'Ireland is an agricultural country. There are in Ulster, as in England and Scotland, factories which support the greater portion of the population, and cause the prosperity of the province; but outside of Ulster, cattle and butter are the staple products. And how does Ireland stand in her only market, England, as compared with other nations? She enjoys free trade in butter, no doubt, but so do France and Holland; but these countries, while they find an open market in England, tax all English and Irish productions, and being manufacturing countries themselves they can afford to sell butter at so cheap a rate as to swamp Ireland's market. A slight protective duty on foreign butter would be hailed with gratitude in Ireland, and do more to allay discontent than any further acts of so-called "generosity."
'Again, the great thinly peopled countries of the West find in England a free market for cattle and flour, and America taxes very highly all English goods. Why not place Ireland on a par with America, by levying a slight protective duty on American beef and flour? Every little village in Ireland formerly had its flour mill, which worked up the corn grown in the country as well as imported grain. These mills are now generally idle and the men who worked them ruined. A small duty on manufactured flour would restore this industry, and enable men with some capital to give employment to labour, and to work up in small quantities for the farmer, at a cheap rate, their home-grown corn, as well as to grind imported grain. Our own colonies may have, no doubt, a right to object to our taxing their goods, but not so foreign countries.
'The Free Trade system of England would, no doubt, have been successful if reciprocated. But the question is worth considering, whether the English people do not now lose more by taxation resulting from the chronic state of rebellion in Ireland than she gains by bringing in American beef and flour, and foreign butter and butterine, free, to the impoverishment of Ireland, and of the agricultural portions of England and Scotland? "Remedial measures" for an agricultural country are certainly not those which spoil its market.'
Don't dismiss that as pre-Chamberlainese Protection for it is sheer common-sense on a matter of national importance, and what I wrote in 1887, after many years, has become part of the political convictions of a great and an increasing party.
I wonder what the Protective party will be like when it eventually comes into office. Promises out of office are often the whale which only produces the sprat of legislation when the time of fulfilment arrives. This is an impartial opinion on most Cabinets of the last fifty years.
One of the few occasions on which a recent British Government has recently shown some signs of appreciating a really keen and capable man was when they made Mr. Ellison Macartney, Master of the Mint.
I wrote and congratulated him, observing that I hoped he would never be short of money, but if that was his plight all he had to do was to coin it for himself.
I have a bad recollection for faces, and one day in Dublin his father came up to me, and seeing I did not remember him, recalled a story with which I had amused him in the lobby of the House of Commons.
It was to this effect, and may prove new to others:—
Coming out of Glasgow one evening two Irishmen waylaid a Scotsman for the sake of plunder. He was nearly enough for them both, but numbers prevailed, and when they had mastered him, after searching his pockets, they only found three halfpence.