J. G. Swift MacNeill

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]