That seems to be the limit to which criticism can justly go in the case of Ireland and Great Britain. That is as far as it goes in the analogous case of New Zealand and the Australian Commonwealth, where a small island State has a separate Customs system from that of a large, wealthy, and populous neighbour of the same race, and with many identical interests. That is as far as it goes in the parallel case of little Newfoundland and the great Dominion of Canada. Neither the Dominion nor the Commonwealth claim that proximity, power, and racial identity give them the right to control the trade and taxation of their small independent neighbours, nor does the smallest friction result from the mutual independence. On the contrary, both the Dominions and the Commonwealth were founded on that vital principle of a pre-existent State independence surrendered voluntarily for larger ends. The whole Empire depends on the principle of local autonomy, and, above all, on the principle of local financial autonomy. Endeavours in America to sustain the opposite theory led to disaster. We have for generations regarded it as perfectly natural that the self-governing Colonies should have Customs systems of their own, even when they are used for the purpose of imposing heavy duties on goods coming from the Mother Country, and we know that that liberty has borne fruit a hundredfold in affection and loyalty to the Imperial Government. Until the Union of Great Britain and Ireland it was regarded as equally natural that Ireland should have control of her own Customs, along with all other branches of revenue. Even after the Union, although there was no Irish control over anything Irish, it was recognized, until the fiscal unification of the two countries in 1817, that Irish conditions required a separate Customs system, which, in fact, existed until 1826.[140] How fiscal unification and the subsequent abolition of separate Customs was brought about I have told in Chapter XI. It is not a pleasant story. To say the least, the conditions, moral and material, were not such as to warrant the inference that there is any inherent necessity for joint Customs between Ireland and Great Britain. The presumption raised by all subsequent events is in the opposite direction.
But the tradition of unified Customs, now nearly a century old, has immense potency, and unless it is fearlessly scrutinized and challenged, may be able, reinforced by the passions excited by the great controversy over Free Trade and Protection, to defy the warnings writ large upon the page of history. The tradition must be so challenged. Say what we will about the proximity of Ireland and Great Britain, descant as we will in law-books, pamphlets, leading articles, debates, on what ought theoretically to be the fiscal relations of the two countries, we cannot escape from the fact that, in this as in so many other respects, both the human and economic problem before us is fundamentally a colonial problem, and that its being so is not the fault of Ireland, but of Great Britain.
Belief in Home Rule seems to me necessarily to involve a willingness to give Ireland her Customs. Great Britain has no moral right to lay it down that her views about trade shall govern the course of Irish policy; and if Great Britain believes sincerely in Home Rule, she should be willing to trust Ireland, regardless of the economic consequences, and regardless of the effect upon the great Tariff controversy.
The effect upon that controversy I shall not discuss. It seems to me to possess only a tactical and electioneering interest, and that side of the Home Rule problem I have rigidly avoided, while expressing in general terms my belief that sound policy and sound tactics in reality coincide. The Home Rule Bill is far more likely to be wrecked by timidity than by boldness, by precautions and compromises than by a fearless accommodation of British policy to Irish facts and needs.
As to the danger to Great Britain of separate Irish Customs, it seems to me to be greatly exaggerated. Ireland's own interests will primarily dictate her action. What she will decide her interest to be, nobody can foretell with certainty beyond a limited point, because Irish public opinion is not formed. Ireland has taken little or no part in the fiscal controversy, for the simple reason that she has been absorbed in the task of getting Home Rule, and until she gets it she is precluded from formulating a trustworthy national opinion on most of the great subjects which agitate modern societies. There is, however, no tradition in favour of high Protection, even from Grattan's commercially free Parliament. The question of a low protective or purely revenue tariff on imports has not received any serious investigation. Let us frankly admit at the outset that no country in the world, economically situated as Ireland is, dispenses with a general tariff of some sort, and undoubtedly there are to-day a good many Irishmen outside political life who advocate the encouragement of infant Irish manufacturing industries by sufficient protective duties directed against Great Britain as well as against the outside world. It would be strange if there were not, in view of the distressing past history of Ireland's throttled industries, and in view of the strenuous efforts now being made by the Development Associations to push the manufacture and sale of Irish goods in all parts of the world. There are many avowed Free Traders also; nor are the Development Associations themselves officially protectionist. The opinion is sometimes expressed that Ireland, which could easily be self-supporting in the matter of food, occupies an unhealthy position in exporting a large proportion of her own agricultural produce, butter, bacon, meat, etc., and in importing for her own consumption inferior British and foreign qualities of some of the principal foodstuffs; but, so far as it is possible to ascertain it, the predominant opinion seems to be that an agricultural tariff would not be a good remedy for this weakness, if it be one, and that Ireland's future development, like that of Denmark, lies in the increasingly scientific organization of her agricultural industries, and in the better cultivation of her own soil. "Better farming, better business, better living," to use the admirable motto invented by Sir Horace Plunkett for the I.A.O.S. In the absence of an Irish Legislature, no special importance can be attached to individual expressions of opinion. Yet a measure of prophecy is permissible. The Irish Legislature will have to study the national interest, and it is possible to say with certainty at least this—that Ireland's interest lies in maintaining close and friendly trade relations with Great Britain. Unfortunately, we have no means of accurately ascertaining the amount of trade done by Ireland with Great Britain and with foreign and colonial countries respectively. Irish commerce takes, of course, three forms: (a) Direct trade with countries outside Great Britain; (b) indirect trade with these countries via Great Britain; (c) direct local trade with Great Britain. The statisticians of the Irish Department of Agriculture make only an imperfect attempt to distinguish between these classes, but their figures, so far as they go, prove beyond question that the great bulk of Irish external commerce belongs to Class (c)—local trade with Great Britain. The total value of Irish trade in 1909 is estimated at £125,675,847, of which £63,947,155 was for imports, £61,728,692 for exports. Probably 80 per cent., at least, of this trade was strictly local. Certainly Great Britain is the market for very nearly the whole of Irish agricultural produce, and for most of her exports of linen, ships, tobacco, liquor, etc. Any aggressive action likely to provoke a tariff war would be ruinous to Ireland, while it would hurt Great Britain far less in proportion. But, in fact, both countries would suffer, Great Britain from the loss of an easily accessible food-supply of extraordinary value, not only for economic, but for strategical reasons; Ireland from the loss of an excellent and indispensable customer.
On the other hand, whatever Ireland's trade policy may be, she certainly needs the power of fixing her own duties upon commodities like tea and sugar, which are of foreign origin, and are now merely transported to her through British ports. Taxation of this sort is a matter of the deepest concern to a country where agricultural wages average only eleven shillings a week, and which cannot reduce its exorbitant Old Age Pensions Bill without giving some compensatory relief to the classes concerned. Tobacco, of which in its manufactured forms Ireland is a considerable producer as well as a large consumer, belongs to the same category. Liquor is an important article of production in Ireland, as well as of consumption, and the Irish Legislature ought to be able to form and carry out its own liquor policy. Ireland is just as able and willing to promote temperance as Great Britain, and just as competent to reconcile a temperance policy with due regard to producing and distributing interests.
The Customs tariff is an Irish question, not an Ulster question. The interests of the Protestant farmers of North-East Ulster are identical with those of the rest of Ireland, and obviously it will be a matter of the profoundest importance for Ireland as a whole to safeguard the interests of the shipbuilding and linen industries in the North in whatever way may seem best. The Industrial Development Associations, which are affiliated in a national organization, and are far above petty sectarian jealousies, may be trusted to see that Ireland steers a safe financial course in her trade policy.
If there is little or no danger that a Home-Ruled Ireland will commit tariff follies of her own, she has unquestionably a right to escape from further entanglement in the tariff policy of Great Britain. What may be the issue of Great Britain's great fiscal controversy nobody can foretell. But as long as a protective tariff remains the cardinal point in the constructive policy of one of the British parties, there is a strong likelihood of such a tariff, which would be uniform for the whole United Kingdom, being carried into law. Free Traders, like myself, may deplore the possibility, but we cannot shut our eyes to it. That tariff, if and when it is framed, will, like the Free Trade tariff of the past, be framed without regard to Irish interests, which are predominantly agricultural, and with exclusive regard to British interests, which are mainly industrial. Whatever may have been the original ideal of the Conservative Protectionists, however highly they may once have valued the protection of agriculture, irresistible political forces have driven them in the direction of a tariff framed mainly to secure the adhesion of the great manufacturing towns. The electoral power of these towns, the growing resentment of the working classes in most parts of the world at the increasing cost of living, the fact that Great Britain cannot under any conceivable circumstances feed her own population, have been reflected in the definite abandonment by the party leaders of the proposed small duty against colonial imports, and in the admission by Mr. Bonar Law at Manchester, during the last General Election, that the proposed tariff would not benefit the farmers. Nor will the failure of the Reciprocity Agreement between Canada and the United States appreciably diminish the obstacles to food-taxes in the United Kingdom. Any practicable protective tariff, therefore, on the ground of its injustice to Ireland, would cause strong and legitimate resentment in that country, which is subjected to the most formidable competition from foreign and colonial foodstuffs, but whose great competition in manufactured goods is Great Britain herself. The one Irish industry which might favour it is the linen industry of the North. It would have no attraction for the shipbuilding industry, which in no part of the British Isles has anything to gain by Protection, as I believe all parties to the controversy agree. Other small manufacturing industries would complain that they gained nothing; while the agricultural population would complain that, as consumers, they would be damaged by higher prices for clothing and other manufactured articles, while as producers they were ignored.
The difficulty is only one further proof of the dissimilarity of economic conditions between Great Britain and Ireland, and of the artificial and unnatural character of the present fiscal union. Justice to Ireland demands its dissolution. The dangers are imaginary. Liberals, however firm their belief in Free Trade, should hold, with Lord Welby and his Home Rule colleagues on the Financial Relations Commission, that "even if Ireland initiates a protective policy, in this case, as in that of the Colonies, freedom is a greater good than Free Trade." As for the Protectionists, I have never seen an argument from that source, and I do not see how any consistent or plausible argument could possibly be framed, to show that a uniform tariff for the United Kingdom could be fair to Ireland. Professor Hewins, the leading Tariff Reform economist, virtually acknowledges the impossibility in his Introduction to Miss Murray's "Commercial Relations between England and Ireland." There were two sound lines of policy, he points out, which might have been adopted towards Ireland in the period prior to the Union: (1)To have placed her on a level of equality with the Colonies, applying the mercantile system indiscriminately and impartially to the Colonies and to her; or (2) to have aimed from the first at the financial and commercial unity of the British Isles. Neither of these courses was taken. Ireland, while kept financially and commercially separate, "was in a less favourable position than that of a Colony." With regard to the present, "Most of the difficulties of an economic character," says the Professor, "in the financial relations between England and Ireland, arise from the differences of economic structure and organization between the two countries. If Ireland were a highly organized, populous, manufacturing country, the present fiscal system would probably work out no worse than it does in the urban districts of Great Britain. But whatever be the virtues or demerits of that system, it was certainly not framed with any reference to the economic conditions which prevail in Ireland." We wait for the seemingly unavoidable political inference, but in vain. Professor Hewins is a Unionist. "A 'national' policy for Ireland ... is never likely to be possible." Well, that is plain speaking, and the more plainly these things are said the better. Let Unionists, if they will, tell Ireland frankly that she must eternally suffer for the Union, but let them not pretend, as they do pretend, that Ireland profits by the Union.