"A free trade, he was well persuaded, by no means imported an equal trade. He had many public and private reasons to think so. A free trade imported, in his opinion, an unrestrained trade to every part of the world, independent of the control, regulation, or interference of the British Legislature. It was not a speculative proposition, confined to theory or mere matter of argument; the people of Ireland had explained the context, if any ambiguity called for such an explanation; he received accounts from Ireland that a trade was opened between the northern part of Ireland and North America with the privity of Congress, and indemnification from capture by our enemies; that provision ships had sailed to the same place—nay, more, that Doctor Franklyn, the American Minister at Paris, had been furnished with full power to treat with Ireland upon regulations of commerce and mutual interest and support, and that whether or not any such treaty should take place, the mutual interests of both countries, their very near affinity in blood, and their established intercourse, cemented farther by the general advantages arising from an open and unrestrained trade between them, would necessarily perfect what had already actually begun."[133]
Mr. Lecky thus accurately and distinctly describes the nature of the commercial arrangements under which Ireland obtained the limited free trade which she enjoyed, with some modifications, till the Union:—
"The fear of bankruptcy in Ireland; the non-importation agreements, which were beginning to tell upon English industries; the threatening aspect of an armed body, which already counted more than 40,000 men; the determined and unanimous attitude of the Irish Parliament; the prediction of the Lord-Lieutenant that all future military grants in Ireland depended upon his (Lord North's) course; the danger that England, in the midst of a great and disastrous war, should be left absolutely without a friend, all weighed upon his mind; and at the close of 1779, and in the beginning of 1780, a series of measures was carried in England which exceeded the utmost that a few years before the most sanguine Irishman could have either expected or demanded. The Acts which prohibited the Irish from exporting their woollen manufactures and their glass were wholly repealed, and the great trade of the colonies was freely thrown open to them. It was enacted that all goods that might be legally imported from the British settlements in America and Africa to Great Britain, may be in like manner imported directly from those settlements into Ireland, and that all goods which may be legally exported from Great Britain into those settlements may in like manner be exported from Ireland, on the sole condition that duties equal to those in British ports be imposed by the Irish Parliament on the goods and exports of Ireland. The Acts which prohibited carrying gold and silver into Ireland were repealed. The Irish were allowed to import foreign hops. They were allowed to become members of the Turkey Company, and to carry on a direct trade between Ireland and the Levant Sea.[134]
"Thus fell to the ground that great system of commercial restriction which began under Charles II., which under William III. acquired a crushing severity, and which had received several additional clauses in the succeeding reigns. The measures of Lord North, though obviously due in a great measure to intimidation and extreme necessity, were at least largely, wisely, and generously conceived, and they were the main sources of whatever material prosperity Ireland enjoyed during the next twenty years. The English Parliament had been accustomed to grant a small bounty—rising in the best years to £13,000—on the importation into England of the plainer kinds of Irish linen. After the immense concessions made to Irish trade, no one could have complained if this bounty had been withdrawn, but North determined to continue it. He showed that it had been of real use to the Irish linen manufacture, and he strongly maintained that the prosperity of Ireland must ultimately prove a blessing to England."[135]
Speaking at the Guildhall in Bristol in 1780, Edmund Burke thus described the concessions to Ireland and the series of circumstances to which these measures owed their origin:—
"The whole kingdom of Ireland was instantly in a flame. Threatened by foreigners, and, as they thought, insulted by England, they resolved at once to resist the power of France and to cast off yours. As for us, we were able neither to protect nor to restrain them. Forty thousand men were raised and disciplined without commission from the Crown; two illegal armies were seen with banners displayed at the same time and in the same country. No executive magistrate, no judicature in Ireland, would acknowledge the legality of the army which bore the King's commission, and no law or appearance of law authorised the army commissioned by itself. In this unexampled state of things, which the least error, the least trespass on our part would have hurried down the precipice into an abyss of blood and confusion, the people of Ireland demanded a freedom of trade with arms in their hands. They interdict all commerce between the two nations; they deny all new Supply in the House of Commons, although in time of war; they stint the trust of the old revenue given for two years to all the King's predecessors to six months. The British Parliament, in a former session frightened into a limited concession by the menaces of Ireland, frightened out of it by the menaces of England, were now frightened back again, and made an universal surrender of all that had been thought the peculiar, reserved, uncommunicable rights of England—the exclusive commerce of America, of Africa, of the West Indies, all the enumerations of the Acts of Navigation, all the manufactures—iron, glass, even the sacred fleece itself—all went together. No reserve, no exception, no debate, no discussion. A sudden light broke in upon us all. It broke in, not through well-contrived and well-disposed windows, but through flaws and breaches, through the yawning chasms of our ruin. We were taught wisdom by humiliation. No town in England presumed to have a prejudice or dared to mutter a petition. What was worse, the whole Parliament of England, which retained authority for nothing but surrenders, was despoiled of every shadow of its superintendence. It was, without any qualification, denied in theory as it had been trampled upon in practice."[136]
"The chain," says Mr. Froude, "was allowed to remain till it was broken by the revolt of the American colonies, and Ireland was to learn the deadly lesson that her real wrongs would receive attention only when England was compelled to remember them through fear."[137]