The Commercial Restraints of Ireland

by John Hely-Hutchinson

The Provost dwells on the illustrative fact, that, whether the Debt was increased or diminished, and however much the pensions and salaries were multiplied, the distress and wretchedness of the body of the people continued the same. The linen manufacture for a while prospered, and afforded a limited relief in a few places; but tillage was declining, and destitution was all round. The distress was noticed in the House, but nothing effectual was attempted, and Hutchinson cannot refrain from exclaiming: “Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe, enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give them employment and food, had not left sufficient memorials of their wretchedness; if their habitations, apparel, and food, were not sufficient proofs, I should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of unemployed industry.”

All these restrictions were enacted by England, not from any actual loss that she had sustained by Irish competition, but from an apprehension of loss. Hutchinson shows how groundless the apprehension was, and he protests against the iniquity of sacrificing the happiness of a great and ancient kingdom, and the welfare of millions of its people, to guard against an imagined decrease in the value of English land. If wool-spinning was cheaper in Ireland than in England, that was because the Irish operatives had to live on food—“potatoes and milk, or more frequently water”[119]—with which the English would not be content; but wages and the cost of producing would increase with the opening of trade, and with the increase of manufactures. England’s greedy monopoly was sinking the Irish people, while fair trade would really lessen the cheap labour competition which the English masters professed to dread. An open wool trade in Ireland would, moreover, be mainly carried on by English capitalists and by English shipping, just as in ancient Egypt, China, and Hindostan, the export trade used to be conducted by foreigners; and just as in the victualling trade of Ireland, the natives were but factors to the English. On every side, therefore, the English themselves suffered as much by the restrictions as the Irish, and they would be, if they could but see it, proportionate gainers by the removal of the restrictions. Hutchinson goes on to show that England gets one-third of the wealth of Ireland, and that she would get more than the half of the benefit of the wool trade; but that even so the country would be the better for the small share of the gains that would be allowed to remain with her. Agriculture would be encouraged, and manufactures would be promoted; and there would be a circulation of money amongst the people. Taxes were proportionately heavier in Ireland than in England, when the annual earnings, expenditure, rentals, circulating specie, and personal property of the two countries were compared. The English were mistaken in some of the calculations on which they grounded the commercial restrictions, and they would be commercial gainers by the removal of the restrictions; but it was not for the benefit of England, and it was for the benefit of Ireland, that the Provost demanded free and open commerce for the produce and manufactures of this country. This was what he claimed and argued for, and this was what he very largely helped to obtain for Ireland; and this was the service that won him back a great deal of the popularity which he had forfeited by his hired subserviency to the English party.

There is a good deal of repetition in the Provost’s book as we have it, but this is accounted for by the fact that the book was originally published in the form of letters.[120] The repetitions, moreover, are not altogether artistic blemishes, for they are made to intensify, and, as it were, to multiply, the identical facts by presenting them in fresh connections. This is notably the case in regard of the Provost’s doublings back on the wool trade, and on the linen trade, and on England’s dealings with Ireland in regard of both these trades. After the destruction of the cattle trade these were the two sources of industry left to this country, and therefore the record of the treatment and evolution of these trades is in fact the history of the commercial relations between England and this country. The Provost accordingly takes the wool and the linen trade as the fixed pillars of his discourse, and he interpolates the spaces between them with coincident statistics that illustrate his thesis. It is thus that in page 83 he comes back to the wool trade to show the falsehood of the English trade returns, which asserted that the trade “was set up here since the reduction of Ireland” by Cromwell. The trade had been a flourishing one in this country from the time of Edward III. Then in the Sixth Letter the Provost takes up the linen trade again, for the purpose of showing more emphatically, in the first place, that it was forced on Ireland as an equivalent for the loss of the wool trade; in the second place, that it was not at all an equivalent—and in the third place, that England before long broke her stipulations with this country, and so discouraged the hemp and linen manufacture of Ireland, that the Irish had to abandon the flax culture altogether. In 1705, leave was given to Ireland to export some sorts of linen to the colonies, but leave was not given to bring back dye stuffs or other colonial produce. In 1743, bounties were offered on exports of Irish linen, provided they were shipped from English ports; but there was already a duty of thirty per cent. on foreign linen imported into England; and thus Ireland was, of course, deprived of the colonial and other markets. Not till 1777 were the American markets opened to Ireland, and by that time the emigration of the Ulster linen-workers had become so enormous, that America was, in fact, a rival in the trade. What words can more offensively and more bitterly express the oppression of the country than this leave to trade with other countries? It took Grattan and Hussey Burgh “with their coats off,” and it took the Volunteers with their motto “Free Trade, or ——,” to sweep away this badge of slavery. All the time England was multiplying pensions and salaries here; she was levying taxes and draining rents; and, as Hutchinson clearly puts it, Ireland “was paying to Great Britain double the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which Great Britain allows her. It would be difficult to find a similar instance in the history of mankind.” Again and again the Provost comes back to point out the open tyranny and the underhand unfairness of England’s commercial legislation for this country, and in the Seventh Letter he repeats that this legislation was a departure from the policy which was guaranteed by Magna Charta, and which had prevailed from the time of Edward III. When a supposed compensation was afterwards offered, it was no more than what Ireland had had before, and the liberty granted by Queen Anne was merely allowing us to do in regard of one manufacture what had previously been a right in every instance.

“At this earlier period, then,” says Hutchinson, “the English commercial system and the Irish, so far as it depended upon the English statute law, was the same; and before this period, so far as it depended upon the common law and Magna Charta, it was also the same.”

“This was the voice of nature,” he adds, “and the dictate of sound and generous policy; it proclaimed to the nations that they should not give to strangers the bread of their own children; that the produce of the soil should support the inhabitants of the country; that their industry should be exercised on their own materials, and that the poor should be employed, clothed, and fed.

“This policy was liberal, just, and equal; it opened the resources and cultivated the strength of every part of the empire.”

From this liberal and profitable policy, however, England departed towards the close of the seventeenth century, and manifold were the wrongs which the departure inflicted on this country. The Provost details these wrongs with the indignation of a patriot; he rails at the oppression which, by depriving the people of liberty, robbed them of half their vigour; but still as a courtier and as a Government man, he was able to “revere that conquest which has given to Ireland the Common Law and the Magna Charta of England.” Why he revered the Conquest, when the Common Law and Magna Charta failed to protect the welfare of Ireland, the Provost does not state. Two things stand out clearly throughout the treatise—one is that Ireland, both as a producer and as a consumer, has been immensely profitable to England; and the other is that England has been the source of vast evil and suffering to Ireland. The purport of “The Commercial Restraints” is to set forth these two great truths, and the record may be read now without prejudice on one side of the Channel, and without panic or passion on the other. The teaching of the book ought to be palpable enough for the men of the present day. It ought to convince Englishmen that it is time for them to distrust their “resources of civilisation,” and to let this country prosper; and it ought to remind Irishmen that they are the best judges of what they want, and that their road to prosperity is independence of English conceit, together with a sturdy development of their own native resources.

In and since Provost Hutchinson’s time Ireland has won vast conquests from her oppressor, and she has won them all by the same weapon—firm and constitutional discontent. She has much to win still, and she will surely win it by the same method, while outside that method she is powerless. Free Trade and Parliamentary Independence were won without shedding a drop of blood, and the conditions of the fight for what is required now are far more propitious and hopeful than they were a century ago. Then, Ireland had to contend with an obstinate king, a wrong-headed minister, and a greedy nation; now, all these things are changed. The men of ’82, no doubt, had at their back the Irish Volunteers that England feared, and there are no Irish Volunteers now; their place, however, is supplied by a more coercive force, and that force is the spirit of justice which is spreading through the Liberals of England, and is fed by the Liberals of Ireland. But even supposing that all these demands touching land, education, and autonomy, were granted, there still remains another object for Irishmen to work out, namely, the recreation of their home industries and manufactures. The land, after all, is not everything—all the people cannot live by it and out of it—and, as Hutchinson observes, no one industry is sufficient to maintain a numerous population in prosperity and comfort.

In past times, as a couple of months ago the Lord Lieutenant at Belfast, and Mr. Fawcett at Shoreditch, were saying,[121] all these industries in the country were prohibited by unjust and iniquitous legislation, and by a mass of vexatious restrictions; but there are no prohibitions now, and the country abounds with the conditions and materials of prosperity. Bishop Berkeley wrote, when the prohibiting laws had been seventy years in operation, and when the force that swept them away had not yet begun to breathe in the country. He regarded the laws with despair, and piteously bemoaned the destitution and degradation in which the people were fixed. His earnest exhortation to them was to compensate themselves for the loss of the foreign trade by developing home industries and manufactures; and he asked[122] whether the natives might not be able to effect their own prosperity and elevation, even though “there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom?”

Lord Clare, in his Union speech, declared that Ireland made more progress in her eighteen years of freedom than ever nation made in the same period; and it will be now for the working-men of this generation to show that, in enterprise and trades-craft they are not degenerate from their half-taught forefathers who won Fitzgibbon’s testimony. There is every ground for confident anticipation, that this year’s National Exhibition will profoundly and widely strengthen the effort for the revival of our Native Industries, and it is with the desire to contribute somewhat to the all-important and patriotic impulse that “The Commercial Restraints of Ireland” is now reproduced by the publishers.