report on the state of Irish agriculture, commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal imported from Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to abolish the bounty and double the levy on imports. Writing twenty-eight years later the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a policy, so foolish and so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre vistas to any student of economic history:
"Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circumstance that, in the metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior, superior, probably, to any other city or
town in this portion of the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in Europe, there is not a factory for the production of either silk, linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled by a steam engine."
The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a duty on spirits. This course Belfast had been permitted to follow—one of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the side of the Protestant North. In my part of the country the people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation.
The Drummond Commission, appointed in 1836 to consider the question of railway construction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 which practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate "to accomplish so important a national object." What came after is best related in the official terminology of the Scotter Commission of 1906-10:
"This report was presented in July 1838, and early in the
following year a great public meeting, held in Dublin, passed a resolution that inasmuch as an adequate system of railways could not be constructed by private capital, the Government should be urged to take the work into its own hands, thereby saving the cost of Private Bill legislation. Promises were also made that the lands necessary for railway construction would be given free of cost. Similar resolutions were adopted at another meeting held about the same time in the north of Ireland. In addition, an address to the Queen was presented by a number of Irish Peers, headed by the Duke of Leinster, praying that action might be taken on the Drummond Commission Report."
The government saw the light, and proceeded to sin against it. They embodied the Dublin programme in resolutions which were adopted by the House of Commons in March 1839, and they then abruptly abandoned the whole business. The last chance was not yet lost. During the Great Famine of 1847 the Opposition proposed to raise, £16,000,000 by State loans for the construction of railways as relief works. A suggestion so sane could not hope to pass. It was in fact rejected; the starving peasants were set to dig large holes and fill them up again, and to build bad roads leading nowhere. And instead of a national railway
system Ireland was given private enterprise with all its waste and all its clash of interests.
The two most conspicuous gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish destitution had assumed what politicians call men-acing proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circumstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability of extending the English Poor Law to Ireland. Their report is a pioneer document in the development of economic thought. Just as the Railway Commission a few years later was to give the watchword of the future, nationalisation, so the Poor Law Commission gave within its province the watchword of the future, prevention before relief. They pointed the contrast between the two countries. I quote the words of the later Irish Poor Law Commission of 1903-6: