"All history," writes Professor Marshall of Cambridge, the doyen of Political Economy in England, "is full of the record of inefficiency caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, and other forms of civil and political oppression and repression."
The Act of Union was, as has been said, one of those spiritual outrages which, in their reactions, are like lead poured into the veins. It lowered the vital resources of Ireland. It made hope an absentee, and enterprise an exile. That was its first-fruits of disaster.
These commonplaces of the gospel of freedom "for which Hampden died in the field and Sidney on the scaffold" will possibly appear to their modern descendants mystical, sentimental, and remote from real life. For there is no one in the world so ready as your modern Englishman to deny that he is a man in order to prove that he is a business-man. Fortunately we can establish for this strange being, who has thus indecently stripped himself of humanity, and
establish in very clear and indisputable fashion the cash nexus between Unionism and decay. The argument is simple.
The Union came precisely in the period in which capital was beginning to dominate the organisation of industry. The Union denuded Ireland of the capital which would have enabled her to transform the technique of her manufactures, and so maintain the ground won under Grattan's Parliament. The channels through which this export of capital proceeded were absenteeism and over-taxation.
The first statement in this paragraph of plaint calls for no elaboration. Arnold Toynbee took as the terminal dates of the Industrial Revolution the years 1760 and 1830. The last generation of the eighteenth century brought to birth the great inventions, but it was the first generation of the nineteenth that founded on them large scale production, and settled the structure of modern industry. Not without profound disturbance and incalculable suffering was the new system established in England; the story may be read in the pages of Marx, Cunningham, Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic historians. But, for all the blood and tears, it was established. Insulated from the continental turmoil, served by her Titanic bondsmen coal
and iron, England was able to defeat the Titan, Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin of her collar. But the Union made her task impossible. Lord Castlereagh was quite right in pointing to the accumulation of capital as the characteristic advantage of England. Through centuries of political freedom that process had gone on without interruption. Ireland, on the contrary, had been scientifically pillaged by the application to her of the "colonial system" from 1663 to 1779; I deliberately exclude the previous waste of war and confiscation. She had but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, despite her brilliant success in that period, she had not time to accumulate capital to any great extent. But Grattan's Parliament had shown itself extraordinarily astute and steady of purpose in its economic policy. Had its guidance continued—conservative taxation, adroit bounties, and that close scrutiny and eager discussion of the movements of industry which stands recorded in its Journal—the manufactures of Ireland would have weathered the storm. But the luck was as usual against her. Instead of wise leadership from Dublin the gods decreed that she should have for portion the hard
indifference and savage taxation of Westminster. Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, stripped of the capital that would have served as a commissariat of advance in that crucial struggle, she went down.
I am not to make here the case for Ireland in respect of over-taxation. It was made definitely in the Report of the Childers Commission, a document which no Englishman reads, lest in coming to the light he should have his sins too sharply rebuked. It has been developed and clarified in many speeches and essays and in some books. To grasp it is to find your road to Damascus on the Irish Question. But for the moment we are concerned with but one aspect, namely, the export of capital from Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that process. Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk, and appropriated it for her own nourishment. One has a sort of
gloomy pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we were not duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons—in those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom—tore the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said: