaded;
but the commercial leaders were possessed with a terror of Irish
rivalry which could not be exorcised. The bill was at last transmitted,
but a clause had been slipped in empowering the Council to suspend the
premiums at their pleasure; and the House of Commons in disgust refused
to take back a measure which had been mutilated into a mockery."[70]
To take another instance, illustrative of the same system, which was in
full operation sixty years later. The heads of a bill were introduced
in 1771 to prevent corn from being wasted in making whisky, and to
put some restraint on the vice of drunkenness, which was increasing.
This bill was warmly recommended to the English Privy Council by
Townshend, the Lord-Lieutenant of the day, who said, "the whisky shops
were ruining the peasantry and the workmen. There was an earnest and
general desire to limit them. It will be a loss to the revenue, but it
is a very popular bill, and will give general content and satisfaction
throughout the kingdom."[71] "The Whisky Bill," says Mr. Froude, "was
rejected because the Treasury could not spare a few thousand pounds
which were levied upon drunkenness."[72]
It must also be borne in mind that although the English Parliament
could, and, in fact, did, place prohibitory duties on Irish goods
imported into England, it was quite impossible for the Irish Parliament
to exercise the same power. Bills of such a nature would, of course,
never obtain the sanction of the English Privy Council, to whom they
must have been submitted.
The difference between the duties on the same goods when imported
from England into Ireland, and from Ireland into England, were in
some cases striking. "In Ireland," says Mr. Parsons, speaking in the
Irish Parliament in 1784, "no more than 6d. a yard was imposed on the
importation of English cloths, while ours in England were charged with
a duty of £2 0s. 6d."[73]
Mr. Pitt, speaking as Prime Minister in the British House of Commons
in February, 1785, stated that on most of the manufactures of Ireland
prohibitory duties were laid by Great Britain. "They (the Irish) had
not," he said, "admitted our commodities totally free from duties; they
bore, upon an average, about ten per cent."[74]
The helplessness of the Irish Parliament during this period is
demonstrated by Hely Hutchinson. He states that in 1721, during a
period of great distress, the speech from the Throne, and the Addresses
to the King and the Lord-Lieutenant declare in the strongest terms the
great decay of trade, and the very low and impoverished state to which
the country was reduced. "But," he says, "it is a melancholy proof of
the desponding state of this kingdom, that no law whatever was then
proposed for encouraging trade or manufactures, or, to follow the words
of the address, for reviving trade or making us a flourishing people,
unless that for amending laws as to butter and tallow casks deserves to
be so called. And why? Because it was well understood by both Houses
of Parliament that they had no power to remove those restraints which
prohibited trade and discouraged manufactures, and that any application
for that purpose would at that time have only offended the people on
one side of the Channel, without bringing any relief to those on the
other."[75]
The Irish Parliament did, however, what they could. Thus, "in the
sessions of 1703, 1705, and 1707, the House of Commons resolved
unanimously that it would greatly conduce to the relief of the poor
and the good of the kingdom, that the inhabitants thereof should use
none other but the manufactures of this kingdom in their apparel, and
the furniture of their houses; and in the last of those sessions,
the members engaged their honours to each other that they would
conform to the said resolution."[76] Many of their suggestions for
the encouragement of home produce are of extraordinary ingenuity. In
1727, the Privy Council allowed a bill to become law, entitled "An Act
to encourage the home consumption of wool by burying in wool only,"
providing that no person should be buried "in any stuff or thing other
than what is made of sheep or lambs' wool only."[77] The custom, now
grotesque and unmeaning, but still in vogue in Ireland, of wearing
scarfs at funerals, was recommended in the interest of the linen
manufacture, and was first introduced in 1729 at the funeral of Mr.
Conolly, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons.[78] So, too, spinning
schools were established in every county, and a board of trustees
was appointed to watch over the interests of the linen manufacture;
"but the utter want of capital, the neglect of the grand juries, the
ignorance, poverty, and degradation of the inhabitants, made the
attempt to create a new manufacture hopeless."[79]
These efforts of the Irish Parliament, though of little practical
effect, demonstrate their keen appreciation of the sufferings around
them and their sympathy with the wants and wishes of their people, who
were crushed by a system which Mr. Pitt has characterised as one "of
cruel and abominable restraint."[80]
Speaking in the English House of Commons in 1785, that statesman bade
members "recollect that from the Revolution to a period within the
memory of every man who heard him, indeed until these very few years,
the system had been that of debarring Ireland from the enjoyment and
use of her own resources, to make that kingdom completely subservient
to the interests and opulence of this country, without suffering her
to share in the bounties of nature, in the industries of her citizens,
or making them contribute to the general interests and strength of the
empire."[81]
"No country," says Mr. Lecky, "ever exercised a more complete control
over the destinies of another than did England over those of Ireland,
for three-quarters of a century after the Revolution. No serious
resistance of any kind was attempted. The nation was as passive as
clay in the hands of the potter, and it is a circumstance of peculiar
aggravation that a large part of the legislation I have recounted was a
distinct violation of a solemn treaty.[82] The commercial legislation
which ruined Irish industry, the confiscation of Irish land which
demoralised and impoverished the nation, were all directly due to the
English Government, and the English Parliament."[83]
"If," says Mr. Froude, "the high persons at the head of the great
British Empire had deliberately considered by what means they could
condemn Ireland to remain the scandal of their rule, they could have
chosen no measures better suited to their end than those which they
pursued unrelentingly through three-quarters of a century."[84]
FOOTNOTES:
[63] "Parliamentary Register," p. 7.
[64] Rapin, xvii., p. 417. The date of this letter is 16th of July,
1698. The matter was so urgent that William III. wrote two letters. See
"English in Ireland," i. 297.
[65] "English in Ireland," vol. i., p. 297.
[66] _Ibid._, p. 297.
[67] 10 & 11 Will. III., c. 10.
[68] "English in Ireland," vol. i., p. 439.
[69] The charge of indolence which Mr. Froude has here preferred
against the Irish peasantry has frequently been refuted. The accusation
is an old one. Speaking in the Irish House of Commons in 1784, the
Right Hon. Luke Gardiner thus repelled it:--"Those who render our
people idle are the first to ridicule them for that idleness, and to
ridicule them without a cause. National characteristics are always
unjust, as there never was a country that has not produced both
good and bad." "They are general assertions, as false as they are
illiberal. Irishmen have shown spirit and genius in whatever they have
undertaken." "I call upon gentlemen to specify one instance where the
people were indolent when the laws of their country protected them
in their endeavours." ("Irish Debates," iii., p. 127.) "It is a cant
in England," says Mr. O'Connell, "that they (the Irish) are an idle
people, but how can that be said when they are to be found seeking
employment through every part of the world? They are to be found making
roads in Scotland and digging canals in the poisonous marshes of New
Orleans." ("Discussion in Dublin Corporation on Repeal of the Union,"
in 1843, p. 58) The _Times_ of the 26th of June, 1845, in an article to
which I will refer hereafter, says "The Irishman is disposed to work."
[70] "English in Ireland," vol. i., 441-446. The subsequent history
of this Bill as related by Mr. Froude is interesting. It became law
in 1727, but was practically ineffective. See Lecky's "Eighteenth
Century," ii., 248.
[71] "English in Ireland," vol. ii., 113, 114.
[72] "English in Ireland," vol. ii., 114.
[73] "Irish Debates," vol. iii., 132.
[74] "Parliamentary Register," 17, 255.
[75] "Commercial Restraints," pp. 40-41. Speaking of the great distress
in the years 1740 and 1741, Hely Hutchinson again deplores the
inability of the Irish Parliament to alleviate the misery of the poor.
"They (the Commons) could not have been insensible of the miseries
of their fellow-creatures, many thousands of whom were lost in those
years, some from absolute want and many from disorders occasioned by
bad provisions. Why was no attempt made for their relief? Because the
Commons knew that the evil was out of their reach, and the poor were
not employed because they were discouraged by restrictive laws from
working up the materials of their own country, and that agriculture
could not be encouraged when the lower classes of the people were not
enabled by their industry to purchase the produce of the farmer's
labour."--("Commercial Restraints," pp. 47-48.)
[76] "Commercial Restraints," pp. 210, 211.
[77] 7 George II. (Irish) c. 13. This Irish Statute was framed on the
model of an Act passed by the English Parliament in 1678, providing
that all dead bodies should be wrapped in woollen shrouds. Dean Swift
warmly approved of this measure which, however, he seemed to think
would never pass the Privy Councils. "What," he says, "if we should
agree to make burying in woollen a fashion, as our neighbours have made
it a law?" Swift's Works (Scott's Ed.), vi., p. 274.
[78] Finlayson's "Monumental Inscriptions in Christ Church Cathedral,
Dublin," p. 27.
[79] Lecky's "Eighteenth Century," vol. ii., 215.
[80] "Parliamentary Register," 17, 249. Mr. Lecky pays a high
compliment to the exertions of the Irish Parliament to protect the
material interests of their country. "During the greater part of the
century (18th century) it had little power except that of protesting
against laws crushing Irish commerce, but what little it could do it
appears to have done."--"Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," p. 187.
[81] "Parliamentary Register," 17, 249.
[82] Mr. Lecky refers doubtless to the Treaty of Limerick.
[83] "Eighteenth Century," vol. ii., 256.
[84] "English in Ireland," vol. ii., 213.