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Page 19
"But the noble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of
Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly. Ireland, he
says, must contribute to every war, and the Minister won't trust to
interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. _He
must have her purse within his own grasp_. While three hundred men
hold it in Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out of
his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over and lay it at his
feet, and then he will have full and uncontrolled power."
So it came about. Even before the Union Grattan's Parliament had, of its
own free will and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into debt
for the first time to help England against France. But, as Foster
indicated, the Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of
their resources. They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became
a necessary ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland was
swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr
Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen
years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817
her funded debt was increased from �28,541,157 to �112,684,773, an
augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years
following the Union she paid in taxes �78,000,000 as against �31,000,000
in the last fifteen years preceding the Union. After the amalgamation of
the Exchequers in 1817 the case becomes clearer. In 1819-20, for
instance, the revenue contributed by Ireland was �5,256,564, of which
only �1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great
Britain of �3,691,684. For 1829-30 the tribute was �4,156,576.
Let us now inquire how things stood with regard to absenteeism. This had
existed before the Union'; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to
Johnson's "Dictionary" he will find it damned in a definition. But it
was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of
Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs
of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and
more material evidence in those fallen and ravaged mansions which now
constitute the worst slums of our capital city.
One figure may be cited by way of illustration. Before the Union "98
Peers, and a proportionate number of wealthy Commoners" lived in Dublin.
The number of resident Peers in 1825 was twelve. At present, as I learn
from those who read the sixpenny illustrateds, there is one. But when
they abandoned Ireland they did not leave their rents behind. And it was
a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled
between 1790 and 1833. Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr
D'Alton in his "History of the County Dublin," a book quite innocent of
politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not
less than �3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than �4,000,000, an
under-estimate. If we average these figures over the period we find that
during the first thirty years of Union, that is to say during the most
critical phase of the Industrial Revolution, not less than �105,000,000
of Irish capital was "exported" from Ireland to Great Britain through
the channel of absenteeism.
Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute in similar fashion, and
taking the lowest estimates, I am unable to reach a less total than
�120,000,000 for the same period. In other words, the effect of the
Union was to withdraw from Ireland during the thirty years that settled
the economic structure of modern industry not less than _�_225,000,000.
Let me draw the argument together in words which I have used elsewhere,
and which others can no doubt easily better:
"We have heard, in our day, a long-drawn denunciation of a Liberal
government on the score that it had, by predatory taxation, driven
English capital out of the country, and compromised the industrial
future of England. We have seen in our own day gilt-edged
securities, bank, insurance, railway, and brewery shares in Great
Britain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of _�_250,000,000 on
the Boer War. We know that in economic history effects are, in a
notable way, cumulative; so clearly marked is the line of
continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a
nail in all England that could not be traced back to savings made
before the Norman Conquest. A hundred instances admonish us that,
in industrial life, nothing fails like failure. When we put all
these considerations together, and give them a concrete
application, can we doubt that in over-taxation and the withdrawal
of capital we have the prime _causa causans_ of the decay of
Ireland under the Union?"
In this wise did Pitt "blend Ireland with the industry and capital of
Great Britain." Cupped by his finance she gave the venal blood of her
industry to strengthen the predominant partner, and to help him to
exclude for a time from these islands that pernicious French Democracy
in which all states and peoples have since found redemption. Such was
the first chapter in the Economics of Unionism.
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