“The woollen trade in Ireland is in a more sound and healthy condition than it has ever been, and its yearly advance may be confidently expected.”
There was an abundant supply of land for the increasing population—1,200,000 acres of land being capable of cultivation, besides upwards of 1,000,000 acres of bog land capable of reclamation at a cost of little more than £1 per acre.
With such capabilities for advancement, nothing short of the most extraordinary prosperity ought to have followed the general advance of wealth in the civilised world, caused by the improvements in arts, sciences, machinery, steam, and electricity. But what do we find after thirty-six years of the curse of Free Trade? Land out of cultivation; farms abandoned; manufacturing industries extinct; population decreasing by more than three millions[79] in forty years. Anarchy, murder, assassination rampant. No doubt the Famine of 1847 and the subsequent emigration caused a large decrease in the population of Ireland, but disciples of the Malthusian theory would have told you that this was an element of prosperity. I do not hold this view, but any protectionist country would have rapidly recovered the blow, whilst Free Trade Ireland has since steadily decreased in population, and is sinking lower and lower into the Slough of Despond.
You argue that “rack-renting is the cause.” Nonsense! The average rent of land in Ireland is only one-third of that which is paid in prosperous protectionist countries;[80] any rent at all will soon be a rack-rent. There is plenty of land in Ireland to be had at nominal rents, land that has gone out of cultivation; but Free Trade has taken away the possibility of its cultivation at a profit, even if it were rent-free. You urge absenteeism as the cause; it is the effect, not the cause. Moreover, only about one-sixth of the land is owned by absentees.
Ireland is like a child crying out in the pangs of starvation, and you give it opiates in the shape of mischievous enactments (such as the Encumbered Estates Act and the Land Act) which only augment the evil. To use the words of a writer of the day: “Your Statesmanship knows no policy but that of coercion to-day, concession to-morrow.” Ireland cries in the pangs of hunger, you alternately beat and coax it.
You propose wholesale emigration, which may be compared to bleeding the patient to death in order to cure it of starvation.
Fools!! Can’t you see it is dying of hunger? All it wants is food, work, and employment of its labour,—development of its resources.
Take away your iniquitous policy of Free Trade,—abolish your unjust enactments, your legalised instruments of confiscation and plunder,—abandon your insane encouragement of internecine war between capital and labour,—desist from your suicidal encouragement to agitation and class antagonism,—encourage capitalists,—protect industries,—employ labour,—and you will soon find Ireland prosperous, contented, and loyal.
The cry for Home Rule is a protest against your misrule.
If you persist in your insane policy, Ireland must inevitably be depopulated either by starvation or by wholesale emigration.[81]