chairman of the Ways and Means Committee of the same body in 1782-3, denounced as "corrupt," was induced to lay an export duty on cloths sent to England, instead of an import duty on cloths brought from England, the effect of which was to deprive Irish manufacturers of the English market. At this time the French, by raising their protective duties against England, were getting that foothold which soon enabled them to undersell England in woolen cloths in all the markets of Europe.

On measures introduced in 1783 by Mr. Gardner, the Irish Parliament adopted a definitely protective policy, which England suffered her to do without open resistance, owing to her own humiliation in the loss of America. So prosperous was Ireland for a brief period that her Parliament appropriated £50,000 to assist Swiss immigrants, principally artisans, in locating in Waterford. Her population increased by 3,000,000 in twenty years.' In 1799, when the act of union with England was first proposed in the Irish Parliament and defeated, the House of Commons, in its address to the King, stated soundly and cogently the reasons for defeating it.†

*

The late premier has recently given the seal of his emphatic approval to the statement that the means by which England cozened and bought the passage of the Act of Union through the Irish Parliament were intensely corrupt. Gladstone thus gives his sanction to the specifications of corruption embodied in Plowden's and other narratives of this transaction. Un

"There is

* Lord Clare, speaking about the condition of Ireland at this period, says: not a civilized nation on the face of the habitable globe which had advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manufacture, with the same rapidity in the same period as Ireland."

Lord Plunkett, describing Ireland at the same time, says: "Laws well arranged and administered, a constitution fully recognized and established, her revenues, her trade, her manufactures, thriving beyond the hope or example of any other country of her extent."

+ The address said: "Giving the name of Union to the measure is a delusion. . . . In manufactures any attempt it makes to offer any benefit which we do not now enjoy is vain and delusive, and wherever it is to have effect, that effect will be our injury. Most of the duties on imports which operate as protection to our manufactures, are under its provisions to be either removed or reduced immediately, and those which will be reduced are to cease entirely at a limited time, though many of our manufactures owe their existence to the protection of these duties, and though it is not in the power of human wisdom to foresee any precise time when they may be able to thrive without them. Your Majesty's faithful commons feel more than ordinary interest in laying this fact before you, because they have under your approbation raised up and nursed many of these manufactures, and by so doing have encouraged much capital to be invested in them, the proprietors of which are now to be left unprotected, and to he deprived of the Parliament, on whose faith they embarked themselves, their families and properties, in the undertaking." Plowden's Review, vol. v. Appendix, page 34.

THE ACT OF UNION.

493

questionably, Gladstone would not have sanctioned the charge without knowing, not only that it was true, but that it would not be in the power of any Englishman to deny it. Moreover, no Englishman of note has denied it, and it therefore stands virtually admitted by the whole English nation.*

The Act of Union was designed to promote Englishmen's profits by transferring numerous branches of industry from Ireland to England. This was effected by removing all duties, or nearly all, from English goods shipped into Ireland, while leaving considerable duties on those shipped from Ireland into England. The doctrine that the "consumer always pays the duty," and hence that Englishmen would only be taxing, instead of benefiting, themselves, was forgotten. The practice of English legislators, in passing the Act of Union, contradicts the English economists, almost without exception. The following schedule of rates of duties, from Plowden's Review, shows how England kindly gave free goods to Ireland and labored on under the burden of tariff taxes on all goods purchased by her own people from Ireland :

*The charge is thus set forth in Battersley's "Repealer's Manual": "The amount of salaries given to those who held places during the King's pleasure, and whose votes mainly contrived to carry the Union, is set down &t £68,877; in addition there were twenty-six lawyers who received places; two hundred borough mongers, who received for their votes £1,500,000. New Titles-61 were given for marquises, 6 earls, 13 viscounts, 3 viscountesses, 23 barons, 12 baronets. The price of a single vote was familiarly known-it was £8,000, or a civil or military appointment to the value of £2,000 per annum. They were considered by the government party simple, who only took one of three. The dexterous always managed to get at least two of three, and it would not be difficult to mention the names of twelve or twenty members who con. trived to obtain the entire three-the £8,000, the civil appointment, and the military appointment,"

The decline in the manufacturing industries of Ireland, in the thirty years following the repeal, and even prior to the breaking out of the potato rot, and the Irish famine of 1846-9, reduces the problem of the unfitness of any one race of men to rule another, to the definiteness of a demonstration in mathematics. The thirty years, preceding 1800, were years of as great prosperity in Ireland as in England, and of a growth in population which, if continued to the present, would have given Ireland to-day 20, 000,000 people. It is difficult to estimate the amount of profit, made by English manufacturers and merchants, out of the subversion of Irish industries.* They sold increasingly, in Ireland, the goods of every kind which Irish artisans had been making previous to the Act of Union. Temporarily, therefore, in all these thirty years the Union must have brought to English mills exactly the grist they sought.

Up to 1846 the Irish people, who were so largely driven out of manufactures, continued to have some protection on their agriculture in the form of a duty on the importation of corn.

*The following tables show the subversion of Irish industries:

In

prosperous weavers.
stocking making.

"Drogheda, stocking making.

"Dublin, liberty's weavers.

linen yarn

Dublin, silk weavers....

Dublin, 1800, master woolen manufacturers

hands employed....

master wool combers

hands employed...

64

46

carpet manufacturers.

hands employed

Cork,

braid weavers

"6 worsted weavers.

The importation of raw silk for manufacture shrank from 144,275 pounds to 3,190 pounds in 1831. Shoes exported to America declined from a value of $70,000 to noth.

that year the duties on corn were repealed. There had been a "blight" in 1831, caused by that continual cropping of land to one or two crops without rotation, which is the necessary mode of tilling the soil where no sufficient or near markets exist. The potato rot of 1846 would never have occurred, if the modes of agriculture had continued to be what they were before the Act of Union. In the year of the repeal of the corn laws, therefore, the great famine descended upon Ireland, for causes as inseparably resultant from the economic policy of England as were the similar famines in India. The result goes far toward proving that those large aggregations of men, which we call nations, have not yet advanced to the possession of a conscience, or an economic intelligence. The taxation of one nation by another, in the form of profits on its enforced trade, in the degree that barely enriches the taxing nation, but plunges the taxed nation into famine, while it is really a form of persecution more painful than rack, stake, or thumbscrew, more unprincipled than the Inquisition and more desolating than the crusades, still receives the polite genuflexions of thousands, and is called free trade.

ing. The export of fish, soap, candles, disappeared. Shipping employed in carrying Irish commerce shrank to one-fifth its previous tonnage. Forty vessels had once carried Irish goods to Newfoundland. None were any longer required. The consumption of tea by the Irish people shrank to one-twentieth in 1821 what it had been in 1786. Before the Union, 200,000 people were employed in factories. In 1850 only 24,725. -["Why Ireland is Poor," by John F. Scanlon.

CHAPTER XIII.

TAXATION CONTINUED.

187. France-Conditions.-The practice of France, in raising revenue, is as little studied in the United States, as that of Germany, or Russia. Yet the conditions, of each of these countries are more nearly like those of America, than are those of England, whose precepts, if not whose practice, Americans give more attention to, than to those of any country outside their own. According to the French census of 1872, a slightly greater proportion of the people of France are maintained by agriculture, than of the United States, according to its census of 1880. In France, out of a total population of 35,121,992, no less than 18,513,325, or 52.71 per cent., were tillers of the soil, or members of their families. The number in mines and manufactures (classed as industrial) were 8,451,344, being 24.06 per cent., 8.43 per cent. of the people being in commerce, 2.51 per cent. in transport, credit banking, and commission, 0.62 per cent were clergy of all religions, 5.99 per cent. were annuitants, 1.56 per cent. were in the armed force, and 1.56 per cent. in the administration of the government.* It is remarkable, in contrast with England, that the number of those doing business on their own account, as proprietors and managers, are 6,674,248, while the total of those acting under direction of others in production, as directing overseers, workmen (ouvriers), and day-laborers, amount to only 6,151,726. The families, including the domestic servants, of those who are their own entrepreneurs, or employers, in the work of production, number 21,604,526, or about two-thirds in a total of 34,356,081.

Every alternate man, in France, is his own employer.

*"Condition of Nations," by Kolb.

In Great