A Native Parliament can alone judge or act usefully on this momentous subject. An absentee tax and a resident government, and the progress of public industry and education, would enable an Irish Parliament to create vast manufactures here by protecting duties in the first instance, and to maintain them by our general prosperity, or it could rely on its own adjustment of landed property as sufficient to put the people above the need of hazarding purity or content by embarking in great manufactures.
A peasant proprietary could have wealth enough to import wrought goods, or taste and firmness enough to prefer home-made manufactures.
But these are questions for other years. We wish the reader to take our word for nothing, but to consult the writers on Irish trade:—Laurence's Interest of Ireland (1682); Browne's Tracts (1728); Dobbs on "Trade" (1729); Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints (1779); Sheffield on "Irish Trade" (1785); Wallace on "Irish Trade" (1798); the various "Parliamentary Reports," and the very able articles on the same subject in the Citizen.
Do not be alarmed at the list, reader; a month's study would carry you through all but the Reports, and it would be well spent. But if you still shrink, you can ease your conscience by reading Mr. John O'Connell's Report on "The Commercial Injustices," just issued by the Repeal Association. It is an elaborate, learned, and most useful tract.
NATIONAL ART.
No one doubts that if he sees a place or an action he knows more of it than if it had been described to him by a witness. The dullest man, who "put on his best attire" to welcome Cæsar, had a better notion of life in Rome than our ablest artist or antiquary.
Were painting, then, but a coloured chronicle, telling us facts by the eye instead of the ear, it would demand the Statesman's care and the People's love. It would preserve for us faces we worshipped, and the forms of men who led and instructed us. It would remind us, and teach our children, not only how these men looked, but, to some extent, what they were, for nature is consistent, and she has indexed her labours. It would carry down a pictorial history of our houses, arts, costume, and manners to other times, and show the dweller in a remote isle the appearance of countries and races of his cotemporaries.
As a register of facts—as a portrayer of men, singly, or assembled—and as a depicter of actual scenery, art is biography, history, and topography taught through the eye.
So far as it can express facts, it is superior to writing; and nothing but the scarcity of faithful artists, or the stupidity of the public, prevents us from having our pictorial libraries of men and places. There are some classes of scenes—as where continuous action is to be expressed—in which sculpture quite fails, and painting is but a shadowy narrator.