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Page 20
CHAPTER VI
THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2)
If the reader cares to push forward the line of thought suggested in the
preceding pages and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so without
difficulty. He has but to compare the post-Union history of linen with
that of cotton. Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the
State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of
mercantilism. Within certain limits--such as the steady resolve to
confine it, in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point of
geography, to Ulster--it had behind it at the Union a century of
encouragement. It is calculated that between 1700 and 1800 it had
received bounties, English and Irish, totalling more than,�2,500,000. In
other words it had a chance to accumulate capital. Even linen declined
after the Union partly from the direct effects of that measure, partly
from the growing intensity of the Industrial Revolution. But the
capital accumulated, the commercial good name established under native
government carried the manufacturers through. These were able towards
1830 to introduce the new machinery and the new processes, and to
weather the tempest of competition. Cotton, on the other hand, was a
very recent arrival. It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave
promise of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital told more and
more as changes in the technique of transportation and production
ushered in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival,
involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the
cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared.
But let us resume the parable. If the "business man" responds to
capital, he will certainly not be obtuse to the appeal of coal. In this
feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at a disadvantage, and it
was promised that the free trade with Great Britain inaugurated by the
Union would "blend" with her the resources of the latter country. Did
she obtain free trade in coal? Miss Murray, a Unionist, in her
"Commercial Relations between England and Ireland" tells the story in
part:
"Coals again had hitherto been exported from Great Britain at a
duty of gd. per ton; this duty was to cease but the Irish import
duty on coal was to be made perpetual, and that at a time when all
coasting duties in England and Scotland had been abolished. Dublin
especially would suffer from this arrangement, for the duty there
on coals imported was is. 8-4/5d. per ton, while that in the rest
of Ireland was only 9-1/2d. This was because a local duty of 1s.
per ton existed in Dublin for the internal improvement of the city;
this local duty was blended by the Union arrangements with the
general duty on the article, and its perpetual continuance was thus
enforced. All this shows how little Irish affairs were understood
in England."
But was it a failure of the English intellect or a lapse of the English
will? Except through the Platonic intuition which reduces all sin to
terms of ignorance I cannot accept the former explanation. What is
certain is that there was no lack of contemporary protest. There existed
in Dublin in 1828 a Society for the Improvement of Ireland, an active
body which included in its membership the Lord Mayor (a high Tory, of
course), Lord Cloncurry, and a long list of notable names such as
Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George
Moore, and Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the Society appointed
a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture,
commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information
touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent
decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how
things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish
Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried
coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal
imported from Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to abolish the
bounty and double the levy on imports. Writing twenty-eight years later
the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a
policy, so foolish and so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre
vistas to any student of economic history:
"Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting
the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of
Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee
are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all
the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most
rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circumstance that, in the
metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect
to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior,
superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of
the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of
employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in
Europe, _there is not a factory for the production of either silk,
linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled
by a steam engine_."
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