as to who was its author. It was always known to be the production of
Provost Hely Hutchinson, and its first appearance was greeted with two
different sorts of reception. It was burned by the Common Hangman so
effectually, that Mr. Flood said he would give a thousand pounds for a
copy and that the libraries of all the three branches of the legislature
could not produce a copy[108]--and at the same time it "earned Mr. Hely
Hutchinson's pardon from Irish patriotism for his subserviency to the
Court and Lord Townshend."[109] The book was the outcome of the stubborn
inability of English rulers to interpret the face of this country; and the
first sketch of the publication was the papers which the author
contributed to Lord Lieutenant Buckinghamshire in 1779 as to the cause of
the existing ruin here and as to its cure. The purport of the Letters was
to exhibit, calmly and seriously, and as by a friend to both countries,
the grievous oppressions which the greedy spirit of English trade
inflicted on the commerce, industries, and manufactures of Ireland during
the century and a quarter that extended from the Restoration of Charles
II. to the rise of Grattan. The author draws all his statements from the
Statute Books and Commons Journals of both kingdoms, while he does not
fail to support his own conclusions and comments by State Papers and
Statistical Returns that possess an authority equal to that of the
Statutes. He lays the whole length and breadth of the position steadily
and searchingly before the Viceroy's eyes. He shows him that the then
state of Ireland teemed with every circumstance of national poverty, while
the country itself abounded in the conditions of national prosperity. Of
productiveness there was no lack; but land produce was greatly reduced in
value; wool had fallen one half, wheat one third, black cattle in the same
proportion, and hides in a much greater. There were no buyers, tenants
were not to be found, landlords lost one fourth of their rents, merchants
could do no business, and within two years over twenty thousand
manufacturers in this city were disemployed, beggared, and supported by
alms. All this was after a period of fourscore years of profound internal
peace--and the question was, what was the cause of it?
This is what the author sets himself to investigate in the Letters, and in
regard of sweep of survey, historic retrospect, statistical quotation, and
close economic comment, the investigation leaves little to be desired. The
Provost is anxious, in the first place, to point out that it was not
absentee rents, salaries, profits of offices, and pensions that caused the
decline--and this forestalling admonition is no more than what might be
expected from a man who was such an insatiable trafficker in places, and
salaries, and profits, and pensions. He admits that these things made the
decline more rapid, but a "more radical" cause was to be assigned for a
malady that arose out of the constitution itself. He maintains that
Ireland was flourishing, prosperous, and wealthy under James and Charles
I., and that after the Restoration it was one of the most improved and
improving spots in Europe. This is a somewhat poetical view, especially
when we remember how Strafford ruined the landowners and destroyed the
wool trade; but wretched as was the condition of the people under the
Stuarts, it may have been less unendurable than the condition under "a
succession of five excellent sovereigns." In truth, talking about the
perpetually developed prosperity of the Irish people under the several
successions of English misrule is the very irony of pharisaism, although
the recital is a stereotyped phrase of English officials from the Tudor
_employes_ down to those of our own days,[110] none of whom ever fail to
find "the strings of the Irish harp all in tune." In some periods the
distress may have been more intense than in others, and in all periods
there were not wanting instances of individual aggrandisement--but the
general wretchedness remained fast fixed. England has been a constant
source of woe to Ireland, and suffering is the badge of all our tribe. In
any strict assize Hutchinson would be laughed out of Court for essaying to
plead the wealth and prosperity of Ireland directly after the devastations
of the Carews and Mountjoys, after the Desmond and Ulster confiscations
and evictions, and after the Cromwellian atrocities. Hutchinson knew quite
well what the condition of the people was all through; but it suited him,
rhetorically, to cut out a corner of the picture and to colour that corner
very highly. Graziers used to make a good thing of their cattle and of
their wool, and economic returns of their exports showed pleasant balance
sheets; but graziers were not the Irish people any more than Manchester is
England now. In fact, they were chiefly English landowners here, and the
extent of their exports is only the measure of the misery which they left
unpitied and unrelieved. This, however, was not the philosophy which
Hutchinson wanted to preach; and he was far too clear-headed a man to make
a mistake as to what he wanted to say. He accordingly lays hold on the
figures that set off his argument, and out of fancy premises he draws a
solid conclusion which in no sense needed such controvertible data. What
was certain was that Ireland possessed the conditions of prosperity, and
that it teemed with actual poverty. The question was, what caused this
contradiction? The answer was, England caused it; and this is the answer
which Hutchinson plainly and nakedly gives. In all the rest of his
book--i.e. from Letter III. to the close--he sustains this thesis with a
directness that cannot be gainsayed or resisted. Having related the
efforts of Strafford--one of the most malignant enemies that Ireland ever
encountered--to crush the wool trade here in the time of Charles I.,
Hutchinson comes to the acts of the English under Charles II. and William
III.
Charles, so far as he could have a liking for anything outside his
pleasures, had a liking for Ireland; and William feeling that he had
already done Ireland wrong enough, was disposed at last to be merciful and
liberal towards her; but both of the kings were overborne by their English
parliaments.
In 1663, the English Act "for encouragement of Trade"! contained an
insidious clause, imposing a penalty of L2 on each head of Irish cattle,
and 10_s._ on each sheep imported into England between July and December.
In 1666, the "Act against importing cattle from Ireland and other places
beyond seas, and fish taken by foreigners" was passed, and to annoy the
king the importation was termed a "nuisance."[111] This Act was made
perpetual by the "Act of 1678, prohibiting the importation of cattle from
Ireland." This latter Act was not repealed until the 5th of George III.,
when the permission was granted for seven years; the permission was made
perpetual by the 16th of the same reign.
Carte[112] relates at length and with an honest sympathy with Ireland, the
whole incident of 1663-8. He tells how the Duke of Ormond, who was then
Lord Lieutenant here, together with his valiant son, Lord Ossory, strove
manfully for this country, and how he prevailed with the king to delay the
obnoxious measure. He mentions also Ormond's noble enterprise in
establishing at Clonmel the flourishing Walloon woollen manufactory. Carte
records likewise how, in 1666, the Dublin people, when scant of money by
virtue of English jealousy, sent over a contribution of 30,000 fat oxen to
feed the Londoners who had suffered by the great fire, and how
ungraciously the generous boon was received by the ill-mannered English
victuallers and by their bribed spokesmen in high places.[113]
Notwithstanding this benevolence of the Irish people, the English
persisted in ruining their cattle trade, and before the end of William's
reign they passed a further law to ruin the Irish woollen trade. This was
in 1699, and the long depression and degradation which resulted from it
prove, says Hutchinson, "this melancholy truth, that a country will sooner
recover from the miseries and devastations occasioned by war, invasion,
rebellion, and massacre, than from laws restraining the commerce,
discouraging the manufactures, fettering the industry, and, above all,
breaking the spirit of the people."
This melancholy truth the Provost goes on to illustrate and enforce, and
he does this by reciting the facts from the beginning, and from year to
year continually, as they are recorded in the journals of Parliament. The
restriction of the cattle trade in 1666, when the people, in reliance on
the continuance of the trade, had greatly increased their live-stocks,
compelled the Irish to develop their wool trade. They had been encouraged
by their English rulers to devote their energies to this industry, because
the "country was so fertile by nature, and so advantageously situated for
trade and navigation." Suddenly a Bill was introduced into the English
parliament in 1697 and passed in 1699, restraining the exportation of
woollen manufactures from Ireland, and beseeching His Majesty "in the most
public and effectual way that may be, to declare to all his subjects of
Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture hath
long, and will ever be, looked upon with jealousy by all his subjects of
this [England] kingdom," and further "to enjoin all those he employed in
Ireland to make it their care and use their utmost diligence, to hinder
the exportation of wool from Ireland except to be imported hither [to
England], and for the discouraging the woollen manufacture," &c. To this
address King William gave the ever memorable reply: "_I shall do all that
in me lies to discourage the woollen trade in Ireland, and to encourage
the linen manufacture there;[114] and to promote the trade of England_;"
and he wrote to the Lords Justices over here to have a measure to that
effect passed in the Irish parliament. The Lords Justices accordingly made
"a quickening speech" to both Houses; a Bill for their acceptance was
transmitted from the Castle, and the Irish parliament, in which the
Williamite influence was dominant, passed the measure that annihilated the
industry and prosperity of their country.[115] By this law an additional
duty of twenty per cent. was imposed on broadcloth, and of ten per cent.
on all new draperies except friezes; and the law which was enacted in
January, 1699, was to be in force for three years. This law, prohibitive
as it was, did not, however, satisfy England. In the June of the same year
the English parliament passed a perpetual law, not overtaxing but
expressly prohibiting the exportation from Ireland of all goods made of
or mixed with wool, except to England and Wales, and with the licence of
the Revenue Commissioners. Previous English Acts had made the duties on
the importation into England practically prohibitive, and therefore the
last Act operated as a suppression of exportation. The Irish were already
prevented from importing dye-stuffs from the colonies, and from exporting
their woollen manufactures thither. What England wanted was, not a fair
competition with Ireland, but a monopoly; she was resolved to prevent
Ireland not merely from underselling her in foreign markets, but from
selling there at all.
The natural and actual result of this exorbitant greed was that the Irish
people were driven to have recourse to the method of "running the wool,"
i.e. smuggling it away to foreign markets. The severest penalties were
enacted by the British legislature and by the Irish House of Commons
against this practice, but they were enacted in vain. It was impossible to
seal up a country of whose thirty-two counties nineteen are maritime and
the rest washed by fine rivers that empty themselves into the sea. The
wool running prevailed to an immense extent, and by means of it France,
Germany, and Spain were able to undersell England in the foreign markets,
and England lost millions of pounds by virtue of the Irish contraband
supplies. The market price of Europe mocked the English importation
duties, and more than defeated the prohibition. At last, in 1739, after
forty years of oppression here and loss to herself, England relaxed the
severity of the restrictions, and as her own House of Commons Journal
acknowledges, this relaxation was made for the benefit of the English
woollen manufactures. For the twenty-three years that succeeded King
William's pledge to ruin the best trade in this country, there is an
unvaried record of the depression and misery of the Irish people, and
during all this period and in the face of all this acknowledgment, there
was not even a proposal of any law, saving one about casks for butter and
tallow, to encourage our manufactures, or to tolerate our trade, or to let
the country revive. There was a native parliament here, and why did they
exhibit this wondrous apathy? "Because," says our author, "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."
In 1723, the petition of the woollen weavers and clothiers of Dublin
forced from the Lord Lieutenant in his speech from the throne a
recommendation to find out some employment for the poor, but neither
petition nor speech produced any effect. From 1723 to 1729 the distress
continued; in the latter year it was aggravated by a famine. The scarcity
was caused not by any blight of the land produce, but by the despair of
the farmers; for when exportation is prohibited, and the manufacturing
class at home is without employment and without money to buy, farmers will
abandon tillage and dearth must ensue. In a few years more there was
another scarcity of food, and then the Lord Lieutenant congratulated the
country on the success of the linen trade, and recommended the
encouragement of tillage. Nothing, however, was done to alter the
conditions on which the improvement of the tillage depended, "because the
Commons said that the evil was out of their reach and that the poor were
not employed because they were discouraged by restrictive laws from
working up the materials of the country." Thus matters went on from bad to
worse until after the peace of 1745, when there came an influx of money,
by which the debt that had been contracted for England's Jacobite war of
1715 was paid off in 1754, and the result of this discharge was increased
burdens on the country without any accompanying relief to commerce and
industries. The Treasury balance led, in 1753, to a dispute as to the
right of disposing of it between the King and the Commons; and this
dispute was the first beginning of parliamentary life in Ireland.[116] To
get rid of the redundancy and to leave the less for English pensions and
Government salaries, works of local improvement were undertaken, and these
undertakings, so far as they were carried out, helped to give employment
and to stimulate agriculture.
This, however, was but a partial and insufficient remedy for the universal
distress, and small as it was, it was obtained against the will of the
English Government. No real relief was conferred on the country, and
within a couple of years more the revenue fell off, and L20,000 was voted
for the relief of the poor.
In 1757[117] it was thought an amazing feat when Pery carried his Land
Carriage and Coal Acts; and then, in 1761, came the augmentation of the
army.[118] On the breaking out of the Spanish war, there was a fresh vote
of credit, and still no relief to manufacturers or to agriculturists. This
distress, caused by English-made laws, Hutchinson points out, produced the
White Boys, and for the cure of this distress an increased attention to
the Charter Schools was recommended. By 1771 the National Debt had largely
increased, while income had diminished, and in a couple of years more the
linen trade was rapidly declining, while pensions and charges on the
establishment were greatly increased.
The Provost dwells on the illustrative fact, that, whether the Debt was
increased or diminished, and however much the pensions and salaries were
multiplied, the distress and wretchedness of the body of the people
continued the same. The linen manufacture for a while prospered, and
afforded a limited relief in a few places; but tillage was declining, and
destitution was all round. The distress was noticed in the House, but
nothing effectual was attempted, and Hutchinson cannot refrain from
exclaiming: "Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe,
enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or
pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and
wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of
the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the
ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give
them employment and food, had not left sufficient memorials of their
wretchedness; if their habitations, apparel, and food, were not sufficient
proofs, I should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest
the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of
unemployed industry."
All these restrictions were enacted by England, not from any actual loss
that she had sustained by Irish competition, but from an apprehension of
loss. Hutchinson shows how groundless the apprehension was, and he
protests against the iniquity of sacrificing the happiness of a great and
ancient kingdom, and the welfare of millions of its people, to guard
against an imagined decrease in the value of English land. If
wool-spinning was cheaper in Ireland than in England, that was because the
Irish operatives had to live on food--"potatoes and milk, or more
frequently water"[119]--with which the English would not be content; but
wages and the cost of producing would increase with the opening of trade,
and with the increase of manufactures. England's greedy monopoly was
sinking the Irish people, while fair trade would really lessen the cheap
labour competition which the English masters professed to dread. An open
wool trade in Ireland would, moreover, be mainly carried on by English
capitalists and by English shipping, just as in ancient Egypt, China, and
Hindostan, the export trade used to be conducted by foreigners; and just
as in the victualling trade of Ireland, the natives were but factors to
the English. On every side, therefore, the English themselves suffered as
much by the restrictions as the Irish, and they would be, if they could
but see it, proportionate gainers by the removal of the restrictions.
Hutchinson goes on to show that England gets one-third of the wealth of
Ireland, and that she would get more than the half of the benefit of the
wool trade; but that even so the country would be the better for the small
share of the gains that would be allowed to remain with her. Agriculture
would be encouraged, and manufactures would be promoted; and there would
be a circulation of money amongst the people. Taxes were proportionately
heavier in Ireland than in England, when the annual earnings, expenditure,
rentals, circulating specie, and personal property of the two countries
were compared. The English were mistaken in some of the calculations on
which they grounded the commercial restrictions, and they would be
commercial gainers by the removal of the restrictions; but it was not for
the benefit of England, and it was for the benefit of Ireland, that the
Provost demanded free and open commerce for the produce and manufactures
of this country. This was what he claimed and argued for, and this was
what he very largely helped to obtain for Ireland; and this was the
service that won him back a great deal of the popularity which he had
forfeited by his hired subserviency to the English party.
There is a good deal of repetition in the Provost's book as we have it,
but this is accounted for by the fact that the book was originally
published in the form of letters.[120] The repetitions, moreover, are not
altogether artistic blemishes, for they are made to intensify, and, as it
were, to multiply, the identical facts by presenting them in fresh
connections. This is notably the case in regard of the Provost's doublings
back on the wool trade, and on the linen trade, and on England's dealings
with Ireland in regard of both these trades. After the destruction of the
cattle trade these were the two sources of industry left to this country,
and therefore the record of the treatment and evolution of these trades is
in fact the history of the commercial relations between England and this
country. The Provost accordingly takes the wool and the linen trade as the
fixed pillars of his discourse, and he interpolates the spaces between
them with coincident statistics that illustrate his thesis. It is thus
that in page 83 he comes back to the wool trade to show the falsehood of
the English trade returns, which asserted that the trade "was set up here
since the reduction of Ireland" by Cromwell. The trade had been a
flourishing one in this country from the time of Edward III. Then in the
Sixth Letter the Provost takes up the linen trade again, for the purpose
of showing more emphatically, in the first place, that it was forced on
Ireland as an equivalent for the loss of the wool trade; in the second
place, that it was not at all an equivalent--and in the third place, that
England before long broke her stipulations with this country, and so
_discouraged_ the hemp and linen manufacture of Ireland, that the Irish
had to abandon the flax culture altogether. In 1705, leave was given to
Ireland to export some sorts of linen to the colonies, but leave was not
given to bring back dye stuffs or other colonial produce. In 1743,
bounties were offered on exports of Irish linen, provided they were
shipped from English ports; but there was already a duty of thirty per
cent. on _foreign_ linen imported into England; and thus Ireland was, of
course, deprived of the colonial and other markets. Not till 1777 were the
American markets opened to Ireland, and by that time the emigration of the
Ulster linen-workers had become so enormous, that America was, in fact, a
rival in the trade. What words can more offensively and more bitterly
express the oppression of the country than this leave to trade with other
countries? It took Grattan and Hussey Burgh "with their coats off," and it
took the Volunteers with their motto "Free Trade, or ----," to sweep away
this badge of slavery. All the time England was multiplying pensions and
salaries here; she was levying taxes and draining rents; and, as
Hutchinson clearly puts it, Ireland "was paying to Great Britain double
the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which
Great Britain allows her. It would be difficult to find a similar
instance in the history of mankind." Again and again the Provost comes
back to point out the open tyranny and the underhand unfairness of
England's commercial legislation for this country, and in the Seventh
Letter he repeats that this legislation was a departure from the policy
which was guaranteed by Magna Charta, and which had prevailed from the
time of Edward III. When a supposed compensation was afterwards offered,
it was no more than what Ireland had had before, and the liberty granted
by Queen Anne was merely allowing us to do in regard of one manufacture
what had previously been a right in every instance.
"At this earlier period, then," says Hutchinson, "the English commercial
system and the Irish, so far as it depended upon the English statute law,
was the same; and before this period, so far as it depended upon the
common law and Magna Charta, it was also the same."
"This was the voice of nature," he adds, "and the dictate of sound and
generous policy; it proclaimed to the nations that they should not give to
strangers the bread of their own children; that the produce of the soil
should support the inhabitants of the country; that their industry should
be exercised on their own materials, and that the poor should be employed,
clothed, and fed.
"This policy was liberal, just, and equal; it opened the resources and
cultivated the strength of every part of the empire."