The Commercial Restraints of Ireland

by John Hely-Hutchinson

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.