The direct attacks on Irish trade were almost exclusively the work of the English Parliament; while the English Privy Council strangled at its birth every beneficial enactment of the Irish Parliament.
The following instances will explain and illustrate the difficulties with which the Irish Parliament had to contend in every effort to promote the material prosperity of their country:—
"With," says Mr. Froude, "their shipping destroyed by the Navigation Act, their woollen manufactures taken from them, their trade in all its branches crippled and confined, the single resource left to those of the Irish who still nourished dreams of improving their unfortunate country was agriculture. The soil was at least their own, which needed only to be drained, cleared of weeds, and manured to produce grass crops and corn crops as rich as the best in England. Here was employment for a population three times more numerous than as yet existed. Here was a prospect, if not of commercial wealth, yet of substantial comfort and material abundance."[68]
After some further observations, Mr. Froude thus proceeds:—"The tenants were forbidden in their leases to break or plough the soil. The people no longer employed were driven away into holes and corners, and eked out a wretched subsistence by potato gardens or by keeping starving cattle of their own on the neglected bogs. Their numbers increased, for they married early, and they were no longer liable, as in the old times, to be killed off like dogs in forays. They grew up in compulsory idleness, encouraged once more in their inherited dislike of labour,[69] and inured to wretchedness and hunger; and on every failure of the potato crop, hundreds of thousands were starving. Of corn very little was grown anywhere in Ireland. It was imported from England, Holland, Italy, and France, but in quantities unequal to any sudden demand. The disgrace of allowing a nation of human beings to subsist upon such conditions forced itself at last on the conscience of the Irish Parliament, and though composed of landowners who were tempted as much as others to let their farms on the terms most profitable to them, the House of Commons in 1716 resolved unanimously to make an effort for a general change of system, and to reclaim both people and country by bringing back and stimulating agriculture. They passed a vote that covenants which prohibited the breaking soil with the plough were impolitic, and should have no binding force. They passed heads of a bill, which they recommended with the utmost earnestness to the consideration of the English Council, enjoining that for every hundred acres which any tenant held he should break up and cultivate five, and, as a further encouragement, that a trifling bounty should be granted by the Government on corn grown for exportation.
"And what did England answer? England which was so wisely anxious for the prosperity of the Protestant interest in Ireland: England which was struggling so pathetically to make the Irish peers and gentlemen understand the things that belonged to their peace? The bounty system might or might not have been well calculated to produce the effect which Ireland desired. It was the system which England herself practised with every industry which she wished to encourage, and it was not on economic grounds that the Privy Council rejected a Bill which they ought rather to have thrust of their own accord on Irish acceptance. The real motive was probably the same which had led to the suppression of the manufactures—the detestable opinion that to govern Ireland conveniently Ireland must be kept weak. Although the corn consumed in Ireland had been for many years imported, the English farmers were haunted with a terror of being undersold in their own and foreign markets by a country where labour was cheap. A motive so iniquitous could not be confessed, but the objections which the Council were not ashamed to allege were scarcely less disgraceful to them. The English manufacturers having secured, as they supposed, the monopoly of Irish wool on their own terms, conceived that the whole soil of Ireland ought to be devoted to growing it. The merchants of Tiverton and Bideford had recently memorialised the Crown on the diminution of the number of fleeces which reached them from the Irish ports. They attributed the falling off to the contraband trade between Ireland and France, which shortened their supplies, enhanced the price, and gave the French weavers an advantage over them. Their conjecture, as will be hereafter shown, was perfectly just. The contraband trade, as had been foreseen when the restrictions were imposed, had become enormous. But the Commissioners of the Irish Revenue were unwilling to confess to carelessness. They pretended that the Irish farmers, forgetting their obligations to England, and thinking wickedly only of their own interests, were diminishing their stock of sheep, breaking up the soil, and growing wheat and barley. The allegation, unhappily, was utterly untrue. But the mere rumour of a rise of industry in Ireland created a panic in the commercial circles of England. Although the change existed as yet only in desire, and the sheep-farming, with its attending miseries, was increasing rather than diminishing, Stanhope, Walpole, Sutherland, and the other advisers of the English Crown, met the overtures of the Irish Parliament in a spirit of settled hostility, and, with an infatuation which now appears insanity, determined to keep closed the one remaining avenue by which Ireland could have recovered a gleam of prosperity.
"The heads of the Bill were carried in Ireland without a serious suspicion that it would be received unfavourably. A few scornful members dared to say that England would consent to nothing which would really benefit Ireland, but they were indignantly silenced by the friends of the Government. It was sent over by the Duke of Grafton, with the fullest expectation that it would be returned. He learnt first with great surprise that 'the Tillage Bill was meeting with difficulties.' 'It was a measure,' he said, 'which the gentlemen of the country had very much at heart, as the only way left them to improve their estates while they were under such hard restrictions in point of trade.' 'It would be unkind,' he urged, in a second and more pressing letter, 'to refuse Ireland anything not unreasonable in itself. He conceived the Corn Bill was not of that nature, and therefore earnestly requested his Majesty would be pleased to indulge them in it.'
"Stanhope forwarded in answer a report of the English Commissioners of Customs, which had the merit of partial candour. 'Corn,' they said, 'is supposed to be at so low a rate in Ireland in comparison with England, that an encouragement to the exportation of it would prejudice the English trade.'
"The Lords Justices returned the conclusive rejoinder that for some years past Ireland had imported large quantities of corn from England, which would have been impossible had her own corn been cheaper. 'They could not help representing,' they said, 'the concern they were under to find that verified which those all along foretold who obstructed the King's affairs, and which his friends had constantly denied, that all the marks they had given of duty and affection would not procure one bill for the benefit of the nation.'
"The fact of the importation of corn from England could not be evaded; but the commercial leaders were possessed with a terror of Irish rivalry which could not be exorcised. The bill was at last transmitted, but a clause had been slipped in empowering the Council to suspend the premiums at their pleasure; and the House of Commons in disgust refused to take back a measure which had been mutilated into a mockery."[70]