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Page 18
But a truce to these dismal chronicles. The _post hoc_ may be taken as
established; was it a _propter hoc_? Was the Union the cause as well as
the antecedent of this decay? No economist, acquainted with the facts,
can fail to answer in the affirmative. The causal connection between two
realities could not be more manifest. Let us examine it very briefly.
I begin of necessity with the principle of freedom, for freedom is the
dominating force in economic life. No instance can be cited of a modern
people of European civilisation that ever prospered while held
politically in subjection.
"All history," writes Professor Marshall of Cambridge, the doyen of
Political Economy in England, "is full of the record of
inefficiency caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, and
other forms of civil and political oppression and repression."
The Act of Union was, as has been said, one of those spiritual outrages
which, in their reactions, are like lead poured into the veins. It
lowered the vital resources of Ireland. It made hope an absentee, and
enterprise an exile. That was its first-fruits of disaster.
These commonplaces of the gospel of freedom "for which Hampden died in
the field and Sidney on the scaffold" will possibly appear to their
modern descendants mystical, sentimental, and remote from real life. For
there is no one in the world so ready as your modern Englishman to deny
that he is a man in order to prove that he is a business-man.
Fortunately we can establish for this strange being, who has thus
indecently stripped himself of humanity, and establish in very clear
and indisputable fashion the cash nexus between Unionism and decay. The
argument is simple.
The Union came precisely in the period in which capital was beginning to
dominate the organisation of industry. The Union denuded Ireland of the
capital which would have enabled her to transform the technique of her
manufactures, and so maintain the ground won under Grattan's Parliament.
The channels through which this export of capital proceeded were
absenteeism and over-taxation.
The first statement in this paragraph of plaint calls for no
elaboration. Arnold Toynbee took as the terminal dates of the Industrial
Revolution the years 1760 and 1830. The last generation of the
eighteenth century brought to birth the great inventions, but it was the
first generation of the nineteenth that founded on them large scale
production, and settled the structure of modern industry. Not without
profound disturbance and incalculable suffering was the new system
established in England; the story may be read in the pages of Marx,
Cunningham, Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic historians. But, for
all the blood and tears, it was established. Insulated from the
continental turmoil, served by her Titanic bondsmen coal and iron,
England was able to defeat the Titan, Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny
that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as
the phrase goes, to the pin of her collar. But the Union made her task
impossible. Lord Castlereagh was quite right in pointing to the
accumulation of capital as the characteristic advantage of England.
Through centuries of political freedom that process had gone on without
interruption. Ireland, on the contrary, had been scientifically pillaged
by the application to her of the "colonial system" from 1663 to 1779; I
deliberately exclude the previous waste of war and confiscation. She had
but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, despite her brilliant
success in that period, she had not time to accumulate capital to any
great extent. But Grattan's Parliament had shown itself extraordinarily
astute and steady of purpose in its economic policy. Had its guidance
continued--conservative taxation, adroit bounties, and that close
scrutiny and eager discussion of the movements of industry which stands
recorded in its Journal--the manufactures of Ireland would have
weathered the storm. But the luck was as usual against her. Instead of
wise leadership from Dublin the gods decreed that she should have for
portion the hard indifference and savage taxation of Westminster.
Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, stripped of the capital
that would have served as a commissariat of advance in that crucial
struggle, she went down.
I am not to make here the case for Ireland in respect of over-taxation.
It was made definitely in the Report of the Childers Commission, a
document which no Englishman reads, lest in coming to the light he
should have his sins too sharply rebuked. It has been developed and
clarified in many speeches and essays and in some books. To grasp it is
to find your road to Damascus on the Irish Question. But for the moment
we are concerned with but one aspect, namely, the export of capital from
Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that
process. Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all
rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union
arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they
combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical
technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed
the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk,
and appropriated it for her own nourishment. One has a sort of gloomy
pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we
were not duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons--in
those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom--tore
the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare
his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said:
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