INTRODUCTION.
Although this work was published anonymously, there never was any question as to who was its author. It was always known to be the production of Provost Hely Hutchinson, and its first appearance was greeted with two different sorts of reception. It was burned by the Common Hangman so effectually, that Mr. Flood said he would give a thousand pounds for a copy and that the libraries of all the three branches of the legislature could not produce a copy[108]—and at the same time it “earned Mr. Hely Hutchinson’s pardon from Irish patriotism for his subserviency to the Court and Lord Townshend.”[109] The book was the outcome of the stubborn inability of English rulers to interpret the face of this country; and the first sketch of the publication was the papers which the author contributed to Lord Lieutenant Buckinghamshire in 1779 as to the cause of the existing ruin here and as to its cure. The purport of the Letters was to exhibit, calmly and seriously, and as by a friend to both countries, the grievous oppressions which the greedy spirit of English trade inflicted on the commerce, industries, and manufactures of Ireland during the century and a quarter that extended from the Restoration of Charles II. to the rise of Grattan. The author draws all his statements from the Statute Books and Commons Journals of both kingdoms, while he does not fail to support his own conclusions and comments by State Papers and Statistical Returns that possess an authority equal to that of the Statutes. He lays the whole length and breadth of the position steadily and searchingly before the Viceroy’s eyes. He shows him that the then state of Ireland teemed with every circumstance of national poverty, while the country itself abounded in the conditions of national prosperity. Of productiveness there was no lack; but land produce was greatly reduced in value; wool had fallen one half, wheat one third, black cattle in the same proportion, and hides in a much greater. There were no buyers, tenants were not to be found, landlords lost one fourth of their rents, merchants could do no business, and within two years over twenty thousand manufacturers in this city were disemployed, beggared, and supported by alms. All this was after a period of fourscore years of profound internal peace—and the question was, what was the cause of it?
This is what the author sets himself to investigate in the Letters, and in regard of sweep of survey, historic retrospect, statistical quotation, and close economic comment, the investigation leaves little to be desired. The Provost is anxious, in the first place, to point out that it was not absentee rents, salaries, profits of offices, and pensions that caused the decline—and this forestalling admonition is no more than what might be expected from a man who was such an insatiable trafficker in places, and salaries, and profits, and pensions. He admits that these things made the decline more rapid, but a “more radical” cause was to be assigned for a malady that arose out of the constitution itself. He maintains that Ireland was flourishing, prosperous, and wealthy under James and Charles I., and that after the Restoration it was one of the most improved and improving spots in Europe. This is a somewhat poetical view, especially when we remember how Strafford ruined the landowners and destroyed the wool trade; but wretched as was the condition of the people under the Stuarts, it may have been less unendurable than the condition under “a succession of five excellent sovereigns.” In truth, talking about the perpetually developed prosperity of the Irish people under the several successions of English misrule is the very irony of pharisaism, although the recital is a stereotyped phrase of English officials from the Tudor employés down to those of our own days,[110] none of whom ever fail to find “the strings of the Irish harp all in tune.” In some periods the distress may have been more intense than in others, and in all periods there were not wanting instances of individual aggrandisement—but the general wretchedness remained fast fixed. England has been a constant source of woe to Ireland, and suffering is the badge of all our tribe. In any strict assize Hutchinson would be laughed out of Court for essaying to plead the wealth and prosperity of Ireland directly after the devastations of the Carews and Mountjoys, after the Desmond and Ulster confiscations and evictions, and after the Cromwellian atrocities. Hutchinson knew quite well what the condition of the people was all through; but it suited him, rhetorically, to cut out a corner of the picture and to colour that corner very highly. Graziers used to make a good thing of their cattle and of their wool, and economic returns of their exports showed pleasant balance sheets; but graziers were not the Irish people any more than Manchester is England now. In fact, they were chiefly English landowners here, and the extent of their exports is only the measure of the misery which they left unpitied and unrelieved. This, however, was not the philosophy which Hutchinson wanted to preach; and he was far too clear-headed a man to make a mistake as to what he wanted to say. He accordingly lays hold on the figures that set off his argument, and out of fancy premises he draws a solid conclusion which in no sense needed such controvertible data. What was certain was that Ireland possessed the conditions of prosperity, and that it teemed with actual poverty. The question was, what caused this contradiction? The answer was, England caused it; and this is the answer which Hutchinson plainly and nakedly gives. In all the rest of his book—i.e. from Letter III. to the close—he sustains this thesis with a directness that cannot be gainsayed or resisted. Having related the efforts of Strafford—one of the most malignant enemies that Ireland ever encountered—to crush the wool trade here in the time of Charles I., Hutchinson comes to the acts of the English under Charles II. and William III.
Charles, so far as he could have a liking for anything outside his pleasures, had a liking for Ireland; and William feeling that he had already done Ireland wrong enough, was disposed at last to be merciful and liberal towards her; but both of the kings were overborne by their English parliaments.
In 1663, the English Act “for encouragement of Trade”! contained an insidious clause, imposing a penalty of £2 on each head of Irish cattle, and 10s. on each sheep imported into England between July and December. In 1666, the “Act against importing cattle from Ireland and other places beyond seas, and fish taken by foreigners” was passed, and to annoy the king the importation was termed a “nuisance.”[111] This Act was made perpetual by the “Act of 1678, prohibiting the importation of cattle from Ireland.” This latter Act was not repealed until the 5th of George III., when the permission was granted for seven years; the permission was made perpetual by the 16th of the same reign.
Carte[112] relates at length and with an honest sympathy with Ireland, the whole incident of 1663-8. He tells how the Duke of Ormond, who was then Lord Lieutenant here, together with his valiant son, Lord Ossory, strove manfully for this country, and how he prevailed with the king to delay the obnoxious measure. He mentions also Ormond’s noble enterprise in establishing at Clonmel the flourishing Walloon woollen manufactory. Carte records likewise how, in 1666, the Dublin people, when scant of money by virtue of English jealousy, sent over a contribution of 30,000 fat oxen to feed the Londoners who had suffered by the great fire, and how ungraciously the generous boon was received by the ill-mannered English victuallers and by their bribed spokesmen in high places.[113]
Notwithstanding this benevolence of the Irish people, the English persisted in ruining their cattle trade, and before the end of William’s reign they passed a further law to ruin the Irish woollen trade. This was in 1699, and the long depression and degradation which resulted from it prove, says Hutchinson, “this melancholy truth, that a country will sooner recover from the miseries and devastations occasioned by war, invasion, rebellion, and massacre, than from laws restraining the commerce, discouraging the manufactures, fettering the industry, and, above all, breaking the spirit of the people.”
This melancholy truth the Provost goes on to illustrate and enforce, and he does this by reciting the facts from the beginning, and from year to year continually, as they are recorded in the journals of Parliament. The restriction of the cattle trade in 1666, when the people, in reliance on the continuance of the trade, had greatly increased their live-stocks, compelled the Irish to develop their wool trade. They had been encouraged by their English rulers to devote their energies to this industry, because the “country was so fertile by nature, and so advantageously situated for trade and navigation.” Suddenly a Bill was introduced into the English parliament in 1697 and passed in 1699, restraining the exportation of woollen manufactures from Ireland, and beseeching His Majesty “in the most public and effectual way that may be, to declare to all his subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture hath long, and will ever be, looked upon with jealousy by all his subjects of this [England] kingdom,” and further “to enjoin all those he employed in Ireland to make it their care and use their utmost diligence, to hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland except to be imported hither [to England], and for the discouraging the woollen manufacture,” &c. To this address King William gave the ever memorable reply: “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen trade in Ireland, and to encourage the linen manufacture there;[114] and to promote the trade of England;” and he wrote to the Lords Justices over here to have a measure to that effect passed in the Irish parliament. The Lords Justices accordingly made “a quickening speech” to both Houses; a Bill for their acceptance was transmitted from the Castle, and the Irish parliament, in which the Williamite influence was dominant, passed the measure that annihilated the industry and prosperity of their country.[115] By this law an additional duty of twenty per cent. was imposed on broadcloth, and of ten per cent. on all new draperies except friezes; and the law which was enacted in January, 1699, was to be in force for three years. This law, prohibitive as it was, did not, however, satisfy England. In the June of the same year the English parliament passed a perpetual law, not overtaxing but expressly prohibiting the exportation from Ireland of all goods made of or mixed with wool, except to England and Wales, and with the licence of the Revenue Commissioners. Previous English Acts had made the duties on the importation into England practically prohibitive, and therefore the last Act operated as a suppression of exportation. The Irish were already prevented from importing dye-stuffs from the colonies, and from exporting their woollen manufactures thither. What England wanted was, not a fair competition with Ireland, but a monopoly; she was resolved to prevent Ireland not merely from underselling her in foreign markets, but from selling there at all.
The natural and actual result of this exorbitant greed was that the Irish people were driven to have recourse to the method of “running the wool,” i.e. smuggling it away to foreign markets. The severest penalties were enacted by the British legislature and by the Irish House of Commons against this practice, but they were enacted in vain. It was impossible to seal up a country of whose thirty-two counties nineteen are maritime and the rest washed by fine rivers that empty themselves into the sea. The wool running prevailed to an immense extent, and by means of it France, Germany, and Spain were able to undersell England in the foreign markets, and England lost millions of pounds by virtue of the Irish contraband supplies. The market price of Europe mocked the English importation duties, and more than defeated the prohibition. At last, in 1739, after forty years of oppression here and loss to herself, England relaxed the severity of the restrictions, and as her own House of Commons Journal acknowledges, this relaxation was made for the benefit of the English woollen manufactures. For the twenty-three years that succeeded King William’s pledge to ruin the best trade in this country, there is an unvaried record of the depression and misery of the Irish people, and during all this period and in the face of all this acknowledgment, there was not even a proposal of any law, saving one about casks for butter and tallow, to encourage our manufactures, or to tolerate our trade, or to let the country revive. There was a native parliament here, and why did they exhibit this wondrous apathy? “Because,” says our author, “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.”
In 1723, the petition of the woollen weavers and clothiers of Dublin forced from the Lord Lieutenant in his speech from the throne a recommendation to find out some employment for the poor, but neither petition nor speech produced any effect. From 1723 to 1729 the distress continued; in the latter year it was aggravated by a famine. The scarcity was caused not by any blight of the land produce, but by the despair of the farmers; for when exportation is prohibited, and the manufacturing class at home is without employment and without money to buy, farmers will abandon tillage and dearth must ensue. In a few years more there was another scarcity of food, and then the Lord Lieutenant congratulated the country on the success of the linen trade, and recommended the encouragement of tillage. Nothing, however, was done to alter the conditions on which the improvement of the tillage depended, “because the Commons said that the evil was out of their reach and that the poor were not employed because they were discouraged by restrictive laws from working up the materials of the country.” Thus matters went on from bad to worse until after the peace of 1745, when there came an influx of money, by which the debt that had been contracted for England’s Jacobite war of 1715 was paid off in 1754, and the result of this discharge was increased burdens on the country without any accompanying relief to commerce and industries. The Treasury balance led, in 1753, to a dispute as to the right of disposing of it between the King and the Commons; and this dispute was the first beginning of parliamentary life in Ireland.[116] To get rid of the redundancy and to leave the less for English pensions and Government salaries, works of local improvement were undertaken, and these undertakings, so far as they were carried out, helped to give employment and to stimulate agriculture.
This, however, was but a partial and insufficient remedy for the universal distress, and small as it was, it was obtained against the will of the English Government. No real relief was conferred on the country, and within a couple of years more the revenue fell off, and £20,000 was voted for the relief of the poor.
In 1757[117] it was thought an amazing feat when Pery carried his Land Carriage and Coal Acts; and then, in 1761, came the augmentation of the army.[118] On the breaking out of the Spanish war, there was a fresh vote of credit, and still no relief to manufacturers or to agriculturists. This distress, caused by English-made laws, Hutchinson points out, produced the White Boys, and for the cure of this distress an increased attention to the Charter Schools was recommended. By 1771 the National Debt had largely increased, while income had diminished, and in a couple of years more the linen trade was rapidly declining, while pensions and charges on the establishment were greatly increased.
The Provost dwells on the illustrative fact, that, whether the Debt was increased or diminished, and however much the pensions and salaries were multiplied, the distress and wretchedness of the body of the people continued the same. The linen manufacture for a while prospered, and afforded a limited relief in a few places; but tillage was declining, and destitution was all round. The distress was noticed in the House, but nothing effectual was attempted, and Hutchinson cannot refrain from exclaiming: “Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe, enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give them employment and food, had not left sufficient memorials of their wretchedness; if their habitations, apparel, and food, were not sufficient proofs, I should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of unemployed industry.”
All these restrictions were enacted by England, not from any actual loss that she had sustained by Irish competition, but from an apprehension of loss. Hutchinson shows how groundless the apprehension was, and he protests against the iniquity of sacrificing the happiness of a great and ancient kingdom, and the welfare of millions of its people, to guard against an imagined decrease in the value of English land. If wool-spinning was cheaper in Ireland than in England, that was because the Irish operatives had to live on food—“potatoes and milk, or more frequently water”[119]—with which the English would not be content; but wages and the cost of producing would increase with the opening of trade, and with the increase of manufactures. England’s greedy monopoly was sinking the Irish people, while fair trade would really lessen the cheap labour competition which the English masters professed to dread. An open wool trade in Ireland would, moreover, be mainly carried on by English capitalists and by English shipping, just as in ancient Egypt, China, and Hindostan, the export trade used to be conducted by foreigners; and just as in the victualling trade of Ireland, the natives were but factors to the English. On every side, therefore, the English themselves suffered as much by the restrictions as the Irish, and they would be, if they could but see it, proportionate gainers by the removal of the restrictions. Hutchinson goes on to show that England gets one-third of the wealth of Ireland, and that she would get more than the half of the benefit of the wool trade; but that even so the country would be the better for the small share of the gains that would be allowed to remain with her. Agriculture would be encouraged, and manufactures would be promoted; and there would be a circulation of money amongst the people. Taxes were proportionately heavier in Ireland than in England, when the annual earnings, expenditure, rentals, circulating specie, and personal property of the two countries were compared. The English were mistaken in some of the calculations on which they grounded the commercial restrictions, and they would be commercial gainers by the removal of the restrictions; but it was not for the benefit of England, and it was for the benefit of Ireland, that the Provost demanded free and open commerce for the produce and manufactures of this country. This was what he claimed and argued for, and this was what he very largely helped to obtain for Ireland; and this was the service that won him back a great deal of the popularity which he had forfeited by his hired subserviency to the English party.
There is a good deal of repetition in the Provost’s book as we have it, but this is accounted for by the fact that the book was originally published in the form of letters.[120] The repetitions, moreover, are not altogether artistic blemishes, for they are made to intensify, and, as it were, to multiply, the identical facts by presenting them in fresh connections. This is notably the case in regard of the Provost’s doublings back on the wool trade, and on the linen trade, and on England’s dealings with Ireland in regard of both these trades. After the destruction of the cattle trade these were the two sources of industry left to this country, and therefore the record of the treatment and evolution of these trades is in fact the history of the commercial relations between England and this country. The Provost accordingly takes the wool and the linen trade as the fixed pillars of his discourse, and he interpolates the spaces between them with coincident statistics that illustrate his thesis. It is thus that in page 83 he comes back to the wool trade to show the falsehood of the English trade returns, which asserted that the trade “was set up here since the reduction of Ireland” by Cromwell. The trade had been a flourishing one in this country from the time of Edward III. Then in the Sixth Letter the Provost takes up the linen trade again, for the purpose of showing more emphatically, in the first place, that it was forced on Ireland as an equivalent for the loss of the wool trade; in the second place, that it was not at all an equivalent—and in the third place, that England before long broke her stipulations with this country, and so discouraged the hemp and linen manufacture of Ireland, that the Irish had to abandon the flax culture altogether. In 1705, leave was given to Ireland to export some sorts of linen to the colonies, but leave was not given to bring back dye stuffs or other colonial produce. In 1743, bounties were offered on exports of Irish linen, provided they were shipped from English ports; but there was already a duty of thirty per cent. on foreign linen imported into England; and thus Ireland was, of course, deprived of the colonial and other markets. Not till 1777 were the American markets opened to Ireland, and by that time the emigration of the Ulster linen-workers had become so enormous, that America was, in fact, a rival in the trade. What words can more offensively and more bitterly express the oppression of the country than this leave to trade with other countries? It took Grattan and Hussey Burgh “with their coats off,” and it took the Volunteers with their motto “Free Trade, or ——,” to sweep away this badge of slavery. All the time England was multiplying pensions and salaries here; she was levying taxes and draining rents; and, as Hutchinson clearly puts it, Ireland “was paying to Great Britain double the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which Great Britain allows her. It would be difficult to find a similar instance in the history of mankind.” Again and again the Provost comes back to point out the open tyranny and the underhand unfairness of England’s commercial legislation for this country, and in the Seventh Letter he repeats that this legislation was a departure from the policy which was guaranteed by Magna Charta, and which had prevailed from the time of Edward III. When a supposed compensation was afterwards offered, it was no more than what Ireland had had before, and the liberty granted by Queen Anne was merely allowing us to do in regard of one manufacture what had previously been a right in every instance.
“At this earlier period, then,” says Hutchinson, “the English commercial system and the Irish, so far as it depended upon the English statute law, was the same; and before this period, so far as it depended upon the common law and Magna Charta, it was also the same.”
“This was the voice of nature,” he adds, “and the dictate of sound and generous policy; it proclaimed to the nations that they should not give to strangers the bread of their own children; that the produce of the soil should support the inhabitants of the country; that their industry should be exercised on their own materials, and that the poor should be employed, clothed, and fed.
“This policy was liberal, just, and equal; it opened the resources and cultivated the strength of every part of the empire.”
From this liberal and profitable policy, however, England departed towards the close of the seventeenth century, and manifold were the wrongs which the departure inflicted on this country. The Provost details these wrongs with the indignation of a patriot; he rails at the oppression which, by depriving the people of liberty, robbed them of half their vigour; but still as a courtier and as a Government man, he was able to “revere that conquest which has given to Ireland the Common Law and the Magna Charta of England.” Why he revered the Conquest, when the Common Law and Magna Charta failed to protect the welfare of Ireland, the Provost does not state. Two things stand out clearly throughout the treatise—one is that Ireland, both as a producer and as a consumer, has been immensely profitable to England; and the other is that England has been the source of vast evil and suffering to Ireland. The purport of “The Commercial Restraints” is to set forth these two great truths, and the record may be read now without prejudice on one side of the Channel, and without panic or passion on the other. The teaching of the book ought to be palpable enough for the men of the present day. It ought to convince Englishmen that it is time for them to distrust their “resources of civilisation,” and to let this country prosper; and it ought to remind Irishmen that they are the best judges of what they want, and that their road to prosperity is independence of English conceit, together with a sturdy development of their own native resources.
In and since Provost Hutchinson’s time Ireland has won vast conquests from her oppressor, and she has won them all by the same weapon—firm and constitutional discontent. She has much to win still, and she will surely win it by the same method, while outside that method she is powerless. Free Trade and Parliamentary Independence were won without shedding a drop of blood, and the conditions of the fight for what is required now are far more propitious and hopeful than they were a century ago. Then, Ireland had to contend with an obstinate king, a wrong-headed minister, and a greedy nation; now, all these things are changed. The men of ’82, no doubt, had at their back the Irish Volunteers that England feared, and there are no Irish Volunteers now; their place, however, is supplied by a more coercive force, and that force is the spirit of justice which is spreading through the Liberals of England, and is fed by the Liberals of Ireland. But even supposing that all these demands touching land, education, and autonomy, were granted, there still remains another object for Irishmen to work out, namely, the recreation of their home industries and manufactures. The land, after all, is not everything—all the people cannot live by it and out of it—and, as Hutchinson observes, no one industry is sufficient to maintain a numerous population in prosperity and comfort.
In past times, as a couple of months ago the Lord Lieutenant at Belfast, and Mr. Fawcett at Shoreditch, were saying,[121] all these industries in the country were prohibited by unjust and iniquitous legislation, and by a mass of vexatious restrictions; but there are no prohibitions now, and the country abounds with the conditions and materials of prosperity. Bishop Berkeley wrote, when the prohibiting laws had been seventy years in operation, and when the force that swept them away had not yet begun to breathe in the country. He regarded the laws with despair, and piteously bemoaned the destitution and degradation in which the people were fixed. His earnest exhortation to them was to compensate themselves for the loss of the foreign trade by developing home industries and manufactures; and he asked[122] whether the natives might not be able to effect their own prosperity and elevation, even though “there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom?”
Lord Clare, in his Union speech, declared that Ireland made more progress in her eighteen years of freedom than ever nation made in the same period; and it will be now for the working-men of this generation to show that, in enterprise and trades-craft they are not degenerate from their half-taught forefathers who won Fitzgibbon’s testimony. There is every ground for confident anticipation, that this year’s National Exhibition will profoundly and widely strengthen the effort for the revival of our Native Industries, and it is with the desire to contribute somewhat to the all-important and patriotic impulse that “The Commercial Restraints of Ireland” is now reproduced by the publishers.
THE COMMERCIAL RESTRAINTS
OF
IRELAND CONSIDERED.
First Letter.
Dublin, 20th Aug., 1779.
My Lord,
You desire my thoughts on the affairs of Ireland, a subject little considered, and consequently not understood in England. The Lords and Commons of Great Britain have addressed his Majesty to take the distressed and impoverished state of this country into consideration; have called for information and resolved to pursue effectual methods for promoting the common strength, wealth, and commerce of both kingdoms, and his Majesty has been pleased to express in his speech from the throne his entire approbation of their attention to the present state of Ireland.
The occasion calls for the assistance of every friend of the British Empire, and those who can give material information are bound to communicate it. The attempt, however, is full of difficulty; it will require more than ordinary caution to write with such moderation as not to offend the prejudices of one country and with such freedom as not to wound the feelings of the other.
The present state of Ireland teems with every circumstance of national poverty. Whatever the land produces is greatly reduced in its value: wool is fallen one-half in its usual price, wheat one-third, black cattle of all kinds in the same proportion, and hides in a much greater. Buyers are not had without difficulty at those low rates, and from the principal fairs men commonly return with the commodities they brought there; rents are everywhere reduced—in many places it is impossible to collect them;—the farmers are all distressed, and many of them have failed; when leases expire tenants are not easily found; the landlord is often obliged to take his lands into his own hands for want of bidders at reasonable rents, and finds his estate fallen one-fourth in its value. The merchant justly complains that all business is at a stand, that he cannot discount his bills, and that neither money nor paper circulates. In this and the last year above twenty thousand manufacturers in this metropolis were reduced to beggary for want of employment, they were for a considerable length of time supported by alms, a part of the contribution came from England and this assistance was much wanting from the general distress of all ranks of people in this country. Public and private credit are annihilated, Parliament, that always raises money in Ireland on easy terms, when there is any to be borrowed in the country, in 1778, gave £7½ per cent. in annuities, which, in 1773 and 1775, were earnestly sought after at £6, then thought to be a very high rate. The expenses of a country nearly bankrupt must be inconsiderable; almost every branch of the revenue has fallen, and the receipts in the Treasury for the two years ending Lady-day, 1779, were less than those for the two years ending Lady-day, 1777, deducting the sums received on account of loans in each period, in a sum of £334,900 18s. 9½d. There was due on the 25th of March last, on the establishments, and for extraordinary expenses, an arrear amounting to £373,706 13s. 6½d.; a sum of £600,000 will probably be now wanting to supply the deficiencies on the establishments and extraordinary charges of government, and an annual sum of between £50,000 and £60,000 yearly to pay interest and annuities. In the last session £466,000 was borrowed. If the sum wanting could now be raised, the debt would be increased in a sum of above £1,000,000 in less than three years; and if the expenses and the revenues should continue the same as in the last two years, there is a probability of an annual deficiency of £300,000. The nation in the last two years has not been able to pay for its own defence: a militia law passed in the last session could not be carried into execution for want of money. Instead of paying forces abroad,[123] Ireland has not been able in this year to pay the forces kept in the kingdom: it has again relapsed into its ancient state of imbecility, and Great Britain has been lately obliged to send over money to pay the army[124] which defends this impoverished country.
Our distress and poverty are of the utmost notoriety; the proof does not depend solely upon calculation or estimate, it is palpable in every public and private transaction, and is deeply felt among all orders of our people.
This kingdom has been long declining. The annual deficiency of its revenues for the payment of the public expenses has been for many years supplied by borrowing. The American rebellion, which considerably diminished the demand for our linens; an embargo on provisions continued for three years,[125] and highly injurious to our victualling trade; the increasing drain of remittances to England for rents, salaries, profits of offices, pensions and interest, and for the payment of forces abroad, have made the decline more rapid, but have not occasioned it.
If we are determined to investigate the truth we must assign a more radical cause; when the human or political body is unsound or infirm it is in vain to inquire what accidental circumstances appear to have occasioned those maladies which arise from the constitution itself.
If in a period of fourscore years of profound internal peace any country shall appear to have often experienced the extremes of poverty and distress; if at the times of her greatest supposed affluence and prosperity the slightest causes have been sufficient to obstruct her progress, to annihilate her credit, and to spread dejection and dismay among all ranks of her people; and if such a country is blessed with a temperate climate and fruitful soil, abounds with excellent harbours and great rivers, with the necessaries of life and materials of manufacture, and is inhabited by a race of men, brave, active, and intelligent, some permanent cause of such disastrous effects must be sought for.
If your vessel is frequently in danger of foundering in the midst of a calm, if by the smallest addition of sail she is near oversetting, let the gale be ever so steady, you would neither reproach the crew nor accuse the pilot or the master; you would look to the construction of the vessel and see how she had been originally framed and whether any new works had been added to her that retard or endanger her course.
But for such an examination more time and attention are necessary than have been usually bestowed upon this subject in Great Britain, and as I have now the honour to address a person of rank and station in that kingdom on the affairs of Ireland I should be brief in my first audience, or I may happen never to obtain the favour of a second.
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Second Letter.
Dublin, 23rd August, 1779.
My Lord,
If there is any such permanent cause from which the frequent distresses of so considerable a part of the British Empire have arisen, it is of the utmost consequence that it should be fully explained and generally understood. Let us endeavour to trace it by its effects; these will manifestly appear by an attentive review of the state of Ireland at different periods.
From the time that King James the First had established a regular administration of justice in every part of the kingdom, until the rebellion of 1641, which takes in a period of between thirty and forty years, the growth of Ireland was considerable.[126] In the Act recognising the title of King James, the Lords and Commons acknowledge, “that many blessings and benefits had, within these few years past, been poured upon this realm;”[127] and at the end of the Parliament, in 1615, the Commons return thanks for the extraordinary pains taken for the good of this republic, whereby they say: “We all of us sit under our own vines, and the whole realm reapeth the happy fruits of peace.”[128] In his reign the little that could be given by the people was given with general consent,[129] and received with extraordinary marks of royal favour. He desires the Lord Deputy to return them thanks for their subsidy, and for their granting it with universal consent,[130] and to assure them that he holds his subjects of that kingdom in equal favour with those of his other kingdoms, and that he will be as careful to provide for their prosperous and flourishing state as for his own person.
Davis, who had served him in great stations in this kingdom, and had visited every province of it, mentions the prosperous state of the country, and that the revenue of the Crown, both certain and casual, had been raised to a double proportion. He takes notice how this was effected “by the encouragement given to the maritime towns and cities, as well to increase the trade of merchandize as to cherish mechanical arts;” and mentions the consequence, “that the strings of this Irish harp were all in tune.”[131]
In the succeeding reign, Ireland, for fourteen or fifteen years, appears to have greatly advanced in prosperity. The Commons granted in the session of 1634 six entire subsidies, which they agreed should amount in the collection to £250,000,[132] and the free gifts previously given to King Charles the First at different times amounted to £310,000.[133] In the session of 1639 they gave four entire subsidies, and the clergy eight; the customs, which had been farmed at £500 yearly in the beginning of this reign, were in the progress of it set for £54,000.[134]
The commodities exported were twice as much in value as the foreign merchandize imported, and shipping is said to have increased an hundred-fold.[135] Their Parliament was encouraged to frame laws conducive to the happiness of themselves and their posterities, for the enacting and “consummating” whereof the king passes his royal word, and assures his subjects of Ireland that they were equally of as much respect and dearness to him as any others.[136]
In the Speaker’s speech in 1639, when he was offered for approbation to the Lord Deputy, he mentions the free and happy condition of the people of Ireland, sets forth the particulars, and in enumerating the national blessings, mentions as one “that our in-gates and out-gates do stand open for trade and traffic;”[137] and as the Lord Chancellor declared his Excellency’s “high liking of this oration,” it may be considered as a fair account of the condition of Ireland at that time. When the Commons had afterwards caught the infection of the times, and were little disposed to pay compliments, they acknowledge that this kingdom, when the Earl of Strafford obtained the government, “was in a flourishing, wealthy, and happy estate.”[138]
After the Restoration, from the time that the acts of settlement and explanation had been fully carried into execution to the year 1688, Ireland made great advances, and continued for several years in a most prosperous condition.[139] Lands were everywhere improved; rents were doubled; the kingdom abounded with money; trade flourished to the envy of our neighbours; cities increased exceedingly; many places of the kingdom equalled the improvements of England; the king’s revenue increased proportionably to the advance of the kingdom, which was every day growing, and was well established in plenty and wealth;[140] manufactures were set on foot in divers parts; the meanest inhabitants were at once enriched and civilized; and this kingdom is then represented to be the most improved and improving spot of ground in Europe. I repeat the words of persons of high rank, great character, and superior knowledge, who could not be deceived themselves, and were incapable of deceiving others.
In the former of these periods Parliaments were seldom convened in Ireland; in the latter, they were suspended for the space of twenty-six years; during that time the English ministers frequently showed dispositions unfavourable to the prosperity of this kingdom; and in the interval between those two periods it had been laid waste, and almost depopulated by civil rage and religious fury. And yet, after being blessed with an internal peace of ninety years, and with a succession of five excellent sovereigns, who were most justly the objects of our affection and gratitude, and to whom the people of this country were deservedly dear; after so long and happy an intercourse of protection, grace, and favour from the Crown, and of duty and loyalty from the subjects, it would be difficult to find any subsequent period where so flattering a view has been given of the industry and prosperity of Ireland.
The cause of this prosperity should be mentioned. James, the first Duke of Ormond, whose memory should be ever revered by every friend of Ireland, to heal the wound that this country had received by the prohibition of the export of her cattle to England, obtained from Charles the Second a letter[141] dated the 23rd of March, 1667, by which he directed that all restraints upon the exportation of commodities of the growth or manufacture of Ireland to foreign parts should be taken off, but not to interfere with the plantation laws, or the charters to the trading companies, and that this should be notified to his subjects of this kingdom, which was accordingly done by a proclamation from the Lord Lieutenant and Council; and at the same time, by his Majesty’s permission, they prohibited the importation from Scotland of linen, woollen, and other manufactures and commodities, as drawing large sums of money out of Ireland, and a great hindrance to its manufactures. His Grace successfully executed his schemes of national improvement, having by his own constant attention, the exertion of his extensive influence, and the most princely munificence, greatly advanced the woollen and revived[142] the linen manufactures, which England then encouraged in this kingdom as a compensation for the loss of that trade of which she had deprived it, and this encouragement from that time to the Revolution had greatly increased the wealth and promoted the improvement of Ireland.
The tyranny and persecuting policy of James the Second,[143] after his arrival in Ireland, ruined its trade and revenue; the many great oppressions which the people suffered during the revolution had occasioned almost the utter desolation of the country.[144] But the nation must have been restored in the reign of William to a considerable degree of strength and vigour; their exertions in raising supplies to a great amount, from the year 1692 to the year 1698, are some proof of it. They taxed their goods, their lands, their persons, in support of a prince whom they justly called their deliverer and defender, and of a government on which their own preservation depended. Those sums were granted,[145] not only without murmur, but with the utmost cheerfulness, and without any complaint of the inability, or representation of the distressed state of the country.
The money brought in for the army at the revolution gave life to all business, and much sooner than could have been expected retrieved the affairs of Ireland. This money furnished capitals for carrying on the manufactures of the kingdom. Our exports increased in ’96, ’97, and ’98, and our imports did not rise in proportion, which occasioned a great balance in our favour; and this increase was owing principally to the woollen manufacture. In the last of those years the balance in favour of Ireland in the account of exports and imports was £419,442.[146]
But in the latter end of this reign the political horizon was overcast, the national growth was checked, and the national vigour and industry impaired by the law made in England restraining, in fact prohibiting, the exportation of all woollen manufactures from Ireland. From the time of this prohibition no parliament was held in Ireland until the year 1703. Five years were suffered to pass before any opportunity was given to apply a remedy to the many evils which such a prohibition must necessarily have occasioned. The linen trade was then not thoroughly established in Ireland; the woollen manufacture was the staple trade, and wool the principal material of that kingdom. The consequences of this prohibition appear in the session of 1703.[147] The Commons[148] lay before Queen Anne a most affecting representation, containing, to use their own words, “a true state of our deplorable condition,” protesting that no groundless discontent was the motive for that application, but a deep sense of the evil state of their country, and of the farther mischiefs they have reason to fear will fall upon it if not timely prevented. They set forth the vast decay and loss of its trade, its being almost exhausted of coin, that they are hindered from earning their livelihoods and from maintaining their own manufactures, that their poor have thereby become very numerous; that great numbers of Protestant families have been constrained to remove out of the kingdom, as well into Scotland as into the dominions of foreign princes and states, and that their foreign trade and its returns are under such restrictions and discouragements as to be then become in a manner impracticable, although that kingdom had by its blood and treasure contributed to secure the plantation trade to the people of England.
In a further address to the Queen,[149] laid before the Duke of Ormond, then Lord Lieutenant, by the House, with its Speaker, they mention the distressed condition of that kingdom, and more especially of the industrious Protestants, by the almost total loss of trade and decay of their manufactures, and, to preserve the country from utter ruin, apply for liberty to export their linen manufactures to the plantations.
In a subsequent part of this session[150] the Commons resolve that, by reason of the great decay of trade and discouragement of the manufactures of this kingdom, many poor tradesmen were reduced to extreme want and beggary. This resolution was nem. con., and the Speaker, Mr. Broderick, then his Majesty’s Solicitor-General, and afterwards Lord Chancellor, in his speech at the end of the session[151] informs the Lord Lieutenant, that the representation of the Commons was, as to the matters contained in it, the unanimous voice and consent of a very full house, and that the soft and gentle terms used by the Commons in laying the distressed condition of the kingdom before his Majesty, showed that their complaints proceeded not from querulousness, but from a necessity of seeking redress, He adds: “It is to be hoped they may be allowed such a proportion of trade that they may recover from the great poverty they now lie under;” and in presenting the bill of supply says, the Commons have granted it “in time of extreme poverty.” The impoverished state of Ireland, at that time, appears in the speech from the throne at the conclusion of the session, in which it is mentioned that the Commons could not then provide for what was owing to the civil and military lists.[152]
The supply given for two years, commencing at Michaelmas, 1703,[153] was a sum not exceeding £150,000, which, considering that no Parliament was held in Ireland since the year 1698, is at the rate of £30,000 yearly, commencing in 1699, and ending in the year 1705.
The great distress of Ireland, from the year 1699 to the year 1703, and the cause of that distress, cannot be doubted.
Let it now be considered, whether the same cause has operated since the year 1703. In the year 1704[154] it appears, that the Commons were not able, from the circumstances of the nation at that time, to make provision for repairing the necessary fortifications; or for arms and ammunition for the public safety: and the difficulties which the kingdom then laboured under, and the decay of trade appear by the addresses of the Commons[155] to the Queen, and to the Duke of Ormond, then Lord Lieutenant, who was well acquainted with the state of this country; by the Queen’s answer,[156] and the address of thanks for it.
In the year 1707,[157] the revenue was deficient for payment of the army and defraying the charges of government, and the Commons promise to supply the deficiency “as far as the present circumstances of the nation will allow.”
In 1709, it appears,[158] by the unanimous address of the Commons to the Lord Lieutenant, that the kingdom was in an impoverished and exhausted state: in 1711,[159] they express their approbation of the frugality of the Queen’s administration, by which their expenses were lessened, and by that means the kingdom preserved from taxes, which might have proved too weighty and burdensome. In their address to the Lord Lieutenant at, the close of the session, they request that he should represent to her Majesty, that they had given all the supplies which her Majesty desired, and which they, in their present condition, were able to grant:[160] and yet those supplies amounted, for two years, to a sum not exceeding £167,023 8s. 5d.;[161] though powder magazines, the council chamber, the treasury office, and other offices were then to be built.
From the Short Parliament of 1713, nothing can be collected, but that the House was inflamed and divided by party dissensions, and that the fear of danger to the succession of the present illustrious family, excluded every other consideration from the minds of the majority.
This last period, from the year 1699 to the death of Queen Anne, is marked with the strongest circumstances of national distress and despondency. The representatives of the people, who were the best judges, and several of whom were members of the House of Commons before and after these restraints, have assigned the reason. No other can be assigned.
That the woollen manufactures were the great source of industry in Ireland, appears from the Irish statute of the 17th and 18th of Charles II., ch. 15;[162] from the resolutions of the Commons, in 1695,[163] for regulating those manufactures, the resolutions of the Committee of Supply in that session;[164] and from the preamble to the English statute of the 10th and 11th of William III., ch. 10; in which it is recited, that great quantities of those manufactures were made, and were daily increasing in Ireland, and were exported from thence to foreign markets.
Of the exportation of all those manufactures the Irish were at once totally deprived: the linen manufacture, proposed as a substitute, must have required the attention of many years before it could be thoroughly established. What must have been the consequences to Ireland in the meantime the journals of the Commons in Queen Anne’s reign have informed us. Compare this period with the three former, and you will prove this melancholy truth: that a country will sooner recover from the miseries and devastation occasioned by war, invasion, rebellion, massacre, than from laws restraining the commerce, discouraging the manufactures, fettering the industry, and above all breaking the spirits of the people.
It would be injustice not to acknowledge that Great Britain has, for a long series of years, made great exertions to repair the evils arising from these restraints. She has opened her great markets to part of the linen manufacture of Ireland; she has encouraged it by granting, for a great length of time, large sums of her own money[165] on the exportation of it; and under her protection, and by the persevering industry of our people, this manufacture has attained to a great degree of perfection and prosperity, in some parts of this country. If the kind and constant attention of that great kingdom with which we are connected, to this important object; or if the lenient course of time had at length healed those wounds, which commercial jealousy had given to the trade and industry of this country, it would not be a friendly hand to either kingdom that would attempt to open them: but, if upon every accident they bleed anew, they should be carefully examined, and searched to the bottom. If the cause of the poverty and distress of Ireland in the reign of Queen Anne has since continued to operate, though not always in so great a degree, yet sufficient frequently to reduce to misery, and constantly to check the growth and impair the strength of that kingdom, and to weaken the force and to reduce the resources of Great Britain; that man ought to be considered as a friend to the British Empire who endeavours to establish this important truth, and to explain a subject so little understood. If in this attempt there shall appear no intention to raise jealousies, inflame discontents, or agitate constitutional questions, it is hoped that those letters may be read without prejudice on one side of the water, and without passion or resentment on the other.
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Third Letter.
Dublin, 25th August, 1779.
My Lord,
To an inquirer after truth, history, since the year 1699 furnishes very imperfect and often partial views of the affairs of Great Britain and Ireland. The latter has no professed historian of its own since that era, and is so slightly mentioned in the histories of the former kingdom, that it seems to be introduced rather to show the accuracy of the accomptant, than as an article to be read and examined; pamphlets are often written to serve occasional purposes, and with an intention to misrepresent; and party writers are not worthy of any regard. We must then endeavour to find some other guide, and look into the best materials for history, by considering the facts as recorded in the journals of Parliament; these have evinced the poverty of Ireland for the first fourteen years of this century. That this poverty continued in the year 1716, appears by the unanimous address of the House of Commons to George the First.[166] This address was to congratulate his Majesty on his success in extinguishing the rebellion, an occasion most joyful to them, and on which no disagreeable circumstance would have been stated, had not truth and the necessities of their country extorted it from them. A small debt of £16,106 11s. 0½d.,[167] due at Michaelmas, 1715, was, by their exertions to strengthen the hands of Government in that year, increased at midsummer, 1717, to a sum of £91,537 17s. 1⅝d.,[168] which was considered as such an augmentation of the national debt, that the Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Bolton, thought it necessary to take notice in his speech from the throne, that the debt was considerably augmented, and to declare at the same time that his Majesty had ordered reductions in the military, and had thought proper to lessen the civil list.
There cannot be a stronger proof of the want of resources in any country, than that a debt of so small an amount should alarm the persons entrusted with the government of it. That those apprehensions were well founded, will appear from the repeated distresses of Ireland, from time to time, for many years afterwards. In 1721, the speech from the throne,[169] and the addresses to the king and to the Lord Lieutenant, state, in the strongest terms, the great decay of her trade, and the very low and impoverished state to which she was reduced.
That this proceeded, in some measure, from calamities and misfortunes which affected the neighbouring kingdoms, is true: but their effects on Ireland, little interested in the South Sea project, could not be considerable. The poverty under which she laboured arose principally from her own situation. The Lord Lieutenant says there is ground to hope that in this session such remedies may be applied as will restore the nation to a flourishing condition; and the Commons return the king thanks for giving them that opportunity to consider of the best methods for reviving their decayed trade and making them a flourishing and happy people.
But 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 the 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. The remedy proposed by Government, and partly executed, by directing a commission under the Great Seal for receiving voluntary subscriptions[170] in order to establish a bank, was a scheme to circulate paper without money; and considering that it came so soon after the South Sea Bubble had burst, it is more surprising that it should have been at first applauded,[171] than that it was, in the same session, disliked, censured, and abandoned.[172] The total inefficacy of the remedy proved however the inveteracy of the disease, and furnishes a farther proof of the desperate situation of Ireland, when nothing could be thought of for its relief, but that paper should circulate without money, trade, or manufactures.[173]
In the following session of 1723, it appears that the condition of our manufacturers, and of the lowest classes of our people, must have been distressed, as the Duke of Grafton, in his speech from the throne, particularly recommends to their consideration the finding out of some method for the better employing of the poor;[174] and though the debt of the nation was no more than £66,318 8s. 3¼d.,[175] and was less than in the last session,[176] yet the Commons thought it necessary to present an address to the king, to give such directions as he, in his great goodness, should think proper, to prevent the increase of the debt of the nation. This address was presented[177] by the House, with its Speaker, and passed nem. con., and was occasioned by the distressed state of the country, and by their apprehensions that it might be further exhausted by the project of Wood’s halfpence: it could not be meant as any want of respect to their Lord Lieutenant, as they had not long since returned him thanks for his wise conduct and frugality in not increasing the debt of the nation.[178] This address of the Commons, and the Lord Lieutenant’s recommendation for the better employing the poor, seems to be explained by a petition of the woollen drapers, weavers, and clothiers of the city of Dublin (the principal seat of the woollen manufacture of Ireland) in behalf of themselves and the other drapers, weavers, and clothiers of this kingdom, praying relief in relation to the great decay of trade in the woollen manufacture.[179]
But this address had no effect; the debt of the nation in the ensuing session of 1725, was nearly doubled.[180] In the speeches from the throne, in 1727, Lord Carteret takes notice of our success in the linen trade, and yet observes, in 1729, that the revenue had fallen short, and that thereby a considerable arrear was due to the establishment.
But notwithstanding the success of the linen manufacture,[181] Ireland was in a most miserable condition. The great scarcity of corn had been so universal in this kingdom in the years 1728 and 1729, as to expose thousands of families to the utmost necessities, and even to the danger of famine; many artificers and housekeepers having been obliged to beg for bread in the streets of Dublin. It appeared before the House of Commons that the import of corn for one year and six months, ending the 29th day of September, 1729, amounted in value to the sum of £274,000, an amazing sum compared with the circumstances of the kingdom at that time! and the Commons resolved that public granaries would greatly contribute to the increasing of tillage, and providing against such wants as have frequently befallen the people of this kingdom, and hereafter may befall them, unless proper precautions shall be taken against so great a calamity.
The great scarcity which happened in the years ’28 and ’29, and frequently before and since, is a decisive proof that the distresses of this kingdom have been occasioned by the discouragement of manufactures. If the manufacturers have not sufficient employment, they cannot buy the superfluous produce of the land; the farmers will be discouraged from tilling, and general distress and poverty must ensue. The consequences of the want of employment among manufacturers and labourers must be more fatal in Ireland than in most other countries; of the numbers of her people it has been computed that 1,887,220 live in houses with but one hearth, and may therefore be reasonably presumed to belong for the most part to those classes.
In the year 1731[182] there was a great deficiency in the public revenue, and the national debt had considerably increased. The exhausted kingdom lay under great difficulties by the decay of trade, the scarcity of money, and the universal poverty of the country, which the Speaker represents[183] in very affecting terms, in offering the money bills for the royal assent, and adds, “that the Commons hope, from his Majesty’s goodness, and his Grace’s free and impartial representation of the state and condition of this kingdom, that they may enjoy a share of the blessings of public tranquillity by the increase of their trade, and the encouragement of their manufactures.”
But in the next session, of 1733, they are told in the speech from the throne, what this share was to be. The Lord Lieutenant informs them that the peace cannot fail of contributing to their welfare, by enabling them to improve those branches of trade and manufactures[184] which are properly their own, meaning the trade and manufacture of linen. Whether this idea of property has been preserved inviolate will hereafter appear.
The years ’40 and ’41 were seasons of great scarcity, and in consequence of the want of wholesome provisions great numbers of our people perished miserably, and the speech from the throne recommends it to both Houses to consider of proper measures to prevent the like calamity for the future. The employment of the poor and the encouragement of tillage are the remedies proposed[185] by the Lord Lieutenant and approved of by the Commons, but no laws for those purposes were introduced, and why they were not affords matter for melancholy conjecture. They could not have been insensible of the miseries of their fellow-creatures, many thousands of whom were lost in those years, some from absolute want, and many from disorders occasioned by bad provisions. Why was no attempt made for their relief? Because the Commons knew that the evil was out of their reach, that the poor were not employed because they were discouraged by restrictive laws from working up the materials of their own country, and that agriculture could not be encouraged where the lower classes of the people were not enabled by their industry to purchase the produce of the farmer’s labour.
For above forty years after making those restrictive laws[186] Ireland was always poor and often in great want, distress, and misery,[187] though the linen manufacture had made great progress during that time. In the war before the last, she was not able to give any assistance. The Duke of Devonshire, in the year 1741, takes notice from the throne, that during a war for the protection of the trade of all his Majesty’s dominions there had been no increase of the charge of the establishment; and in the year 1745, the country was so little able to bear expense, that lord Chesterfield discouraged and prevented any augmentation of the army, though much desired by many gentlemen of the House of Commons, from a sense of the great danger that then impended. An influx of money after the peace, and the further success of the linen trade, increased our wealth, and enabled us to reduce by degrees, and afterwards to discharge the national debt. This was not effected until the first of March, 1754.[188] This debt was occasioned principally by the expenses incurred by the rebellion in Great Britain in the year 1715; an unlimited vote of credit was then given.[189] From the lowness of the revenue, and the want of resources, not from any further exertions on the part of the kingdom in point of expense, the debt of £16,106 11s. 0½d., due in 1715, was increased at Lady-day,[190] 1733, to £371,312 12s. 2½d. That Government and the House of Commons should for such a length of time have considered the reduction and discharge of this debt as an object of so great importance, and that nearly forty years should have passed before the constant attention and strictest economy of both could have accomplished that purpose, is a strong proof of the weakness and poverty of this country, during that period.
After the payment of this debt, the wealth and ability of Ireland were greatly overrated, both here and in Great Britain. The consequences of this mistaken opinion were increased expenses on the part of government and of the country, more than it was able to bear. The strict economy of old times was no longer practised. The representatives of the people set the example of profusion and the ministers of the Crown were not backward in following it. A large redundancy of money in the Treasury, gave a delusive appearance of national wealth. At Lady-day, 1755, the sum in credit to the nation was £471,404 5s. 6⅜d.,[191] and the money remaining in the Treasury of the ordinary unappropriated revenue on the 29th day of September, 1755,[192] £457,959 12s. 7⅛d. But this great increase of revenue arose from an increase of imports, particularly in the year 1754, by which the kingdom was greatly over-stocked, and which raised the revenue in that year £208,309 19s. 2¼d. higher than it was in the year 1748, when the revenue first began to rise considerably;[193] and though what a nation spends is one method of estimating its wealth, yet a nation, like an individual, may live beyond its means, and spend on credit which may far exceed its income. This was the fact as to Ireland in the year 1754, for some years before and for many years after; it appeared in an inquiry before the House of Commons in the session of 1755, that many persons had circulated paper to a very great amount, far exceeding not only their own capitals,[194] but that just proportion which the quantity of paper ought to bear to the national specie.[195] This gave credit to many individuals, who without property became merchant importers, and at the same time increased the receipts of the Treasury and lessened the wealth of the kingdom. At the very time that so great a balance was in the Treasury, public credit was in a very low way, and the House of Commons was employed in preparing a law to restore it. In ’54 and ’55 three principal banks[196] failed, and the legislature took up much time in inquiring into their affairs, and in framing laws for the relief of their creditors.[197] Yet in this session, the liberality of the House of Commons was excessive. The redundancy in the Treasury had, in the session of 1753, occasioned a dispute between the Crown and the House of Commons on the question whether the king’s previous consent was necessary for the application of it. They wished to avoid any future contest of that kind, and were flattered to grant the public money from enlarged views of national improvements. The making rivers navigable, the making and improving harbours, and the improvement of husbandry and other useful arts, were objects worthy of the representatives of the people; and had the faithfulness of the execution answered the goodness of the intention in many instances, the public in general might have had no great reason to complain. Many of those grants prove the poverty of the country. There were not private stocks to carry on the projects of individuals, nor funds sufficient for incorporating and supporting companies, nor profits to be had by the undertakings sufficient to reimburse the money necessary to be expended. The Commons therefore advanced the money, for the benefit of the public; and it can never be supposed that they would have continued to do so for above twenty years, if they were not convinced that there were not funds in the hands of individuals sufficient to carry on those useful undertakings, nor trade enough in the kingdom to make adequate returns to the adventurers.
Having gone through more than half the century, it is time to pause. In this long gloomy period, the poverty of Ireland appears to have been misery and desolation, and her wealth a symptom of decline and a prelude to poverty; the low retiring ebb from the spring-tide of deceitful prosperity, has left our shores bare, and has opened a waste and desolate prospect of barren sand, and uncultivated country.
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Fourth Letter.
Dublin, 27th August, 1779.
My Lord,
The revenue, for the reasons already given, decreased in 1755,[198] fell lower in 1756, and still lower in ’57. In the last year the vaunted prosperity of Ireland was changed into misery and distress; the lower classes of our people wanted food;[199] the money arising from the extravagance of the rich was freely applied to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.[200] One of the first steps of the late Duke of Bedford’s administration—and which reflects honour on his memory—was obtaining a king’s letter, dated 31st March, 1757, for £20,000, to be laid out as his Grace should think the most likely to afford the most speedy and effectual relief to his Majesty’s poor subjects of this kingdom. His Grace, in his speech from the throne, humanely expresses his wish, that some method might be found out to prevent the calamities that are the consequences of a want of corn, which had been in part felt the last year, and to which this country had been too often exposed; the Commons acknowledge that those calamities had been frequently and were too sensibly and fatally experienced in the course of the last year, thank his Grace for his early and charitable attention to the necessities of the poor of this country in their late distresses, and make use of those remarkable expressions,—“that they will most cheerfully embrace[201] every practicable method to promote tillage.”[202] They knew that the encouragement of manufactures were the effectual means, and that these means were not in their power.
The ability of the nation was estimated by the money in the Treasury, and the pensions on the civil establishment, exclusive of French, which at Lady-Day, 1755, were £38,003 15s., amounted at Lady-Day, ’57, to £49,293 15s.[203]
The same ideas were entertained of the resources of this country in the session of 1759. Great Britain had made extraordinary efforts, and engaged in enormous expenses for the protection of the whole empire. This country was in immediate danger of an invasion. Every Irishman was agreed that she should assist Great Britain to the utmost of her ability, but this ability was too highly estimated. The nation abounded rather in loyalty than in wealth.[204] Our brethren in Great Britain, had, however, formed a different opinion, and, surveying their own strength, were incomplete judges of our weakness. A Lord Lieutenant of too much virtue and magnanimity to speak what he did not think, takes notice from the throne, “of the prosperous state of this country, improving daily in its manufactures and commerce.”[205] His Grace had done much to bring it to that state, by obtaining for us some of the best laws[206] in our books of statutes. But this part of the speech was not taken notice of, either in the address to his Majesty or to his Grace, from a House of Commons well disposed to give every mark of duty and respect, and to pay every compliment consistent with truth. The event proved the wisdom of their reserve. The public expenses were greatly increased, the pensions on the civil establishment exclusive of French, at Lady-Day, 1759, amounted to £55,497 5s.;[207] there was, at the same time a great augmentation of military expense.[208] Six new regiments and a troop were raised in a very short space of time. An unanimous and unlimited address of confidence to his Grace,[209] a specific vote of credit for £150,000,[210] which was afterwards provided for in the Loan Bill[211] of that session, a second vote of credit in the same session for £300,000,[212] the raising the rate of interest paid by Government, one per cent., and the payment out of the Treasury[213] in little more than one year of £703,957 3s. 1½d.,[214] were the consequences of those increased expenses. The effects of these exertions were immediately and severely felt by the kingdom. These loans could not be supplied by a poor country, without draining the bankers of their cash; three of the principal houses,[215] among them stopped payment; the three remaining banks in Dublin discounted no paper, and, in fact, did no business. Public and private credit, that had been drooping since the year 1754, had now fallen prostrate. At a general meeting of the merchants of Dublin, in April, 1860, with several members of the House of Commons, the inability of the former to carry on business was universally acknowledged, not from the want of capital, but from the stoppage of all paper circulation, and the refusal of the remaining bankers to discount the bills even of the first houses. The merchants and traders of Dublin, in their petition[216] to the House of Commons, represent “the low state to which public and private credit had been of late reduced in this kingdom, and particularly in this city, of which the successive failures of so many banks, and of private traders in different parts of this kingdom, in so short a time as since October last, were incontestable proofs. The petitioners, sensible that the necessary consequences of these misfortunes must be the loss of foreign trade, the diminution of his Majesty’s revenue, and what is still more fatal, the decay of the manufactures of this kingdom, have in vain repeatedly attempted to support the sinking credit of the nation by associations and otherwise; and are satisfied that no resource is now left but what may be expected from the wisdom of parliament, to avert the calamities with which this kingdom is at present threatened.”
The committee, to whom it was referred, resolve[217] that they had proved the several matters alleged in their petition; that the quantity of paper circulating was not near sufficient for supporting the trade and manufactures of this kingdom; and that the house should engage, to the first of May, ’62, for each of the then subsisting banks in Dublin, to the amount of £50,000 for each bank; and that an address should be presented to the Lord Lieutenant, to thank his Grace for having given directions that bankers’ notes should be received as cash from the several subscribers to the loan, and that he would be pleased to give directions that their notes should be taken as cash in all payments at the Treasury, and by the several collectors for the city and county of Dublin. The house agreed to those resolutions and to that for giving credit to the banks, nem. con.
The speech from the throne takes notice of the care the House of Commons had taken for establishing public credit, which the Lord Lieutenant says he flatters himself will answer the end proposed, and effect that circulation so necessary for carrying on the commerce of the country.[218]
Those facts are not stated as any imputation on the then chief governor: the vigour of his mind incited him to make the Crown as useful as possible to the subject, and the subject to the Crown. He succeeded in both, but in the latter part of the experiment, the weakness of the country was shown. The great law which we owe to his interposition, I speak of that which gives a bounty on the land carriage of corn and flour to Dublin,[219] has saved this country from utter destruction; this law, which reflects the highest honour on the author and promoter, is still a proof of the poverty of that country where such a law is necessary. Its true principle is to bring the market of Dublin to the door of the farmer, and that was done in the year ending the 25th of March, 1777, at the expense of £61,789 18s. 6d., to the public; a large but a most useful and necessary expenditure.[220] The adoption of this principle proves, what we in this country know to be a certain truth, that there is no other market in Ireland on which the farmer can rely for the certain sale of his corn and flour; a decisive circumstance to show the wretched state of the manufactures of this kingdom.
In the beginning of the next parliament the rupture with Spain occasioned a new augmentation of military expense. The ever loyal Commons return an address of thanks to the message mentioning the addition of five new battalions[221] and unanimously promise to provide for them; and with the same unanimity pass a vote of credit for £200,000.[222] The amount of pensions on the civil establishment, exclusive of French, had for one year ending the 25th of March, 1761, amounted to £64,127 5s.,[223] and our manufacturers were then distressed by the expense and havoc of a burdensome war.[224]
In the year 1762 a national evil made its appearance, which all the exertions of the Government and of the legislature have not since been able to eradicate; I mean the risings of the White Boys. They appear in those parts of the kingdom where manufactures are not established, and are a proof of the poverty and want of employment of the lower classes of our people. Lord Northumberland mentions, in his speech from the throne[225] in 1763, that the means of industry would be the remedy; from whence it seems to follow that the want of those means must be the cause. To attain this great end the Commons promise their attention to the Protestant charter schools and linen manufacture.[226] The wretched men who were guilty of those violations of the law, were too mature for the first, and totally ignorant of the second; but long established usage had given those words a privilege in speeches and addresses to stand for everything that related to the improvement of Ireland.
The state of pensions remained nearly the same[227] by the peace the military expenses were considerably reduced; of the military establishment to be provided for in the session 1763, compared with the military establishment as it stood on the 31st of March, 1763, the net decrease was £119,037 0s. 10d. per annum; but as a peace establishment it was high, and compared with that of the 31st of March, 1756[228] being the year preceding the last war, the annual increase was £110,422 9s. 5¼d. The debt of the nation at Lady Day, 1763, and which was entirely incurred in the last war, was £521,161 16s. 6⅞d.,[229] and would have been much greater if the several Lord Lieutenants had not used with great economy the power of borrowing, which the House of Commons had from session to session given them.
That this debt should have been contracted in an expensive war, in which Ireland was called upon for the first time to contribute, is not to be wondered at, but the continual increase of this debt, in sixteen years of peace, should be accounted for.
The same mistaken estimate of the ability of Ireland that occasioned our being called upon to bear part of the British burden during the war, produced similar effects at the time of the peace, and after it. The heavy peace establishment was increased by an augmentation of our army in 1769, which induced an additional charge, taking in the expenses of exchange and remittance of £54,118 12s. 6d. yearly, for the first year; but this charge was afterwards considerably increased, and amounted, from the year 1769 to Christmas, 1778, when it was discontinued, to the sum of £620,824 0s. 9¼d., and this increased expense was more felt, because it was for the purpose of paying forces out of this kingdom.
As our expenses increased our income diminished; the revenue for the two years, ending the 25th of March, 1771,[230] was far short of former years, and not nearly sufficient to pay the charges of Government, and the sums payable for bounties and public works.[231] The debt of the nation at Lady-Day, 1771, was increased to £782,320 0s. 0¼d.[232] The want of income was endeavoured to be supplied by a loan. In the money bill of the October Session, 1771, there was a clause empowering Government to borrow £200,000. Immediately after the linen trade declined rapidly; in 1772, 1773, and 1774, the decay in that trade was general in every part of the kingdom where it was established; the quantity manufactured was not above two-thirds of what used formerly to be made, and that quantity did not sell for above three-fourths of its former price. The linen and linen yarn exported for one year, ending the 25th of March, 1773,[233] fell short of the exports of one year, ending the 25th of March, 1771, to the amount in value of £788,821 1s. 3d. At Lady-day, 1773,[234] the debt increased to £994,890 10s. 10⅛d. The attempt in the Session of 1773,[235] to equalise the annual income and expenses failed, and borrowing on tontine in the Sessions of 1773, 1775, and 1777, added greatly to the annual expense, and to the sums of money remitted out of the kingdom. The debt now bearing interest amounts to the sum of £1,017,600, besides a sum of £740,000 raised on annuities, which amount to £48,900 yearly, with some incidental expenses. The great increase of those national burdens, likely to take place in the approaching Session, has been already mentioned.
The debt of Ireland has arisen from the following causes: the expenses of the late war, the heavy peace establishment in the year 1763, the increase of that establishment in the year 1769, the sums paid from 1759 to forces out of the kingdom, the great increase of pensions and other additional charges on the civil establishment, which, however considerable, bears but a small proportion to the increased military expenses, the falling of the revenue, and the sums paid for bounties and public works; these are mentioned last, because it is apprehended that they have not operated to increase this debt in so great a degree as some persons have imagined; for, though the amount is large, yet no part of the money was sent out of the kingdom, and several of the grants were for useful purposes, some of which made returns to the public and to the Treasury exceeding the amount of those grants.
When those facts are considered, no doubt can be entertained but that the supposed wealth of Ireland has led to real poverty; and when it is known, that from the year 1751 to Christmas, 1778, the sums remitted by Ireland to pay troops serving abroad, amounted to the sum of £1,401,925 19s. 4d., it will be equally clear from whence this poverty has principally arisen.
In those seasons of expense and borrowing the lower classes were equally subject to poverty and distress, as in the period of national economy. In 1762, Lord Halifax, in his speech from the throne,[236] acknowledges that our manufactures were distressed by the war. In 1763, the corporation of weavers, by a petition to the House of Commons, complain that, notwithstanding the great increase both in number and wealth of the inhabitants of the metropolis, they found a very great decay of several branches of trade and manufactures[237] of this city, particularly in the silken and woollen.
In 1765 there was a scarcity caused by the failure of potatoes in general throughout the kingdom, which distressed the common people; the spring corn had also failed, and grain was so high, that it was thought necessary to appoint a committee[238] to inquire what may be the best method to reduce it; and to prevent a great dearth, two acts were passed early in that session, to stop the distillery, and to prevent the exportation of corn, for a limited time. In Spring, 1766, those fears appear to have been well-founded; several towns were in great distress for corn; and by the humanity of the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Hertford, money was issued out of the Treasury to buy corn for such places as applied to his lordship for that relief.
The years 1770 and 1771 were seasons of great distress in Ireland, and in the month of February, in the latter year, the high price of corn is mentioned from the throne[239] as an object of the first importance, which demanded the utmost attention.
In 1778 and 1779 there was great plenty of corn, but the manufacturers were not able to buy, and many thousands of them were supported by charity; the consequence was that corn fell to so low a price that the farmers in many places were unable to pay their rents, and everywhere were under great difficulties.
That the linen manufacture has been of the utmost consequence to this country, that it has greatly prospered, that it has been long encouraged by the protection of Great Britain, that whatever wealth Ireland is possessed of arises, for the most part, from that trade, is freely acknowledged; but in far the greatest part of the kingdom it has not yet been established, and many attempts to introduce it have, after long perseverance and great expense, proved fruitless.
Though that manufacture made great advances from 1727 to 1758,[240] yet the tillage of this kingdom declined during the whole of that period, and we have not since been free from scarcity.
Notwithstanding the success of that manufacture, the bulk of our people have always continued poor, and in a great many seasons have wanted food. Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe, enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give them employment and food, had not left sufficient memorials of their wretchedness; if their habitations, apparel, and food, were not sufficient proofs, I should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of unemployed industry.
That, since the success of the linen manufacture, the money and the rents of Ireland have been greatly increased, is acknowledged; but it is affirmed, and the fact is of notoriety, that the lower orders, not of that trade, are not less wretched. Those employed in the favourite manufacture generally buy from that country to which they principally sell; and the rise in lands is a misfortune to the poor, where their wages do not rise proportionably, which will not happen where manufactures and agriculture are not sufficiently encouraged. Give premiums by land or by water, arrange your exports and imports in what manner you will; if you discourage the people from working up the principal materials of their country, the bulk of that people must ever continue miserable, the growth of the nation will be checked, and the sinews of the State enfeebled.
I have stated a tedious detail of instances, to show that the sufferings of the lower classes of our people have continued the same (with an exception only of those employed in the linen trade) since the time of Queen Anne, as they were during her reign; that the cause remains the same, namely, that our manufacturers have not sufficient employment, and cannot afford to buy from the farmer, and that therefore manufactures and agriculture must both be prejudiced.
After revolving those repeated instances, and almost continued chain of distress, for such a series of years, among the inhabitants of a temperate climate, surrounded by the bounties of Providence and the means of abundance, and being unable to discover any accidental or natural causes for those evils, we are led to inquire whether they have arisen from the mistaken policy of man.
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Fifth Letter.
Dublin, 30th Aug., 1779.
My Lord,
Every man of discernment, who attends to the facts which have been stated, would conclude, that there must be some political institutions in this country counteracting the natural course of things, and obstructing the prosperity of the people. Those institutions should be considered, that as from the effects the cause has been traced, this also should be examined, to show that such consequences are necessarily deducible from it. For several years the exportation of live cattle to England[241] was the principal trade of Ireland. This was thought, most erroneously,[242] as has since been acknowledged,[243] to lower the rents of lands in England. From this, and perhaps from some less worthy motive[244] a law passed in England,[245] to restrain and afterwards to prohibit the exportation of cattle from Ireland. The Irish, deprived of their principal trade, and reduced to the utmost distress by this prohibition, had no resource but to work up their own commodities, to which they applied themselves with great ardour.[246] After this prohibition they increased their number of sheep, and at the Revolution were possessed of very numerous flocks. They had good reasons to think that this object of industry was not only left open, but recommended to them. The ineffectual attempt by Lord Strafford, in 1639, to prevent the making of broadcloths in Ireland,[247] the relinquishment of that scheme by never afterwards reviving it, the encouragement given to their woollen manufactures by many English Acts of Parliament from the reign of Edward III.[248] to the 12th of Charles II., and several of them for the express purpose of exportation; the letter of Charles II., in 1667, with the advice of his Privy Council in England, and the proclamation in pursuance of that letter, encouraging the exportation of their manufactures to foreign countries; by the Irish statutes of the 13th Henry VIII. ch. 2; 28th Henry VIII. ch. 17; of the 11th Elizabeth, ch. 10, and 17th and 18th Charles II., ch. 15 (all of which, the Act of 28th Henry VIII. excepted, received the approbation of the Privy Council of England, having been returned under the Great Seal of that kingdom) afforded as strong grounds of assurance as any country could possess for the continuance of any trade or manufacture.
Great numbers of their flocks had been destroyed at the time of the Revolution, but they were replaced, at great expense, and became more numerous and flourishing than before. The woollen manufacture was cultivated in Ireland for ages before, and for several years after the Revolution, without any appearance of jealousy from England, the attempt by Lord Strafford excepted. No discouragement is intimated in any speech from the throne until the year 1698; Lord Sydney’s, in 1692, imparts the contrary. “Their Majesties,” says he,[249] “being in their own royal judgments satisfied that a country so fertile by nature, and so advantageously situated for trade and navigation, can want nothing but the blessing of peace, and the help of some good laws to make it as rich and flourishing as most of its neighbours; I am ordered to assure you that nothing shall be wanting on their parts that may contribute to your perfect and lasting happiness.”
Several laws had been made[250] in England to prevent the exportation of wool, yarn made of wool, fuller’s earth, or any kind of scouring earth or fulling clay from England or Ireland, into any places out of the kingdoms of England or Ireland. But those laws were equally restrictive on both kingdoms.
In the first year[251] of William and Mary certain ports were mentioned in Ireland, from which only wool should be shipped from that kingdom, and certain ports in England into which only it should be imported; and a register was directed to be kept in the Custom House of London of all the wool from time to time imported from Ireland. By a subsequent Act in this reign,[252] passed in 1696, the Commissioners or Farmers of the Customs in Ireland are directed, once in every six months, to transmit to the Commissioners of Customs in England, an account of all wool exported from Ireland to England, and this last Act, in its title, professes the intention of encouraging the importation of wool from Ireland. The prohibition of exporting the materials from either kingdom, except to the other, and the encouragement to export it from Ireland to England, mentioned in the title of the last-mentioned Act, but for which no provision seems to be made, unless the designation of particular ports may be so called, was the system that then seemed to be settled, for preventing the wool of Ireland from being prejudicial to England; but the prevention of the exportation of the manufacture was an idea that seemed never to have been entertained until the year 1697, when a bill for that purpose was brought into the English House of Commons,[253] and passed that house; but after great consideration was not passed by the Lords in that parliament.[254] There does not appear to have been any increase at that time in the woollen manufacture of Ireland sufficient to have raised any jealousy in England.
By a report from the Commissioners of Trade in that kingdom, dated on the 23rd of December, 1697, and laid before the House of Commons, in 1698, they find that the woollen manufacture in Ireland had increased since the year 1665, as follows:
| Years. | New draperies. Pieces. | Old draperies. Pieces. | Frieze. Yards. |
| 1665 | 224 | 32 | 444,381 |
| 1687 | 11,360 | 103 | 1,129,716 |
| 1696 | 4,413 | 34¾ | 104,167 |
The bill for restraining the exportation of woollen manufactures from Ireland was brought into the English House of Commons on the 23rd of February, 1697, but the law did not pass until the year 1699, in the first session of the new parliament. I have not been able to obtain an account of the exportation of woollen manufactures for the year 1697,[255] but from the 25th of December, 1697, to the 25th of December, 1698, being the first year in which the exports in books extant are registered in the Custom House at Dublin, the amount appears to be of
| New draperies. Pieces. | Old draperies. Pieces. | Frieze. Yards. |
| 23,285½ | 281½ | 666,901 |
though this increase of export shows that the trade was advancing in Ireland, yet the total amount or the comparative increase since 1687 could scarcely “sink the value of lands and tend to the ruin of the trade and woollen manufactures of England.”[256]
The apprehensions of England seem rather to have arisen from the fears of future, than from the experience of any past rivalship in this trade. I have more than once heard Lord Bowes, the late chancellor of this kingdom, mention a conversation that he had with Sir Robert Walpole on this subject, who assured him that the jealousies entertained in England of the woollen trade in Ireland, and the restraints of that trade had at first taken their rise from the boasts of some of our countrymen in London, of the great success of that manufacture here. Whatever was the cause, both houses of parliament in England addressed King William, in very strong terms, on this subject; but on considering those addresses they seem to be founded, not on the state at that time of that manufacture here, but the probability of its further increase. As those proceedings are of great importance to two of the principal manufactures of this country, it is thought necessary to state them particularly. The lords represent, “that the growing manufacture of cloth in Ireland[257] both by the cheapness of all sorts of necessaries for life, and goodness of materials for making all manner of cloth, doth invite your subjects of England, with their families and servants, to leave their habitations to settle there, to the increase of the woollen manufacture in Ireland, which makes your loyal subjects in this kingdom very apprehensive that the further growth of it may greatly prejudice the said manufacture here; by which the trade of the nation and the value of lands will very much decrease, and the numbers of your people be much lessened here.” They then beseech his majesty “in the most public and effectual way, that may be, to declare to all your subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture hath long, and will ever be looked upon with jealousy by all your subjects of this kingdom; and if not timely remedied, may occasion very strict laws, totally to prohibit and suppress the same; and, on the other hand, if they turn their industry and skill to the settling and improving the linen manufacture, for which generally the lands of that kingdom are very proper, they shall receive all countenance, favour, and protection from your royal influence, for the encouragement and promoting of the said linen manufacture, to all the advantage and profit that kingdom can be capable of.”
King William in his answer says, “His Majesty will take care to do what their lordships have desired;” and the lords direct that the Lord Chancellor should order that the address and answer be forthwith printed and published.[258]
In the address of the Commons[259] they say, that “being sensible that the wealth and peace of this kingdom do, in a great measure, depend on preserving the woollen manufacture, as much as possible, entire to this realm, they think it becomes them, like their ancestors, to be jealous of the establishment and increase thereof elsewhere; and to use their utmost endeavours to prevent it, and therefore, they cannot without trouble observe, that Ireland, dependent on, and protected by England in the enjoyment of all they have, and which is so proper for the linen manufacture, the establishment and growth of which there would be so enriching to themselves, and so profitable to England, should of late apply itself to the woollen manufacture, to the great prejudice of the trade of this kingdom, and so unwillingly promote the linen trade, which would benefit both them and us.
“The consequence whereof will necessitate your parliament of England to interpose, to prevent the mischief that threatens us, unless your Majesty, by your authority and great wisdom, shall find means to secure the trade of England by making your subjects of Ireland to pursue the joint interest of both kingdoms.
“And we do most humbly implore your Majesty’s protection and favour in this matter; and that you will make it your royal care, and enjoin all those you employ in Ireland, to make it their care, and use their utmost diligence, to hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland, except to be imported hither, and for the discouraging the woollen manufactures, and encouraging the linen manufactures in Ireland, to which we shall be always ready to give our utmost assistance.”
This address was presented to his Majesty by the house: The answer is explicit: “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen trade in Ireland, and encourage the linen manufacture there; and to promote the trade of England.”
He soon after wrote a letter[260] to Lord Galway, then one of the lord’s justices of this kingdom, in which he tells him, “that it was never of such importance to have at present a good session of parliament, not only in regard to my affairs of that kingdom, but especially of this here. The chief thing that must be tried to be prevented is, that the Irish parliament takes no notice of what has passed in this here,[261] and that you make effectual laws for the linen manufacture, and discourage as far as possible the woollen.” It would be unjust to infer from any of those proceedings that this great prince wanted affection for this country. They were times of party. He was often under the necessity of complying against his own opinion and wishes, and about this time was obliged to send away his favourite guards, in compliance with the desire of the Commons.
The houses of parliament in England originally intended, that the business should be done in the parliament of Ireland by the exertion of that great and just influence which King William had acquired in that kingdom. On the first day of the following session[262] the lords justices, in their speech, mention a bill transmitted for the encouragement of the linen and hempen manufactures, which they recommend in the following words: “The settlement of this manufacture will contribute much to people the country, and will be found much more advantageous to this kingdom than the woollen manufacture, which being the settled staple trade of England, from whence all foreign markets are supplied, can never be encouraged here for that purpose; whereas the linen and hempen manufactures will not only be encouraged as consistent with the trade of England, but will render the trade of this kingdom both useful and necessary to England.”
The Commons in their address[263] promise their hearty endeavours to establish a linen and hempen manufacture in Ireland, and say that they hoped to find such a temperament in respect to the woollen trade here, that the same may not be injurious to England. They referred the consideration of that subject to the committee of supply, who resolved that an additional duty be laid on old and new drapery of the manufacture of this kingdom,[264] that shall be exported, friezes excepted; to which the House agreed.[265] But there were petitions presented against this duty, and relative to the quantity of it, and the committee appointed to consider of this duty were not it seems so expeditious in their proceedings as the impatience of the times required.[266]
On the 2nd of October the lords justices made a quickening speech to both houses, taking notice, that the progress which they expected was not made, in the business of the session, and use those remarkable words: “The matters we recommended to you are so necessary, and the prosperity of this kingdom depends so much on the good success of this session, that since we know his Majesty’s affairs cannot permit your sitting very long, we thought the greatest mark we could give of our kindness and concern for you, was to come hither, and desire you to hasten the despatch of the matters under your consideration; in which we are the more earnest, because we must be sensible, that if the present opportunity his majesty’s affection to you hath put into your hands be lost, it seems hardly to be recovered.[267]
On the 2nd of January, 1698, O. S. the House resolved that the report from the committee of the whole House, appointed to consider of a duty to be laid on the woollen manufactures of this kingdom, should be made on the next day, and nothing to intervene. But on that day a message was delivered from the lords justices in the following words: “We have received his majesty’s commands[268] to send unto you a bill, entitled an act for laying an additional duty upon woollen manufactures exported out of this kingdom; the passing of which in this session his majesty recommended to you, as what may be of great advantage for the preservation of the trade of this kingdom.”
The bill which accompanied this message was presented, and a question for receiving it was carried in the affirmative, by 74 against 34. This bill must have been transmitted from the Council of Ireland. Whilst the Commons were proceeding with the utmost temper and moderation, were exerting great firmness in restraining all attempts to inflame the minds of the people,[269] and were deliberating on the most important subject that could arise, it was taken out of their hands; but the bill passed, though not without opposition,[270] and received the royal assent on the 29th day of January, 1698.
By this act an additional duty was imposed of 4s. for every 20s. in value of broadcloth exported out of Ireland, and 2s. on every 20s. in value of new drapery, friezes only excepted, from the 25th of March, 1699, to the 25th of March, 1702;[271] the only woollen manufacture excepted was one of which Ireland had been in possession before the reign of Edward III., and in which she had been always distinguished.[272] This law has every appearance of having been framed on the part of the Administration.[273]
But it did not satisfy the English parliament, where a perpetual law was made, prohibiting, from the 20th of June, 1699,[274] the exportation from Ireland of all goods made or mixed with wool, except to England and Wales, and with the licence of the Commissioners of the Revenue; duties[275] had been before aid on the importation into England equal to a prohibition, therefore this Act has operated as a total prohibition of the exportation.
Before these laws the Irish were under great disadvantages in the woollen trade, by not being allowed to export their woollen manufactures to the English colonies,[276] or to import dye stuffs directly from thence; and the English in this respect, and in having those exclusive markets, possessed considerable advantages.
Let it now be considered what are the usual means taken to promote the prosperity of any country in respect of trade and manufactures? She is encouraged to work up her own materials, to export her manufactures to other nations, to import from them the material for manufacture, and to export none of her own that she is able to work up; not to buy what she is capable of selling to others, and to promote the carrying trade and ship-building. If these are the most obvious means by which a nation may advance in strength and riches, institutions counteracting those means must necessarily tend to reduce it to weakness and poverty; and, therefore, the advocates for the continuance of those institutions will find it difficult to satisfy the world that such a system of policy is either reasonable or just.
The cheapness of labour, the excellence of materials, and the success of the manufacture in the excluded country,[277] may appear to an unprejudiced man to be rather reasons for the encouragement than for the prohibition. But the preamble of the English Act of the 10th and 11th of William III. affirms, that the exportation from Ireland and the English plantations in America to foreign markets, heretofore supplied from England, would inevitably sink the value of lands, and tend to the ruin of the trade and manufactures of that realm. I shall only consider this assertion as relative to Ireland. A fact upon which the happiness of a great and ancient kingdom, and of millions of people depends, ought to have been supported by the most incontestable evidence, and should never be suffered to rest in speculation, or to be taken from the mere suggestion or distant apprehension of commercial jealousy. Those fears for the future were not founded on any experience of the past. From what market had the woollen manufactures of Ireland ever excluded England? What part of her trade, and which of her manufactures had been ruined; and where did any of her lands fall by the woollen exports of Ireland? Were any of those facts attempted to be proved at the time of the prohibition? The amount of the Irish export proves it to have been impossible that those facts could have then existed. The consequences mentioned as likely to arise to England from the supposed increase of those manufactures in Ireland, had no other foundation but the apprehensions of rivalship among trading people, who, in excluding their fellow-citizens, have opened the gates for the admission of the enemy.
Whether those apprehensions are now well-founded, should be carefully considered. Justice, sound policy, and the general good of the British Empire require it. The arguments in support of those restraints are principally these:—That labour is cheaper, and taxes lower, in Ireland than in England, and that the former would be able to undersell the latter in all foreign markets.
Spinning is now certainly cheaper in Ireland, because the persons employed in it live on food[278] with which the English would not be content; but the wages of spinners would soon rise if the trade was opened. At the loom, I am informed, that the same quantity of work is done cheaper in England than in Ireland; and we have the misfortune of daily experience to convince us that the English, notwithstanding the supposed advantages of the Irish in this trade, undersell them at their own markets in every branch of the woollen manufacture. A decisive proof that they cannot undersell the English in foreign markets.
With the increase of manufactures, agriculture, and commerce in Ireland, the demand for labour, and consequently its price, would increase.[279] That price would be soon higher in Ireland than in England. It is not in the richest countries, but in those that are growing rich the fastest, that the wages of labour are highest,[280] though the price of provisions is much lower in the latter; this, before the present rebellion, was in both respects the case of England and North America. Any difference in the price of labour is more than balanced by the difference in the price of material, which has been for many years past higher in Ireland than in England, and would become more valuable if the export of the manufacture was allowed. The English have also great advantages in this trade from their habits of diligence, superior skill, and large capital. From these circumstances, though the Scotch have full liberty to export their woollen manufactures, the English work up their wool,[281] and the Scotch make only some kind of coarse cloths for the lower classes of their people; and this is said to be for want of a capital to manufacture it at home.[282] If the woollen trade was now open to Ireland, it would be for the most part carried on by English capitals, and by merchants resident there. Nearly one-half of the stock which carried on the foreign trade of Ireland in 1672, inconsiderable as it then was, belonged to those who lived out of Ireland.[283] The greater part of the exportation and coasting trade of British America was carried on by the capitals of merchants who resided in Great Britain; even many of the stores and warehouses from which goods were retailed in some of their principal provinces, particularly in Virginia and Maryland, belonged to merchants who resided in Great Britain, and the retail trade was carried on by those who were not resident in the country.[284] It is said that in ancient Egypt, China, and Indostan, the greater part of their exportation trade was carried on by foreigners.[285] The same thing happened formerly in Ireland, where the whole commerce of the country was carried on by the Dutch;[286] and at present, in the victualling trade of Ireland, the Irish are but factors to the English. This is not without example in Great Britain, where there are many little manufacturing towns, the inhabitants of which have not capitals sufficient to transport the produce of their own industry to those distant markets where there is demand and consumption for it, and their merchants are properly only the agents of wealthier merchants, who reside in some of the great commercial cities.[287] The Irish are deficient in all kinds of stock, they have not sufficient for the cultivation of their lands, and are deficient in the stocks of master manufacturers, wholesale merchants, and even of retailers.
Of what Ireland gains, it is computed that one-third centres in Great Britain.[288] Of our woollen manufacture the greatest part of the profit would go directly there. But the manufacturers of Ireland would be employed, would be enabled to buy from the farmers the superfluous produce of their labour, the people would become industrious, their numbers would greatly increase, the British State would be strengthened, though probably, this country would not for many years find any great influx of wealth; it would be, however, more equally distributed, from which the people and the Government would derive many important advantages.
Whatever wealth might be gained by Ireland would be, in every respect, an accession to Great Britain. Not only a considerable part of it would flow to the seat of government, and of final judicature, and to the centre of commerce; but when Ireland should be able she would be found willing, as in justice she ought to be, to bear her part of those expenses which Great Britain may hereafter incur, in her efforts for the protection of the whole British empire. If Ireland cheerfully and spontaneously, but when she was ill able, contributed, particularly in the years 1759, 1761, 1769, and continued to do so in the midst of distress and poverty, without murmur, to the end of the year 1778, when Great Britain thought proper to relieve her from a burden which she was no longer able to bear, no doubt can be entertained of her contributing, in a much greater proportion, when the means of acquiring shall be open to her.
I form this opinion, not only from the proofs which the experience of many years, and in many signal instances has given, but the nature of the Irish Constitution, which requires that the laws of Ireland should be certified under the Great Seal of England, and the superintending protection of Great Britain, necessary to the existence of Ireland, would make it her interest to cultivate, at all times, a good understanding with her sister kingdom.
The lowness of taxes in Ireland seems to fall within the objection arising from the cheapness of labour. But the disproportion between the taxes of the two kingdoms is much overrated in Great Britain. Hearth-money in Ireland amounts to about £59,000 yearly, the sums raised by Grand Juries are said to exceed the annual sum of £140,000, and the duties on beef, butter, pork, and tallow exported, at a medium from 1772 to 1778, amount to £26,577 11s. yearly. These are payable out of lands, or their immediate produce, and may well be considered as a land-tax. These, with the many other taxes payable in Ireland, compared either with the annual amount of the sums which the inhabitants can earn or expend, with the rental of the lands, the amount of the circulating specie, of personal property, or of the trade of Ireland, it is apprehended would appear not to be inferior in proportion to the taxes of England compared with any of those objects in that country.[289] The sums remitted to absentees[290] are worse than so much paid in taxes, because a large proportion of these is usually expended in the country. If this reasoning is admitted, it will require no calculation to show that Ireland pays more taxes in proportion to its small income than England does in proportion to its great one.
Of excisable commodities, the consumption by each manufacturer is not so considerable as to make the great difference commonly imagined in the price of labour. It is an acknowledged fact that Ireland pays in excises as much as she is able to bear, and that her inability to bear more arises from those very restraints. But supposing the disproportion to be as great as is erroneously imagined in Great Britain, it will not conclude in favour of the prohibition. The land-tax is nearly four times as high in some counties of England as in others, and provisions are much cheaper in some parts of that kingdom than in others, and yet they have all sufficient employment, and go to market upon equal terms. But a monopoly and not an equal market was plainly the object in 1698; it was not to prevent the Irish from underselling at foreign markets, but to prevent their selling there at all. The consequences to the excluded country have been mentioned. England has also been a great sufferer by this mistaken policy.
Mr. Dobbs, who wrote in 1729,[291] affirms that by this law of 1699, our woollen manufacturers were forced away into France, Germany, and Spain; that they had in many branches so much improved the woollen manufacture of France, as not only to supply themselves, but to vie with the English in foreign markets, and that by their correspondence, they had laid the foundation for the running of wool thither both from England and Ireland. He says that those nations were then so improved, as in a great measure to supply themselves with many sorts they formerly had from England, and since that time have deprived Britain of millions, instead of thousands that Ireland might have made.
It is now acknowledged that the French undersell the English; and as far as they are supplied with Irish wool, the loss to the British empire is double what it would be, if the Irish exported their goods manufactured. This is mentioned by Sir Matthew Decker[292] as the cause of the decline of the English, and the increase of the French woollen manufactures; and he asserts that the Irish can recover that trade out of their hands. England, since the passing of this law, has got much less of our wool than before.[293] In 1698, the export of our wool to England amounted to 377,520¾ stone; at a medium of eight years, to Lady-day, 1728, it was only 227,049 stone, which is 148,000 stone less than in 1698, and was a loss of more than half a million yearly to England. In the last ten years the quantity exported has been so greatly reduced, that in one of these years[294] it amounted only to 1007 st. 11 lb., and in the last year did not exceed 1665 st. 12 lb.[295] The price of wool under an absolute prohibition, is £50 or £60 per cent. under the market price of Europe, which will always defeat the prohibition.[296]
The impracticability of preventing the pernicious practice of running wool is now well understood. Of the thirty-two counties in Ireland nineteen are maritime, and the rest are washed by a number of fine rivers that empty themselves into the sea. Can such an extent of ocean, such a range of coasts, such a multitude of harbours, bays, and creeks, be effectually guarded?
The prohibition of the export of live cattle forced the Irish into the re-establishment of their woollen manufacture; and the restraint of the woollen manufacture was a strong temptation to the running of wool. The severest penalties were enacted, the British legislature, the Government, and House of Commons in Ireland, exerted all possible efforts to remove this growing evil, but in vain, until the law was made in Great Britain[297] in 1739 to take off the duties from woollen or bay yarn exported from Ireland, excepting worsted yarn of two or more threads, which has certainly given a considerable check to the running of wool, and has shown that the policy of opening is far more efficacious than that of restraining. The world is become a great commercial society; exclude trade from one channel, and it seldom fails to find another.
To show the absolute necessity of Great Britain’s opening to Ireland some new means of acquiring, let the annual balance of exports and imports returned from the entries in the different custom houses, in favour of Ireland, on all her trade with the whole world, in every year from 1768 to 1778, be compared with the remittances made from Ireland to England in each of those years, it will evidently appear that those remittances could not be made out of that balance. The entries of exports made at custom houses are well known to exceed the real amount of those exports in all countries, and this excess is greater in times of diffidence, when merchants wish to acquire credit by giving themselves the appearance of being great traders.
This balance in favour of Ireland on her general trade, appears by those returns to have been, in 1776, £606,190 11s. 0¼d.; in 1777, £24,203 3s. 10¼d.; in 1778, £386,384 3s. 7d.; and, taken at a medium of eleven years, from 1768 to 1778, both inclusive, it amounts to the sum of £605,083 7s. 5d. The sums remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and profits of offices, amounted, at the lowest computation, from 1768 to 1773, to £1,100,000 yearly;[298] and from 1773, when the tontines were introduced, from which period large sums were borrowed from England, those remittances were considerably increased, and are now not less than between 12 and £13,000 yearly. Ireland then pays to Great Britain double the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which Great Britain allows her. It will be difficult to find a similar instance in the history of mankind.
Those great and constant issues of her wealth without any return, not felt by any other country in such a degree, are reasons for granting advantages to Ireland to supply this consuming waste, instead of depriving her of any which Nature has bestowed.
If any of the resources which have hitherto enabled her to hear this prodigious drain are injurious to the manufactures both of England and Ireland, and highly advantageous to the rivals and enemies of both, is it wise in Great Britain by persevering in an inpracticable system of commercial policy, repugnant to the natural course and order of things, to suffer so very considerable a part of the empire to remain in such a situation?
The experiment of an equal and reasonable system of commerce is worth making; that which has been found the best conductor in philosophy is the surest guide in commerce.
Would you consult persons employed in the trade? They have in one respect an interest opposite to that of the public. To narrow the competition is advantageous to the dealers,[299] but prejudicial to the public. If Edward I. had not preferred the general welfare of his subjects to the interested opinions and petitions of the traders, all merchant traders (who were then mostly strangers) would have been sent away from London,[300] for which purpose the Commons offered him the fiftieth part of their movables.[301]
What was the information given by the trading towns in 1697 and 1698 on the subject of the woollen manufacture of Ireland? Several of their[302] petitions state that the woollen manufacture was set-up in Ireland, as if it had been lately introduced there; and one of them goes so far as to represent the particular time and manner of introducing it. “Many of the poor of that kingdom,” says this extraordinary petition, “during the late rebellion there, fled into the west of England, where they were put to work in the woollen manufacture to learn that trade; and since the reduction of Ireland endeavours were used to set up those manufactures there.[303]
Would any man suppose that this could relate to a manufacture in which this kingdom excelled before the time of Edward III., which had been the subject of so many laws in both kingdoms, and which was always cultivated here, and before this rebellion with more success than after it? The trading towns gave accounts totally inconsistent of the state of this manufacture at that time in England: from Exeter it is represented as greatly decayed and discouraged[304] in those parts, and diminished in England. But a petition from Leeds represents this manufacture as having very much increased[305] since the revolution in all its several branches, to the general interest of England; and yet, in two days after the clothiers from three towns in Gloucestershire assert that the trade has decayed, and that the poor are almost starved.[306] The Commissioners of Trade differ in opinion from them and by their report it appears that the woollen manufacture was then very much increased and improved.[307] The traders have sometimes mistaken their own interests on those subjects. In 1698 a petition for prohibiting the importation from Ireland of all worsted and woollen yarn, represents that the poor of England are ready to perish by this importation;[308] and in 1739 several petitions were preferred against taking off the duties[309] from worsted and bay yarn exported from Ireland to England. But this has been done in the manner before mentioned, and is now acknowledged to be highly useful to England. Trading people have ever aimed at exclusive privileges. Of this there are two extraordinary instances: in the year 1698 two petitions were preferred from Folkstone and Aldborough, stating a singular grievance that they suffered from Ireland, “by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford,[310] and sending them to the Streights, and thereby forestalling and ruining petitioners’ markets;” but these petitioners had the hard lot of having motions in their favour rejected.
I wish that the fullest information may be had in this important investigation, but between the inconsistent accounts and opinions that will probably be given, experience only can decide; and experience will demonstrate that the removal of those restraints will promote the prosperity of both kingdoms.
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Sixth Letter.
Dublin, 1st September, 1779.
My Lord,
By the proceedings in the English Parliament, in the year 1698, and the speech of the Lords Justices to the Irish Parliament in that year, it appears that the linen was intended to be given to this country as an equivalent for the woollen manufacture. The opinion that this supposed equivalent was accepted as such by Ireland is mistaken. The temperament which the Commons of Ireland in their address said they hoped to find was no more than a partial and temporary duty on exportation, as an experiment only, and not as an established system, reserving the exportation of frieze, then much the most valuable part to Ireland.[311] The English intended the linen manufacture as a compensation, and declared that they thought it would be much more advantageous to Ireland[312] than the woollen trade.
This idea of an equivalent has led several persons, and, among the rest, two very able writers[313] into mistakes from the want of information in some facts which are necessary to be known, that this transaction may be fully understood, and, therefore, ought to be particularly stated.
The Irish had before this period applied themselves to the linen trade. This appears by two of their statutes, in the reign of Elizabeth, one laying a duty on the export of flax and linen yarn,[314] and the other making it felony to ship them without paying such duty.[315] In the reign of Charles I. great pains were taken by Lord Strafford to encourage this manufacture, and in the succeeding reign[316] the great and munificent efforts of the first duke of Ormond were crowned with merited success. The blasts of civil dissensions nipped those opening buds of industry; and, when the season was more favourable, it is probable that, like England, they found the woollen manufacture a more useful object of national pursuit, which may be collected from the address of the English House of Commons, “that they so unwillingly promote the linen trade,”[317] and it was natural for a poor and exhausted country to work up the materials of which it was possessed.
In 1696 the English had given encouragement to the manufactures of hemp and flax in Ireland, but without stipulating any restraint of the export of woollen goods. The English Act made in that year recites that great sums of money were yearly exported out of England for the purchasing of hemp, flax, and linen, and the productions thereof, which might be prevented by being supplied from Ireland, and allows natives of England and Ireland to import into England, free of all duties,[318] hemp and flax, and all the productions thereof. In the same session[319] a law passed in England for the more effectually preventing the exportation of wool, and for encouraging the importation thereof from Ireland. Both those manufactures were under the consideration of Parliament this session, and it was thought, from enlarged views of the welfare of both kingdoms, that England should encourage the linen without discouraging the woollen manufacture of Ireland. There was no further encouragement given by England to our linen manufacture for some years after the year 1696.[320] In 1696 there was no equivalent whatever given for the prohibition of the export of our woollen manufactures.
It is true the assurances given by both Houses of Parliament in England for the encouragement of our linen trade were as strong as words could express; but was this intended encouragement, if immediately carried into execution, an equivalent to Ireland for what she had lost? Let it first be considered whether it was an equivalent at the time of the prohibition.
The woollen was then the principal manufacture and trade of Ireland. That it was then considered as her staple, appears from the several Acts of Parliament before mentioned, and from the attempt made in 1695 by the Irish House of Commons to lay a duty on all old and new drapery imported. The amount of the export proves[321] the value of the trade to so poor a country as Ireland, and makes it probable that she then clothed her own people. The address of the English House of Lords shows that this manufacture was “growing” amongst us, and the goodness of our own materials “for making all manner of cloth.”[322] And the English Act of 1698 is a voucher that this manufacture was then in so flourishing a state as to give apprehensions, however ill founded, of its rivalling England in foreign markets. The immediate consequences to Ireland showed the value of what she lost; many thousands of manufacturers were obliged to leave this kingdom for want of employment; many parts of the southern and western counties were so far depopulated that they have not yet recovered a reasonable number of inhabitants; and the whole kingdom was reduced to the greatest poverty and distress.[323] The linen trade of Ireland was then of little consideration, compared with the woollen.[324] The whole exportation of linens, in 1700,[325] amounted only in value to £14,112. It was an experiment substituted in the place of an established trade.
The English ports in Asia, Africa, and America were then shut against our linens; and, when they were opened[326] for our white and brown linens, the restraints of imports from thence to Ireland made that concession of less value, and she still found it her interest to send, for the most part, her linens to England. The linen could not have been a compensation for the woollen manufacture, which employs by far a greater number of hands, and yields much greater profit to the public, as well as to the manufacturers.[327] Of this manufacture there are not many countries which have the primum in equal perfection with England and Ireland; and no countries, taking in the various kinds of those extensive manufactures, so fit for carrying them on. There cannot be many rivals in this trade: in the linen they are most numerous. Other parts of the world are more fit for it than Ireland, and many equally so.
If this could be supposed to have been an equivalent at the time, or to have become so by its success, it can no longer be considered in that light. The commercial state of Europe is greatly altered. Ireland can no longer enjoy the benefit intended for her. It was intended that the great sums of money remitted out of England to foreign countries in this branch of commerce should all centre in Ireland, and that England should be supplied with linen from thence;[328] but foreigners now draw great sums from England in this trade, and rival the Irish in the English markets. The Russians are becoming powerful rivals to the Irish, and undersell them in the coarse kinds of linen. This is now the staple manufacture of Scotland. England, that had formerly cultivated this manufacture without success, and had taken linens[329] from France to the amount of £700,000 yearly, has now made great progress in it. The encouragement of this trade in England and Scotland has been long a principal object to the British Legislature; and the nation that encouraged us to the undertaking has now become our rival in it.[330] That this is not too strong an expression will appear by considering two British statutes, one of which[331] has laid a duty on the importation of Irish sail-cloth into Great Britain, as long as the bounties should be paid on the exportation from[332] Ireland, which obliged us to discontinue them; and the other[333] has given a bounty on the exportation of British chequered and striped linens exported out of Great Britain to Africa, America, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, the island of Minorca, or the East Indies. This is now become a very valuable part of the manufacture, which Great Britain, by the operation of this bounty, keeps to herself. The bounties on the exportation of all other linen, which she has generously given to ours as well as to her own,[334] operate much more strongly in favour of the latter;[335] the expense of freight, insurance, commission, &c., in sending the linens from Ireland to England has been computed at four per cent.; and if this computation is right, when the British linens obtain £12 per cent., the full amount of the premium, the Irish do not receive above eight. Those bounties, though acknowledged to be a favour to Ireland, give Great Britain a further and a very important advantage in this trade, by inducing us to send all our linens to England, from whence other countries are supplied.
The great hinge upon which the stipulation on the part of England, in the year 1698, turned was, that England should give every possible encouragement to the linen and hempen manufactures in Ireland. Encouraging those manufactures in another country was not compatible with this intention. The course of events made it necessary to do this in Scotland;[336] the course of trade made it necessary for England to do the same. A commercial country must cultivate every considerable manufacture of which she has or can get the primum. These circumstances have totally changed the state of the question; and if it was reasonable and just that Ireland, in 1698, should have accepted of the linen in the place of the woollen manufactures, it deserves to be considered whether by the almost total change of the circumstances it is not now unreasonable and unjust.
America itself, the opening of whose markets[337] to Irish linens was thought to have been one of the principal encouragements to that trade, is now become a rival and an enemy; and when she puts off the latter character, will appear in the former with new force and infinite advantages.
The emigration for many years of such great multitudes of our linen manufacturers to America,[338] proves incontrovertibly that they can carry on their trade with more success in America than in Ireland. But let us examine the facts to determine whether the proposed encouragements have taken place. The declaration of the Lords of England for the encouragement of the linen manufacture of Ireland was “to all the advantage and profit that kingdom can be capable of;” and of the Commons, “that they shall be always ready to give it their utmost assistance.” The speech of the Lords Justices shows the extent of this engagement, and promises the encouragement of England “to the linen and hempen manufactures of Ireland.”
In the year 1705[339] liberty was given to the natives of England or Ireland to export from Ireland to the English plantations white and brown linens only, but no liberty given to bring in return any goods from thence to Ireland, which will appear from the account in the Appendix to have made this law of inconsiderable effect. In 1743 premiums were given on the exportation of English and Irish linens from Great Britain; and the bounty granted by Great Britain, in 1774, on flax seed imported into Ireland is a further proof of the munificent attention of Great Britain to our linen trade. But chequered, striped, printed, painted, stained, or dyed linens were not until lately admitted into the plantations from Ireland; and the statutes of Queen Anne,[340] laying duties at the rate of thirty per cent. on such linens made in foreign parts and imported into Great Britain, have been, rather by a forced construction, extended to Ireland, which is deprived of the British markets[341] for those goods, and, until the year 1777,[342] was excluded from the American markets also. But it is thought, as to chequered and striped linens, which are a valuable branch of the linen trade, that this Act will have little effect in favour of this country, from the operation of the before-mentioned British Act of the 10th G. 3, which, by granting a bounty on the exportation of those goods of the manufacture of Great Britain only gives a direct preference to the British linen manufacture before the Irish.
The hempen manufacture of Ireland has been, so far, discouraged by Great Britain, that the Irish have totally abandoned the culture of hemp.[343]
I hope to be excused for weighing scrupulously a proposed equivalent, for which the receiver was obliged to part with the advantages of which he was possessed. The equivalent, given in 1667, for the almost entire exclusion of Ireland from the ports of England and America, was the exportation of our manufactures to foreign nations. The prohibition of 1699 was not altogether consistent with the equivalent of 1667; and from the equivalent of 1698 the superior encouragement since given to English and Scotch linen, and the discouragement to the chequer and stamped linen and sail-cloth of Ireland must make a large deduction. But why must one manufacture only be encouraged? The linen and the woollen trades of Ireland were formerly both encouraged by the legislatures of both kingdoms; they are now both equally encouraged in England.
If this single trade was found sufficient employment for 1,000,000 men who remained in this country at the time of this restraint (the contrary of which has been shown), it would require the interposition of more than human wisdom to divide it among 2,500,000 men at this day, and to send the multitude away satisfied.
No populous commercial country can subsist on one manufacture; if the world has ever produced such an instance I have not been able to find it. Reason and experience demonstrate that, to make society happy, the members of it must be able to supply the wants of each other, as far as their country affords the means; and, where it does not, by exchanging the produce of their industry for that of their neighbours. When the former is discouraged, or the latter prevented, that community cannot be happy. If they are not allowed to send to other countries the manufactured produce of their own, the people who enjoy that liberty will undersell them in their own markets; the restrained manufacturers will be reduced to poverty, and will hang like paralytic limbs on the rest of the body.
If England’s commercial system would have been incomplete, had she failed to cultivate any one principal manufacture of which she had or could obtain the material, what shall we say to the commercial state of that country, restrained in a manufacture of which she has the materials in abundance, and in which she had made great progress, and almost confined to one manufacture of which she has not the primum.
Manufactures, though they may flourish for a time, generally fail in countries that do not produce the principal materials of them. Of this there are many instances. Venice and the other Italian states carried on the woollen manufacture until the countries which produced the materials manufactured them, when the Italian manufactures declined, and dwindled into little consideration in comparison of their former splendour. The Flemings, from their vicinity to those countries that produced the materials, beat the Italians out of their markets. But when England cultivated that manufacture, the Flemings lost it. That this, and not oppression, was the cause, appears from the following state of the linen manufacture[344] there, because it consumes flax, the native produce of the soil; and it is much to be feared that those islands will be obliged to yield the superiority in this trade to other nations that have great extent of country, and sufficient land to spare for this impoverishing production.
That some parts of Ireland may produce good flax must be allowed, and also that parts of Flanders would produce fine wool. But though the legislature has for many years made it a capital object to encourage the growth of flax and the raising of flax-seed in this kingdom, yet it is obliged to pay above £9,000 yearly in premiums on the importation of flax-seed, which is now almost imported, and costs us between £70,000 and £80,000 yearly. Flax farming, in any large quantity, is become a precarious and losing trade,[345] and those who have been induced to attempt it by premiums from the Linen Board have, after receiving those premiums, generally found themselves losers, and have declined that branch of tillage.
When the imported flax-seed is unsound and fails, in particular districts, which very frequently happens, the distress, confusion, and litigation that arise among manufacturers, farmers, retailers, and merchants, affords a melancholy proof of the dangerous consequences to a populous nation when the industry of the people and the hope of the rising year rest on a single manufacture, for the materials of which we must depend upon the courtesy and good faith of other nations.
Let me appeal to the experience of very near a century in the very instance now before you. A single manufacture is highly encouraged; it obtains large premiums, not only from the legislature of its own country, but from that of a great neighbouring kingdom; it becomes not only the first, but almost the sole national object; immense sums of money are expended in the cultivation of it,[346] and the success exceeds our most sanguine expectations. But look into the state of this country; you will find property circulating slowly and languidly, and in the most numerous classes of your people no circulation or property at all. You will frequently find them in want of employment and of food, and reduced in a vast number of instances from the slightest causes to distress and beggary. All other manufacturers will continue spiritless, poor, and distressed, and derive from uncertain employment a precarious and miserable subsistence; they gain little by the success of the prosperous trade, the dealers in which are tempted to buy from that country to which they principally sell; the disease of those morbid parts must spread through the whole body, and will at length reach the persons employed in the favoured manufacture. These will become poor and wretched, and discontented; they emigrate by thousands; in vain you represent the crime of deserting their country, the folly of forsaking their friends, the temerity of wandering to distant, and, perhaps, inhospitable climates; their despondency is deaf to the suggestions of prudence, and will answer, that they can no longer stay “where hope never comes,” but will fly from these “regions of sorrow.”[347]
Let me not be thought to undervalue the bounties and generosity of that great nation which has taken our linen trade under its protection. There is much ill-breeding, though, perhaps, some good sense, in the churlish reply of the philosopher to the request of the prince who visited his humble dwelling, and desired to know, and to gratify his wishes; that they were no more than this, that the prince should not stand between the philosopher and the sun. Had he been a man of the world he might have expressed the same idea with more address, though with less force and significance; he might have said, “I am sensible of your greatness and of your power; I have no doubts of your liberality; but Nature has abundantly given me all that I wish; intercept not one of her greatest gifts; allow me to enjoy the bounties of her hand, and the contentment of my own mind will furnish the rest.”
I have the honour to be, my Lord, &c.
Seventh Letter.
Dublin, 3rd September, 1779.
My Lord,
By comparing the restrictive law of 1699 with the statutes which had been previously enacted in England from the fifteenth year of the reign of Charles II., relative to the colonies, it appears that this restrictive law originated in a system of colonisation. The principle of that system was that the colonies should send their materials to England and take from thence her manufactures, and that the making those manufactures in the colonies should be prohibited or discouraged. But was it reasonable to extend this principle to Ireland? The climate, growth, and productions of the colonies were different from those of the parent country. England had no sugar-canes, coffee, dying stuff, and little tobacco. She took all those from her colonies only, and it was thought reasonable that they should take from her only the manufactures which she made. But in Ireland the climate, soil, growth, and productions are the same as in England, who could give no such equivalent to Ireland as she gave to America, and was so far from considering her when this system first prevailed, as a proper subject for such regulations, that she was allowed the benefits arising from those colonies equally with England, until the fifteenth year of the reign of King Charles II.[348] By an Act passed in that year, Ireland had no longer the privilege of sending any of her exports, except servants, horses, victuals, and salt, to any of the colonies; the reasons are assigned in the preamble “to make this kingdom a staple, not only of the commodities of those plantations, but also of the commodities of other countries and places for the supplying of them, and it being the usage of other nations to keep their plantation trade to themselves.”[349] At the time of passing this law, though less liberal ideas in respect of Ireland were then entertained, it went no further than not to extend to her the benefits of those colony regulations; but it was not then thought that this kingdom was a proper subject for any such regulations. The scheme of substituting there, instead of the woollen, the linen trade, was not at that time thought of. The English were desirous to establish it among themselves, and by an Act of Parliament,[350] made in that year for encouraging the manufacture of linen, granted to all foreigners who shall set up in England the privileges of natural born subjects.
But it appears by the English Statute of the 7th and 8th of William III.,[351] which has been before stated, that this scheme had not succeeded in England, and from this act it is manifest that England considered itself as well as Ireland interested to encourage the linen manufacture there; and it does not then appear to have been thought just that Ireland should purchase this benefit for both, by giving up the exportation of any other manufacture. But in 1698 a different principle prevailed, in effect the same, so far as relates to the woollen manufacture, with that which had prevailed as to the commerce of the colonies. This is evident from the preamble of the English law,[352] made in 1699, “for as much as wool and woollen manufactures of cloth, serge, bays, kersies, and other stuffs, made or mixed with wool, are the greatest and most profitable commodities of this kingdom, on which the value of lands and the trade of the nation do chiefly depend, and whereas great quantities of like manufactures have of late been made and are daily increasing in the kingdom of Ireland, and in the English plantations in America, and are exported from thence to foreign markets heretofore supplied from England, which will inevitably sink the value of lands, and tend to the ruin of the trade and woollen manufactures of this realm; for the prevention whereof and for the encouragement of the woollen manufactures in this kingdom, &c.
The ruinous consequences of the woollen manufactures of Ireland to the value of lands, trade, and manufactures of England, stated in this Act, are apprehensions that were entertained, and not events that had happened; and before those facts are taken for granted, I request the mischief recited in the Acts[353] made in England to prevent the importation of cattle dead or alive from Ireland, may be considered. The mischiefs stated in those several laws are supposed to be as ruinous to England as those recited in the Act of 1699, and yet are now allowed to be groundless apprehensions occasioned by short and mistaken views of the real interests of England. Sir W. Petty[354] demonstrates that the opinion entertained in England at the time of his prohibition of the import of cattle from Ireland was ill-founded; he calls it a strange conceit. If he was now living, he would probably consider the prohibition of our woollen exports as not having a much better foundation.
Connecting this preamble of the Act of 1699, with the speech made from the throne to the parliament of Ireland in the year 1698, with the addresses of both houses in England, and with the prohibition by this and by other Acts, formerly made in England, of exporting wool from Ireland except to that kingdom, the object of this new commercial regulation is obvious. It was to discourage the woollen manufacture in Ireland and in effect to prohibit the exportation from thence because it was the principal branch of manufacture and trade in England; to induce us to send to them our materials for that manufacture, and that we should be supplied with it by them; and to encourage, as a compensation to Ireland, the linen manufacture, which was not at that time a commercial object of any importance to England. This I take to be a part of the system of colony regulations. Whether it was reasonable or just to bring this kingdom into that system, has been already submitted from arguments drawn from the climates and productions of the different countries. The supposed compensation was no more than what Ireland had before; no further encouragement was given by England to our linen manufacture until six years after this prohibition, when at the request of the Irish House of Commons and after a representation of the ruinous state of the country, liberty was given by an English Act of Parliament[355] to export our white and brown linens into the colonies, which was allowing us to do as to one manufacture what, before the fifteenth of King Charles II., was permitted in every instance.
It would be presumption in a private man to decide on the weight of those arguments; but to select and arrange facts that lie dispersed in journals and books of Statutes in both kingdoms, and to make observations on those facts with caution and respect, can never give offence to those who inquire for the purpose of relieving a distressed nation and of promoting the general welfare. In that confidence I beg leave to place this subject in a different view, and to request that it may be considered what the commercial system of this kingdom was at the time of passing this law of 1699, and whether it was, in this respect, reasonable or just that such a regulation should have been then made? The great object which the Lords and Commons of Great Britain have determined to investigate led to such a discussion; determined as they are to pursue effectual methods “for promoting the common strength, wealth, and commerce of both kingdoms.” What better guides can they follow than the examples of their ancestors and the means used by them for many centuries, and in the happiest times, for attaining the same great purposes.
In my opinion it would be improper, in the present state of the British Empire, to agitate disputed questions that may inflame the passions of men. May no such questions ever arise between two affectionate sister kingdoms. It is my purpose only to state acknowledged facts, which never have been contested, and from those facts to lay before you the commercial system of Ireland before the year 1699.
For several centuries before this period Ireland was in possession of the English Common law[356] and of Magna Charta. The former secures the subject in the enjoyment of property of every kind; and by the latter the liberties of all the ports of the kingdom are established.
The Statutes made in England for the common and public weal are,[357] by an Irish Act of the 10th of Henry VII., made laws in Ireland; and the English Commercial Statutes, in which Ireland is expressly mentioned, will place the former state of commerce in this country in a light very different from that in which it has been generally considered in Great Britain.
By the 17th of Edward III., ch. 1, all sorts of merchandises may be exported from Ireland, except to the King’s enemies.
By the 27th of Edward III., ch. 18, merchants of Ireland and Wales may bring their merchandise to the staple of England; and by the 34th of the same king, ch. 17, all kinds of merchandises may be exported from and imported into Ireland, as well by aliens as denizens. In the same year there is another Statute, ch. 18, that all persons who have lands or possessions in Ireland might freely import thither and export from that kingdom their own commodities; and by the 50th of Edward III., ch. 8, no alnage is to be paid, if frieze ware, which are made in Ireland.
This freedom of commerce was beneficial to both countries. It enabled Ireland to be very serviceable to Edward III., as it had been to his father and grandfather, in supplying numbers of armed vessels for transporting their great lords and their attendants and troops[358] to Scotland and also to Portsmouth for his French wars.
But the reign of Edward IV. furnishes still stronger instances of the regard shown by England to the trade and manufactures of this country.
In the third year of that monarch’s reign the artificers of England complained to parliament that they were greatly impoverished, and could not live by bringing in divers commodities and wares ready wrought.[359] An Act passed reciting those complaints, and ordaining that no merchant born a subject of the king, denisen or stranger, or other person, should bring into England or Wales any woollen cloths, &c., and enumerates many other manufactures on pain of forfeiture, provided that all wares and “chaffers” made and wrought in Ireland or Wales may be brought in and sold in the realm of England, as they were wont before the making of that Act.[360]
In the next year another Act[361] passed in that kingdom, that all woollen cloth brought into England, and set to sale, should be forfeited, except cloths made in Wales or Ireland.
In those reigns England was as careful of the commerce and manufactures of her ancient sister kingdom, particularly in her great staple trade, as she was of her own.
Of this attention there were further instances in the years 1468 and 1478. In two treaties concluded in those years between England and the Duke of Bretagne, the merchandise to be traded in between England, Ireland, and Calais on the one part, and Bretagne on the other, is specified, and woollen cloths are particularly mentioned.[362]
And in a treaty between Henry VII. and the Netherlands, Ireland is included, both as to exports and imports.[363]
The commercial Acts of Parliament in which Ireland is mentioned have only been stated, because they are not generally known. But the laws made in England before the 10th Henry VII. for the protection of merchants and the security of trade, being laws for the common and public weal, are also made laws here by the Irish statute of that year, which was returned under the great seal of England, and must have been previously considered in the privy council of that kingdom. At this period, then, the English commercial system and the Irish, so far as it depended upon the English statute law, was the same; and before this period, so far as it depended upon the common law and Magna Charta, was also the same.
From that time until the 15th of King Charles II., which takes in a period of 167 years, the commercial constitution of Ireland was as much favoured and protected as that of England. “The free enlargement of common traffic which his Majesty’s subjects of Ireland enjoyed,” is taken notice of incidentally in an English statute, in the reign of King James I.,[364] and in 1627, King Charles I. made a strong declaration in favour of the trade and manufactures of this country. By several English statutes in the reign of King Charles II., an equal attention was shown to the woollen manufactures in both kingdoms; in the 12th year of his reign[365] the exportation of wool, wool-felts, fuller’s earth, or any kind of scowering earth, was prohibited from both. But let the reasons mentioned in the preamble for passing this law be adverted to: “For preventing inconveniences and losses that happened, and that daily do and may happen, to the kingdom of England, dominion of Wales, and kingdom of Ireland, through the secret exportation of wool out of and from the said kingdoms and dominions; and for the better setting on work the poor people and inhabitants of the kingdoms and dominions aforesaid, and to the intent that the full use and benefit of the principal native commodities of the same kingdom and dominion may come, redound, and be unto the subjects and inhabitants of the same.”
This was the voice of nature, and the dictate of sound and general policy; it proclaimed to the nations that they should not give to strangers the bread of their own children; that the produce of the soil should support the inhabitants of the country; that their industry should be exercised on their own materials, and that the poor should be employed, clothed, and fed.
The shipping and navigation of England and Ireland were at this time equally favoured and protected. By another Act of the same year no goods or commodities[366] of the growth, production or manufacture of Asia, Africa, or America, shall be imported into England, Ireland, or Wales, but in ships which belong to the people of England or Ireland, the dominion of Wales, or town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, or which are of the built of the said lands, and of which the master and three-fourths of the mariners are English; and a subsequent statute[367] makes the encouragement to navigation in both countries equal, by ordaining that the subjects of Ireland and of the Plantations shall be accounted English within the meaning of that clause. Another law[368] of the same reign shows that the navigation, commerce, and woollen manufactures of both kingdoms were equally protected by the English legislature. This Act lays on the same restraint as the above-mentioned Act of the 12th of Charles II., and makes the transgression still more penal. It recites that wool, wool-felts, &c., are secretly exported from England and Ireland to foreign parts to the great decay of the woollen manufactures, and the destruction of the navigation and commerce of these kingdoms.
From those laws it appears that the commerce, navigation, and manufactures of this country were not only favoured and protected by the English legislature, but that we had in those times the full benefit of their Plantation trade; whilst the woollen manufactures were protected and encouraged in England and Ireland, the planting of tobacco in both was prohibited, because “it was one of the main products of several of the Plantations, and upon which their welfare and subsistence do depend.”[369]
This policy was liberal, just, and equal; it opened the resources and cultivated the strength of every part of the empire.
This commercial system of Ireland was enforced by several Acts of her own legislature; two statutes passed in the reign of Henry VIII. to prevent the exportation of wool, because, says the first of those laws, “it hath been the cause of dearth of cloth and idleness of many folks,”[370] and “tends to the desolation and ruin of this poor land.” The second of those laws enforces the prohibition[371] by additional penalties; it recites “that the said beneficial law had taken little effect, but that since the making thereof great plenty of wool had been conveyed out of this land to the great and inestimable hurt, decay, and impoverishment of the King’s poor subjects within the said land, for redress whereof, and in consideration that conveying of the wool of the growth of this land out of the same is one of the greatest occasions of the idleness of the people, waste, ruin, and desolation of the King’s cities and borough towns, and other places of his dominion within this land.” The 11th of Elizabeth[372] lays duties on the exportation equal to a prohibition, and the reason given in the preamble ought to be mentioned: “That the said commodities may be more abundantly wrought in this realm ere they shall be so transported than presently they are, which shall set many now living idle on work, to the great relief and commodity of this realm.[373]
By the preamble of one of those Acts,[374] made in the reign of Charles II., it appears that the sale of Irish woollen goods in foreign markets was encouraged by England, “whereas there is a general complaint in England, France, and other parts beyond the seas (whither the woollen cloths and other commodities made of wool in this, his Majesty’s kingdom of Ireland, are transported) of the false, deceitful, uneven, and uncertain making thereof, which cometh to pass by reason that the clothiers and makers thereof do not observe any certain assize for length, breadth, and weight for making their clothes and other commodities aforesaid in this kingdom, as they do in the realm of England, and as they ought also to do here, by which means the merchants, buyers, and users of the said cloth and other commodities are much abused and deceived, and the credit, esteem, and sale of the said cloth and commodities is thereby much impaired and undervalued, to the great and general hurt and hindrance of the trade of clothing in this whole realm.”
After the ports of England were shut against our cattle, and our trade to the English colonies was restrained, still this commercial system was adhered to by encouraging the manufactures of this country, and the exportation of them to foreign countries. In 1667, when the power of the Crown was not so well understood as at present, the proclamation before mentioned was published by the Lord Lieutenant and Privy Council of Ireland,[375] in pursuance of a letter from Charles II., by the advice of his council in England, notifying to all his subjects of this kingdom the allowance of a free trade to all foreign countries, either at war or peace with his Majesty.
In the year 1663 the distinction between the trade of England and Ireland,[376] and the restraints on that of the latter commenced. By an English Act passed in that year, entitled an Act “for the encouragement of trade,” a title not very applicable to the parts of it that related to Ireland; besides laying a prohibition on cattle imported into England from that kingdom, the exportation of all commodities except victuals, servants, horses, and salt for the fisheries of New England and Newfoundland, from thence to the English plantations, was prohibited from the 25th March, 1764. The exports allowed were useful to them, but prejudicial to Ireland, as they consisted of our people, our provisions, and a material for manufacture which we might have used more profitably on our own coasts.
In 1670, another Act[377] passed in England to prohibit from the 24th of March, 1671, the exportation from the English plantations to Ireland of several materials for manufactures[378] without first unloading in England or Wales. We are informed by this Act that the restraint of the exportation from the English plantations to Ireland was intended by the Act of 1663; but the intention is not effectuated, though the importation of those commodities into Ireland from England, without first unloading there is, in effect, prohibited by that Act.
The prohibition of importing into Ireland any plantation goods, unless the same had been first landed in England, and had paid the duties, is made general, without any exception, by the English Act of the 7th and 8th W. III., ch. 22.
But by subsequent British Acts[379] it is made lawful to import from his Majesty’s plantations all goods of their growth or manufactures, the articles enumerated in those several Acts excepted.[380]
By a late British Act[381] there is a considerable extension of the exports from Ireland to the British plantations. But it is apprehended that this law will not answer the kind intentions of the British legislature. Denying the import from those countries to Ireland is, in effect, preventing the export from Ireland to those countries. Money cannot be expected for our goods there, we must take theirs in exchange; and this can never answer on the terms of our being obliged, in our return, to pass by Ireland, to land those goods in England, to ship them a second time, and then to sail back again to Ireland. No trade will bear such an unnecessary delay and expense. The quickness and the security of the return are the great inducements to every trade. One is lost and the other hazarded by such embarrassments; those who are not subject to them carry on the trade with such advantages over those who are so entangled as totally to exclude them from it. This is no longer the subject of speculation, it has been proved by the experience of above seventy years. Since the year 1705, when liberty was given to import white and brown linen from Ireland into the English plantations, the quantities sent there directly from Ireland were at all times very inconsiderable notwithstanding this liberty; they were sent for the most part from Ireland to England before any bounty was given on the exportation from thence, which did not take place until the year 1743; and from England the English plantations were supplied. There cannot be a more decisive proof that the liberty of exporting without a direct import in return, will not be beneficial to Ireland.
This country is the part of the British empire most conveniently situated for trade with the colonies. If not suffered to have any beneficial intercourse with them, she will be deprived of one of the great advantages of her situation; and such an obstruction to the prosperity of so considerable a part must necessarily diminish the strength of the whole British empire.
Those laws laid Ireland under restraints highly prejudicial to her commerce and navigation. From those countries the materials for ship-building[382] and some of those used in perfecting their staple manufactures were had; Ireland was, by those laws, excluded from almost all the trade of three quarters of the globe, and from all direct beneficial intercourse with her fellow-subjects in those countries, which were partly stocked from her own loins. But still, though deprived at that time of the benefit of those colonies, she was not then considered as a colony herself, her manufacturers were not in any other manner discouraged, her ports were left open, and she was at liberty to look for a market among strangers, though not among her fellow-subjects in Asia, Africa, or America.[383] By the law of 1699 she was, as to her staple manufacture, deprived of those resources; she was brought within a system of colonisation, but on worse terms than any of the plantations who were allowed to trade with each other.[384]
She could send her principal materials for manufacture to England only; but those manufactures were encouraged in England and discouraged in Ireland. The probable consequence of which was, and the event has answered the expectation, that we should take those manufactures from that country; and that, therefore, in those various trades which employ the greatest numbers of men, the English should work for our people; the rich should work for the poor.
Let the histories of both kingdoms, and the statute books of both parliaments be examined, and no precedent will be found for the Act of 1699, or for the system which it introduced.
The whole tenor of the English statutes relative to the trade of this country, and which, by our Act of the 10th of Henry VII., became a part of our commercial constitution, breathe a spirit totally repugnant to the principle of that law; and it is, therefore, with the utmost deference, submitted to those who have the power to decide whether this law was agreeable to the commercial constitution of Ireland, which, for 500 years, has never produced a similar instance.
It might be naturally supposed, by a person not versed in our story, that in the seventeenth century there had been some offence given or some demerit on our part. He would be surprised to hear that during this period our loyalty had been exemplary, and our sufferings on that account great. In 1641, great numbers of the Protestants of Ireland were destroyed, and many of them were deprived of their property and driven out of their country from their attachment to the English Government in this kingdom, and to that religion and constitution which they happily enjoyed under it. At the Revolution they were constant in the same principles, and successfully staked their lives and properties against domestic and foreign enemies in support of the rights of the English crown, and of the religious and civil liberties of Britain and of Ireland. They bravely shared with her in all her dangers, and liberally partook of all her adversities. Whatever were their rights, they had forfeited none of them. Whatever favours they enjoyed, they had new claims from their merit and their sufferings to a continuance of them. They now wanted more than ever the care of that fostering hand which, by rescuing them twice from oppression (obligations never to be forgotton by the Protestants of Ireland), established the liberties, confirmed the strength, and raised the glory of the British empire.
In speaking of a commercial system, it is not intended to touch upon the power of making or altering laws; the present subject leads us only to consider whether that power has been exercised in any instances contrary to reason, justice, and public utility.
When we consider, with the utmost deference to established authority, what is reasonable, useful, and just, principles equally applicable to an independent or a subordinate, to a rich or a poor country: Quod æque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus æque. Should any man talk of a conquest above 500 years since, between kingdoms long united like those, in blood, interest, and constitution, he does not speak to the purpose; he may as well talk of the conquest of the Norman, and use the antiquated language of obsolete despotism. I revere that conquest which has given to Ireland the common law and the Magna Charta of England.
When we consider what is reasonable, useful, and just, and address our sentiments to a nation renowned for wisdom and justice, should pride pervert the question, talk of the power of Britain, and, in the character of that great country, ask, like Tancred, who shall control me? I answer, like the sober Siffredi—thyself.
The power of regulating trade in a great empire is perverted, when exercised for the destruction of trade in any part of it; but whatever or wherever that power is, if it says to the subject on one side of a channel, you may work and navigate, buy and sell; and to the subject on the other side, you shall not work or navigate, buy or sell, but under such restrictions as will extinguish the genius and unnerve the arm of industry; I will only say that it uses a language repugnant to the free spirit of commerce, and of the British and Irish constitution.
Great eulogiums on the virtues of our people have been pronounced by some of the most respected English authors.[385] Yet indolence is objected to them by those who discourage their industry; but they do not reflect that each of these proceeds from habit, and that the noble observation made on virtue in general is equally applicable to industry; the day that it loses its liberty half of its vigour is gone.[386]
The great expenditure of money by England on account of this country is an argument more fit for the limited views of a compting-house than for the enlarged policy of statesmen deliberating on the general good of a great empire.
Very large sums, it is true, were advanced by England for the relief and recovery of Ireland; but these have been reimbursed fifty-fold by the profits and advantages which have since arisen to England from its trade and intercourse with this kingdom. This argument may be further pursued, but accounts of mutual benefits between intimate friends and near relations should always be kept open, and every attempt to strike a balance between them tends rather to raise jealousies than to promote good will.
It has been said that the interest of England required that those restraints should be imposed. The contrary has been shown; one of the maxims of her own law instructs us to enjoy our own property, so as not to injure that of our neighbour,[387] and the true interest of a great country lies in the population, wealth, and strength of the whole empire.
If this restrictive system was founded in justice and sound policy towards the middle and at the conclusion of the last century, the present state of the British empire requires new counsels and a system of commerce and of policy totally different from those which the circumstances of these countries, in the years 1663, 1670, and 1698, might have suggested.
But it is time to give your lordship a little relief before I enter into a new part of my subject.
I have the honour to be,
My lord, &c.
Eighth Letter.
Dublin, 6th September, 1779.
My Lord,
Between the 23rd of October, 1641, and the same day in the year 1652, five hundred and four thousand of the inhabitants of Ireland are said to have perished and been wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship, and banishment.[388] If it had not been for the numbers of British which those wars had brought over,[389] and such who, either as adventurers or soldiers, seated themselves here on account of the satisfaction made to them in lands, the country had been, by the rebellion of 1641 and the plague that followed it, nearly desolate. At the restoration almost the whole property of the kingdom was in a state of the utmost anarchy and confusion. To satisfy the clashing interests of the numerous claimants, and to determine the various and intricate disputes that arose relative to titles, required a considerable length of time. Peace and settlement, or, to use the words of one of the Acts of Parliament[390] of that time, the repairing the ruins and desolation of the kingdom were the great objects of this period.
The English law[391] of 1663, restraining the exportation from Ireland to America, was at that time, and for some years after, scarcely felt in this kingdom, which had then little to export except live cattle, not proper for so distant a market.
The Act of Settlement, passed in Ireland the year before this restrictive law, and the explanatory statute for the settlement of this kingdom, was not enacted until two years after. The country continued for a considerable time in a state of litigation, which is never favourable to industry. In 1661, the people must have been poor; the number of them of all degrees who paid poll money in that year was about 360,000.[392] In 1672, when the country had greatly improved, the manufacture bestowed upon a year’s exportation from Ireland did not exceed eight thousand pounds,[393] and the clothing trade had not then arrived to what it had been before the last rebellion. But still the kingdom had much increased in wealth, though not in manufactured exports. The customs which set in 1656 for £12,000 yearly were, in 1672, worth £80,000[394] yearly, and the improvement in domestic wealth, that is to say, in building, planting, furniture, coaches, &c., is said to have advanced from 1652 to 1673 in a proportion of from one to four. Sir William Petty, in the year 1672, complains not of the restraints on the exportation from Ireland to America,[395] but of the prohibition of exporting our cattle to England, and of our being obliged to unlade in that kingdom[396] the ships bound from America to Ireland, the latter regulation he considers as highly prejudicial to this country.[396]
The immediate object of Ireland at this time seems to have been to get materials to employ her people at home, without thinking of foreign exportations. When we advanced in the export of our woollen goods the law of 1663,[397] which excluded them from the American markets, must have been a great loss to this kingdom; and after we were allowed to export our linens to the British colonies in America, the restraints imposed by the law of 1670 upon our importations from thence became more prejudicial, and will be much more so if ever the late extension of our exports to America should under those restraints have any effect. For it is certainly a great discouragement to the carrying on trade with any country where we are allowed only to sell our manufactures and produce, but are not permitted to carry from them directly to our own country their principal manufactures or produce. The people to whom we are thus permitted to sell want the principal inducement for dealing with us, and the great spring of commerce, which is mutual exchange, is wanting between us.
As the British legislature has thought it reasonable to extend, to a very considerable degree, our exportation to their colonies, and has, doubtless, intended that this favour should be useful to Ireland, it is hoped that those restraints on the importation from thence, which must render that favour of little effect, will be no longer continued.
From those considerations it is evident that many strong reasons respecting Ireland are now to be found against the continuance of those restrictive laws of 1663 and 1670, that did not exist at the time of making them.
The prohibition of 1699 was immediately and universally felt in this country; but in the course of human events various and powerful reasons have arisen against the continuance of that statute, which did not exist, and could not have been foreseen when it was enacted.
At the Restoration the inhabitants of Ireland consisted of three different nations—English, Scotch, and Irish—divided by political and religious principles, exasperated against each other by former animosities, and by present contests for property. When the settlement of the country was completed, the people became industrious, manufactures greatly increased, and the kingdom began to flourish. The prohibition of exporting cattle to England, and perhaps that of importing directly from America the materials of other manufactures, obliged the Irish to increase and to manufacture their own material. They made so great a progress in both, from 1672 to 1687, that in the latter year the exports of the woollen manufacture alone amounted in value to £70,521 14s. 0d.
But the religious and civil animosities continued. The papists objected to the settlement of property made after the Restoration,[398] wished to reverse the outlawries, and to rescind the laws on which that settlement was founded, hoped to establish their own as the national religion, to get the power of the kingdom into their own hands, and to effect all those purposes by a king of their own religion. They endeavoured to attain all those objects by laws[399] passed at a meeting which they called a parliament, held under this prince after his abdication; and by their conduct at this period, as well as in the year 1642,[400] showed dispositions unfavourable to the subordination of Ireland to the Crown of England. They could not be supposed to be well affected to that great prince who defeated all their purposes.
At the time of the revolution the numbers of our people were again very much reduced; but a great majority of the remaining inhabitants consisted of papists. Those, notwithstanding their disappointment at that era, were thought to entertain expectations of the restoration of their Popish king, and designs unfavourable to the established constitution in Church and State. It is not to the present purpose to inquire how long this disposition prevailed. It cannot be doubted but that this was the opinion conceived of their views and principles at the time of passing this law in the year 1699.
England could not then consider a country under such unfortunate circumstances as any great additional strength to it. Foreign Protestants were invited to settle in it, and the emigration of papists in great numbers to other countries was allowed, if not encouraged. Though at this period a regard to liberty as well as to economy, occasioned the disbanding of all the army in England, except 7,000, it was thought necessary for the security of Ireland that an army of 12,000 men should be kept there; and for many years afterwards it was not allowed that this army should be recruited in this kingdom. This distinction of parties in Ireland was in those times the mainspring in every movement relative to that kingdom, and affected not only political but commercial regulations. The reason assigned by the English statute, allowing the exportation of Irish linen cloth to the plantations, is, after reciting the restrictive law of 1663,[401] “yet, forasmuch as the Protestant interest of Ireland ought to be supported, by giving the utmost encouragement to the linen manufactures of that kingdom, in tender regard to her Majesty’s good Protestant subjects of her said kingdom, be it enacted,” &c.
The papists, then disabled from acquiring permanent property in lands, had not the same interest with Protestants in the defence of their country and in the prosperity of the British Empire. But those seeds of disunion and diffidence no longer remain. No man looks now for the return of the exiled family any more than for that of Perken Warbec; and the repeal of Magna Charta is as much expected as of the Act of Settlement. The papists, indulged with the exercise of their religious worship, and now at liberty to acquire permanent property in lands, are interested as well as Protestants in the security and prosperity of this country; and sensible of the benign influence of our Sovereign, and of the protection and happiness which they enjoy under his reign, seem to be as well affected to the King and to the constitution of the State as any other class of subjects, and at this most dangerous crisis have contributed their money to raise men for his Majesty’s service, and declared their readiness, had the laws permitted, to have taken arms for the defence of their country. They owe much to the favour and protection of the Crown, and to the liberal and benevolent spirit of the British legislature which led the way to their relief, and they are peculiarly interested to cultivate the good opinion of their Sovereign, and of their fellow-subjects in Great Britain.
The numbers of our people, since the year 1698, are more than doubled; but in point of real strength to the British Empire are increased in a proportion of above eight to one. In the year 1698 the numbers of our people did not much, if at all, exceed one million. Of these 300,000 are thought to be a liberal allowance for Protestants of all denominations. It is now supposed that there are not less in this kingdom than 2,500,000 loyal and affectionate subjects to his Majesty, and well affected to the constitution and happiness of their country.
A political and commercial constitution, if it could have been considered as wisely framed for the years 1663, 1670, and 1698, ought to be reconsidered in the year 1779; what might have been good and necessary policy in the government of one million of men disunited among themselves, and a majority of them not to be relied upon in support of their king and of the laws and constitution of their country, is bad policy in the government of two millions and a-half of men now united among themselves, and all interested in the support of the Crown, the laws, and the constitution.
What might have been sufficient employment, and the means of acquiring a competent subsistence for one million of people, when a man, by working two days in the week, might have earned a sufficient support for him and his family, will never answer for two millions and a-half of people,[402] when the hard labour of six days in the week can scarcely supply a scanty subsistence. Nor can the resources which enabled us in the last century to remit £200,000 yearly to England[403] support remittances to the amount of more than six times that sum.
Let the reasons for this restrictive system at the time of its formation be examined, and let us judge impartially whether any one of the purposes then intended has been answered. The reasons respecting America were to confine the Plantation trade to England, and to make that country a storehouse of all commodities for its colonies. But the commercial jealousy that has prevailed among the different states of Europe has made it difficult for any nation to keep great markets to herself in exclusion of the rest of the world. It was not foreseen at those periods that the colonies, whilst they all continued dependent, should have traded with foreign nations, notwithstanding the utmost efforts of Great Britain to prevent it. It was not foreseen that those colonies would have refused to have taken any commodities whatever from their parent country, that they should afterwards have separated themselves from her empire, declared themselves independent, resisted her fleets and armies, obtained the most powerful alliances, and occasioned the most dangerous and destructive war in which Great Britain was ever engaged. Nor could it have been foreseen that Ireland, excluded from almost all direct intercourse with them, should have been nearly undone by the contest. The reasons then respecting America no longer exist, and whatever may be the event of the conflict, will never exist to the extent expected when this system of restraints and penalties was adopted.
The reasons relating to Ireland have failed also. The circumstances of this country relative to the woollen manufacture are totally changed since the year 1699. The Lords and Commons of England appear to have founded the law of that year on the proportion which they supposed that the charge of the woollen manufacture in England then bore to the charge of that manufacture in Ireland. In the representation from the Commissioners of Trade, laid before both houses,[404] they think it a reasonable conjecture to take the difference between both wool and labour in the two countries to be one-third; and estimating on that supposition, they find that 43⅞ per cent. may be laid on broadcloth exported out of Ireland, more than on the like cloth exported out of England, to bring them both to an equality. This must have been an alarming representation to England.
But if those calculations were just at the time, which is very doubtful, the supposed facts on which they were founded do certainly no longer exist. Wool is now generally at a higher price in Ireland than in England, and the trifling difference in the price of labour is more than overbalanced by this and the other circumstances in favour of England, which have been before stated; and that those facts supposed in 1698, and the inferences drawn from them, have no foundation in the present state of this country is plain from the experience every day, which shows that instead of our underselling the English, they undersell us in our own markets.
Besides our exclusion from foreign markets, England had two objects in the discouragement of our woollen trade.
It was intended that Ireland should send her wool to England, and take from that country her woollen manufactures.[405] It has been already shown that the first object has not been attained, the second has been carried so far as, for the future, to defeat its own purpose. Whilst our own manufacturers were starving for want of employment, and our wool sold for less than one-half its usual price, we have imported from England, in the years 1777 and 1778, woollen goods to the enormous amount of £715,740 13s. 0d., as valued at our Custom House, and of the manufactures of linen, cotton, and silk mixed, to the amount of £98,086 1s. 11d., making in the whole in those two years of distress, £813,826 14s. 11d.[406] Between 20 and 30,000 of our manufacturers in those branches were in those two years supported by public charity. From this fact it is hoped that every reasonable man will allow the necessity of our using our own manufactures. Agreements among our people for this purpose are not, as it has been supposed, a new idea in this country. It was never so universal as at present, but has been frequently resorted to in times of distress. In the sessions of 1703, 1705, and 1707,[407] 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. The not importing goods from England is one of the remedies recommended by the council of trade in 1676, for alleviating some distress that was felt at that time;[408] and Sir William Temple, a zealous friend to the trade and manufactures of England, recommends to Lord Essex, then Lord Lieutenant, “to introduce, as far as can be, a vein of parsimony throughout the country in all things that are not perfectly the native growths and manufactures.”[409]
The people of England cannot reasonably object to a conduct of which they have given a memorable example.[410] In 1697 the English House of Lords presented an address to King William to discourage the use and wearing of all sorts of furniture and cloths, not of the growth or manufacture of that kingdom; and beseech him by his royal example effectually to encourage the use and wearing of all sorts of furniture and wearing cloths that are the growth of that kingdom, or manufactured there; and King William assures them that he would give the example to his subjects,[411] and would endeavour to make it effectually followed. The reason assigned by the Lords for this address was that the trade of the nation had suffered by the late long and expensive war. But it does not appear that there was any pressing necessity at the time, or that their manufacturers were starving for want of employment.
Common sense must discover to every man that, where foreign trade is restrained, discouraged, or prevented in any country, and where that country has the materials of manufactures, a fruitful soil, and numerous inhabitants, the home-trade is its best resource. If this is thought, by men of great knowledge, to be the most valuable of all trades,[412] because it makes the speediest and the surest returns, and because it increases at the same time two capitals in the same country, there is no nation on the globe whose wealth, population, strength, and happiness would be promoted by such a trade in a greater degree than ours.[413]
Two other reasons were assigned for this prohibition: that the Irish had shown themselves unwilling to promote the linen manufacture,[414] and that there were great quantities of wool in Ireland. But they have since cultivated the linen trade with great success, and great numbers of their people are employed in it. Of late years by the operation of the land-carriage bounty, agriculture has increased in a degree never before known in this country; extensive tracts of lands, formerly sheep-pasture, are now under tillage, and much greater rents are given for that purpose than can be paid by stocking with sheep; the quantity of wool is greatly diminished from what it was in the year 1699, supposing it to have been then equal to the quantity in 1687,[415] it has been for several years lessening, and is not likely to be increased. In those two important circumstances the grounds of the apprehensions of England have ceased, and the state of Ireland has been materially altered since the year 1699.
Another reason respecting England and foreign States, particularly France, has failed. England was, in 1698, in possession of the woollen trade in most of the foreign markets, and expected still to continue to supply them, as appears by the preamble of her Statute passed in that year.
She at that time expected to keep this manufacture to herself. The people of Leeds, Halifax, and Newberry,[416] petition the House of Commons “that by some means the woollen manufacture may be prevented from being set up in foreign countries;” and the Commons, in their address, mention the keeping it as much as possible entire to themselves. But experience has proved the vanity of those expectations; several other countries cultivate this trade with success. France now undersells her. England has lost some of those markets, and it is thought probable that Ireland, if admitted to them, might have preserved and may now recover the trade that England has lost.
A perseverance in this restrictive policy will be ruinous to the trade of Great Britain. Whatever may be the state of America, great numbers of the inhabitants of Ireland, if the circumstances of this country shall continue to be the same as at present in respect of trade, will emigrate there; this will give strength to that part of the empire on which Great Britain can least, and take it from that part on which at present she may most securely depend. But this is not all the mischief; those emigrants will be mostly manufacturers, and will transfer to America the woollen and linen manufactures, to the great prejudice of those trades in England, Scotland, and Ireland; and then one of the means used to keep the colonies dependent by introducing this country into a system of colonisation, will be the occasion of lessening, if not dissolving, the connection between them and their parent State.
Great Britain, weakened in her extremities, should fortify the heart of her empire; Great Britain, with powerful foreign enemies united in lasting bonds against her, and with scarcely any foreign alliance to sustain her, should exert every possible effort to strengthen herself at home. The number of people in Ireland have more than doubled in fourscore years. How much more rapid would be the increase if the growth of the human race was cherished by finding sufficient employment and food for this prolific nation! it would probably double again in half a century. What a vast accession of strength such numbers of brave and active men, living almost within the sound of a trumpet, must bring to Great Britain, now said to be decreasing considerably in population!—a greater certainty than double those numbers dispersed in distant parts of the globe, the expense of defending and governing of which must at all times be great. Sir W. Temple,[417] in 1673, takes notice of the circumstances prejudicial to the trade and riches of Ireland, which had hitherto, he says, made it of more loss than value to England. They have already been mentioned. The course of time has removed some of them, and the wisdom and philanthropy of Britain may remove the rest. “Without these circumstances (says that honest and able statesman), the native fertility of the soils and seas, in so many rich commodities, improved by multitudes of people and industry, with the advantage of so many excellent havens, and a situation so commodious for all sorts of foreign trade, must needs have rendered this kingdom one of the richest in Europe, and made a mighty increase both of strength and revenue to the crown of England.”[418]
During this century, Ireland has been, without exaggeration, a mine of wealth to England, far beyond what any calculation has yet made it. When poor and thinly inhabited she was an expense and a burden to England; when she had acquired some proportion of riches and grew more numerous, she was one of the principal sources of her wealth. When she becomes poor again, those advantages are greatly diminished. The exports from Great Britain to Ireland, in 1778,[419] were less than the medium value of the four preceding years in a sum of £634,444 3s. 0d; and in the year 1779, Great Britain is obliged, partly at her own expense, to defend this country, and for that purpose has generously bestowed out of her own exchequer a large sum of money. Those facts demonstrate that the poverty of Ireland ever has been a drain, and her riches an influx of wealth to England, to which the greater part of it will ever flow, and it imports not to that country through what channel; but the source must be cleared from obstructions, or the stream cannot continue to flow.
Such a liberal system would increase the wealth of this kingdom by means that would strengthen the hands of government, and promote the happiness of the people. Ireland would be then able to contribute largely to the support of the British Empire, not only from the increase of her wealth, but from the more equal distribution of it into a greater number of hands among the various orders of the community. The present inability of Ireland arises principally from this circumstance, that her lower and middle classes have little or no property, and are not able, to any considerable amount, either to pay taxes or consume those commodities that are the usual subjects of them; and this has been the consequence of the laws which prevent trade and discourage manufactures. The same quantity of property distributed through the different classes of the people would supply resources much superior to those which can be found in the present state of Ireland.[420] The increase of people there under its present restraints makes but a small addition to the resources of the State in respect of taxes.[421] In 1685, the amount of the inland excise in Ireland was £75,169. In 1762, it increased only to £92,842. Those years are taken as periods of a considerable degree of prosperity in Ireland. The people had increased, from 1685 to 1762, in a proportion of nearly 7 to 4,[422] which appears from this circumstance, that in 1685 hearth-money amounted to £32,659, and in 1762 to £56,611. At the former period the law made to restrain and discourage the principal trade and manufacture of Ireland had not been made. There were then vast numbers of sheep in Ireland, and the woollen manufacture was probably in a flourishing state. At the former of those periods the lower classes of the people were able to consume excisable commodities; in the latter they lived for the most part on the immediate produce of the soil. The numbers of people in a state, like those of a private family, if the individuals have the means of acquiring, add to the wealth, and if they have not those means, to the poverty of the community. Population is not always a proof of the prosperity of a nation; the people may be very numerous and very poor and wretched. A temperate climate, fruitful soil, bays and rivers well stocked with fish, the habits of life among the lower classes, and a long peace, are sufficient to increase the numbers of people: these are the true wealth of every state that has wisdom to encourage the industry of its inhabitants, and a country which supplies in abundance the materials for that industry. If the state or the family should discourage industry, and not allow one of the family to work, because another is of the same trade, the consequences to the great or the little community must be equally fatal.
Is there not business enough in this great world for the people of two adjoining islands, without depressing the inhabitants of one of them? Let the magnanimity and philanthropy of Great Britain address her poor sister kingdom in the same language which the good-natured Uncle Toby uses to the fly in setting it at liberty:—“Poor fly; there’s room enough for thee and me.”
I have the honour to be,
My Lord, &c.
Ninth Letter.
Dublin, 10th Sept., 1779.
My Lord,
Besides those already mentioned, various other commercial restraints and prohibitions give the British trader and manufacturer many great and important advantages over the Irish. Whilst our markets are at all times open to all their productions and manufactures, with inconsiderable duties on the import, their markets are open or shut against us as suits their conveniency. On several articles of the first importance, and on almost all our own manufactures imported into Great Britain, duties are imposed equal to a prohibition. In the instance of woollen goods, theirs in our ports pay but a small duty; ours in their ports are loaded with duties[423] which amount to a prohibition.[424] Theirs on the exportation are subject to no duty; ours, if permitted to be exported, would, as the law now stands, be subject to a duty[425] over and above that payable for alnage and for the alnager’s fee. If the Act of 1699 was repealed, the English would still have many great advantages over us in the woollen trade.
In our staple manufacture, the bounties given on the exportation of white and brown Irish linen from Great Britain would still continue that trade in the hands of the British merchant. On all coloured linens a duty[426] equal to a prohibition is imposed on the importation into Great Britain; but theirs, imported to us, are subject[427] to ten per cent., and under that duty they have imported considerably. This inequality of duty, and the bounty given by the British Act of the tenth of Geo. III., on the exportation of their chequered and striped linens from Great Britain, secures to them the continuance of the great superiority which they have acquired over us in those very valuable branches of this trade. In many other articles they have given themselves great advantages. Beer they export to us in such quantities as almost to ruin our brewery; but they prevent our exportation to them by duties, laid on the import there, equal to a prohibition. Of malt they make large exports to us, to the prejudice of our agriculture, but have absolutely prohibited our exportation of that commodity to them. Some manufactures they retain solely to themselves, which we are prohibited from exporting, and cannot import from any country but Great Britain, as glass of all kinds. Hops they do not allow us to import from any other place, and in a facetious style of interdiction, pronounce such importation to be a common nuisance.[428] They go further, and by laying a duty on the export, and denying the draw-back, oblige the Irish consumer to pay a tax appropriated, it is said, to the payment of a British debt. I shall make no political, but the subject requires a commercial observation—it is this: the man who keeps a market solely to himself, in exclusion of all others, whether he appears as buyer[429] or seller, fixes his own price, and becomes the arbiter of the profit and loss of every customer.
The various manufactures[430] made or mixed with cotton are subject, by several British Acts, to duties on the importation amounting to 25 per cent.
By another Act, penalties[431] are imposed on wearing any of those manufactures in Great Britain, unless made in that country. Those laws have effectually excluded the Irish manufactures, in all those branches, from the British markets; and it has been already shown that they cannot be sent to the American. From Great Britain into Ireland all those articles are imported in immense quantities, being subject here to duties amounting to 10 per cent. only.
But it would be tedious to descend into a further detail, and disgusting to write a book of rates instead of a letter.[432]
Their superior capitals and expertness give them decisive advantages in every species of trade and manufacture. By the extension of the commerce of Ireland, Great Britain would acquire new and important advantages, not only by the wealth it would bring to that country, and the increase of strength to the empire, but by opening to the British merchant new sources of trade from Ireland.
It is time to draw to a conclusion. I have reviewed my letters to your lordship, for the purpose of avoiding every possible occasion of offence. I flatter myself every reader will discern that they have been written with upright and friendly intentions, not to excite jealousies, but to remove prejudices, to moderate, and conciliate; and that they are intended as an appeal, not to the passions of the multitude, but to the wisdom, justice, and generosity of Britain. Shakespeare could place a tongue in every wound of Cæsar; but Antony meant to inflame; and the only purpose of those letters is to persuade. I have, therefore, not even removed the mantle except where necessity required it.
In extraordinary cases where the facts are stronger than the voice of the pleader, it is not unusual to allow the client to speak for himself. Will you, my lord, one of the leading advocates for Ireland, allow her to address her elder sister, and to state her own case; not in the strains of passion or resentment, nor in the tone of remonstrance, but with a modest enumeration of unexaggerated facts in pathetic simplicity. She will tell her, with a countenance full of affection and tenderness, “I have received from you invaluable gifts—the law of[433] common right, your great charter, and the fundamentals of your constitution. The temple of liberty in your country has been frequently fortified, improved, and embellished; mine, erected many centuries since the perfect model of your own, you will not suffer me to strengthen, secure, or repair; firm and well-cemented as it is, it must moulder under the hand of Time for want of that attention which is due to the venerable fabric.[434] We are connected by the strongest ties of natural affection, common security, and a long interchange of the kindest offices on both sides. But for more than a century you have, in some instances, mistaken our mutual interest. I sent you my herds and my flocks, filled your people with abundance, and gave them leisure to attend to more profitable pursuits than the humble employment of shepherds and of herdsmen. But you rejected my produce,[435] and reprobated this intercourse in terms the most opprobrious. I submitted; the temporary loss was mine, but the perpetual prejudice your own. I incited my children to industry, and gave them my principal materials to manufacture. Their honest labours were attended with moderate success, but sufficient to awaken the commercial jealousy of some of your sons; indulging their groundless apprehensions, you desired my materials, and discouraged the industry of my people. I complied with your wishes, and gave to your children the bread of my own; but the enemies of our race were the gainers. They applied themselves with tenfold increase to those pursuits which were restrained in my people, who would have added to the wealth and strength of your empire what, by this fatal error, you transferred to foreign nations. You held out another object to me with promises of the utmost encouragement. I wanted the means, but I obtained them from other countries, and have long cultivated, at great expense, and with the most unremitted efforts, that species of industry which you recommended. You soon united with another great family, engaged in the same pursuit, which you were also obliged to encourage among them, and afterwards embarked in it yourself, and became my rival in that which you had destined for my principal support. This support is now become inadequate to the increased number of my offspring, many of whom want the means of subsistence. My ports are ever hospitably open for your reception, and shut, whenever your interest requires it, against all others; but yours are, in many instances, barred against me. With your dominions in Asia, Africa, and America my sons were long deprived of all beneficial intercourse, and yet to those colonies I transported my treasures for the payment of your armies, and in a war waged for their defence one hundred thousand of my sons fought by your side.[436] Conquest attended our arms. You gained a great increase of empire and of commerce, and my people a further extension of restraints and prohibitions.[437] In those efforts I have exhausted my strength, mortgaged my territories, and am now sinking under the pressure of enormous debts, contracted from my zealous attachment to your interests, to the extension of your empire, and the increase of your glory. By the present unhappy war for the recovery of those colonies, from which they were long excluded, my children are reduced to the lowest ebb of poverty and distress. It is true you have lately, with the kindest intentions, allowed me an extensive liberty of selling to the inhabitants of those parts of your empire; but they have no inducement to buy, because I cannot take their produce in return. Your liberality has opened a new fountain, but your caution will not suffer me to draw from it. The stream of commerce intended to refresh the exhausted strength of my children flies untasted from their parched lips.
“The common parent of all has been equally beneficent to us both. We both possess in great abundance the means of industry and happiness. My fields are not less fertile nor my harbours less numerous than yours. My sons are not less renowned than your own for valour, justice, and generosity. Many of them are your descendants, and have some of your best blood in their veins. But the narrow policy of man has counteracted the instincts and the bounties of nature. In the midst of those fertile fields some of my children perish before my eyes for want of food, and others fly for refuge to hostile nations.
Suffer no longer, respected sister, the narrow jealousy of commerce to mislead the wisdom and to impair the strength of your state. Increase my resources, they shall be yours, my riches and strength, my poverty and weakness will become your own. What a triumph to our enemies, and what an affliction to me, in the present distracted circumstances of the empire, to see my people reduced by the necessity of avoiding famine, to the resolution of trafficing almost solely with themselves! Great and powerful enemies are combined against you; many of your distant connections have deserted you. Increase your strength at home, open and extend the numerous resources of my country, of which you have not hitherto availed yourself, or allowed me the benefit. Our increased force, and the full exertions of our strength, will be the most effectual means of resisting the combination formed against you by foreign enemies and distant subjects, and of giving new lustre to our crowns, and happiness and contentment to our people.”
APPENDIX.—No. I.
Quantity of Wool, Woollen, and Worsted Yarn exported from Ireland to Great Britain in the following years:—
| Years Ending the 25th of March. | WOOL. | YARN. | ||||
| Woollen. | Worsted. | |||||
| stones. | lbs. | stones. | lbs. | stones. | lbs. | |
| 1764 | 10,128 | 6 | 9,991 | 14 | 139,412 | 12 |
| 1795 | 17,316 | 0 | 13,450 | 12 | 149,915 | 9 |
| 1766 | 21,722 | 13 | 7,980 | 0 | 152,122 | 0 |
| 1767 | 48,733 | 8 | 7,553 | 0 | 151,940 | 9 |
| 1768 | 28,521 | 11 | 11,387 | 6 | 157,721 | 3 |
| 1769 | 3,840 | 16 | 5,012 | 0 | 131,365 | 2 |
| 1770 | 2,578 | 0 | 3,833 | 0 | 117,735 | 9 |
| 1771 | 2,118 | 5 | 4,868 | 2 | 139,378 | 14 |
| 1772 | 2,045 | 6 | 5,947 | 0 | 115,904 | 4 |
| 1773 | 1,839 | 2 | — | 94,098 | 10 | |
| 1774 | 1,007 | 11 | — | 63,920 | 10 | |
| 1775 | 2,007 | 13 | — | 78,896 | 14 | |
| 1776 | 1,059 | 15 | — | 86,527 | 0 | |
| 1777 | 1,734 | 7 | — | 114,703 | 2 | |
| 1778 | 1,665 | 12 | — | 122,755 | 15 | |
APPENDIX.—No. II.
| Years Ending the 25th of March. | DRAPERY. | LINEN COTTON. | |||||||||
| New. | Old. | Silk, mixed manufacture. | |||||||||
| Quantity. | Value. | Quantity. | Value. | Value. | |||||||
| £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | £ | s. | d. | |||
| 1769 | 394,553 | 49,319 | 3 | 9 | 207,117 | 144,982 | 8 | 6 | 13,402 | 10 | 7 |
| 1770 | 462,499 | 57,812 | 7 | 6 | 249,666 | 174,766 | 14 | 6 | 20,907 | 18 | 2½ |
| 1771 | 362,096 | 45,262 | 0 | 0 | 217,395 | 152,176 | 10 | 0 | 20,282 | 5 | 8 |
| 1772 | 314,703 | 39,337 | 18 | 9 | 153,566 | 107,496 | 4 | 0 | 14,081 | 15 | 6½ |
| 1773 | 387,143 | 48,392 | 17 | 6 | 200,065 | 147,045 | 13 | 6 | 20,472 | 7 | 3½ |
| 1774 | 461,407 | 57,675 | 17 | 6 | 282,317 | 197,621 | 18 | 0 | 21,611 | 10 | 3¼ |
| 1775 | 465,611 | 58,201 | 9 | 4½ | 281,379 | 196,965 | 13 | 0 | 24,234 | 16 | 9½ |
| 1776 | 676,485 | 84,560 | 12 | 6 | 290,215 | 203,150 | 10 | 0 | 30,371 | 16 | 8½ |
| 1777 | 731,819 | 91,477 | 8 | 9 | 381,330 | 266,931 | 0 | 0 | 45,411 | 3 | 7 |
| 1778 | 741,426 | 92,678 | 6 | 3 | 378,077 | 264,653 | 18 | 0 | 52,675 | 1 | 11 |
APPENDIX.—No. III.
An account of the Quantity of Linen Cloth exported out of Ireland to Great Britain and Plantations, prior to the year 1743.
| Years Ending the 25th of March. | Linen Cloth exported to | |
| Great Britain. | Plantations. | |
| Yards. | Yards. | |
| 1705 | 739,278 | 19,742 |
| 1706 | 1,325,771 | 62,727 |
| 1707 | 1,847,564 | 81,037 |
| 1708 | 343,359 | 29,606 |
| 1709 | 1,539,250 | 113,939 |
| 1710 | 1,528,185 | 136,844 |
| 1711 | 1,131,629 | 89,262 |
| 1712 | 1,320,968 | 43,011 |
| 1713 | 1,721,003 | 86,357 |
| 1714 | 2,071,814 | 91,916 |
| 1715 | 2,000,581 | 133,752 |
| 1716 | 1,968,568 | 195,825 |
| 1717 | 2,260,243 | 151,240 |
| 1718 | 2,120,075 | 113,790 |
| 1719 | 2,235,357 | 117,288 |
| 1720 | 2,560,113 | 69,579 |
| 1721 | 2,398,103 | 95,488 |
| 1722 | 3,036,431 | 127,934 |
| 1723 | 4,060,402 | 112,952 |
| 1724 | 3,767,063 | 94,816 |
| 1725 | 3,755,430 | 70,052 |
| 1726 | 4,231,676 | 117,213 |
| 1727 | 4,596,089 | 151,977 |
| 1728 | 4,517,152 | 140,049 |
| 1729 | 3,701,485 | 183,363 |
| 1730 | 3,821,188 | 218,220 |
| 1731 | 3,591,316 | 137,039 |
| 1733 | 4,621,127 | 129,244 |
| 1734 | 5,194,241 | 213,250 |
| 1735 | 6,508,748 | 202,759 |
| 1736 | 6,168,333 | 262,242 |
| 1737 | 5,758,408 | 309,827 |
| 1738 | 4,897,169 | 232,947 |
| 1739 | 5,737,834 | 197,671 |
| 1740 | 6,403,569 | 183,471 |
| 1741 | 6,760,025 | 394,374 |
| 1742 | 6,793,009 | 244,546 |