England had assisted the Protestants
of Ireland to crush the Catholics; she had for this purpose placed at their service her treasures, and her armies; and now the Irish Protestants were required, in evidence of their gratitude, to sacrifice the commercial and industrial interests of their country to English jealousy.
At the end of the seventeenth century the manufacture of woollen stuffs had attained to considerable importance in the southern provinces of Ireland. The superiority of the Irish broadcloths, blankets, and friezes was recognized, and it was therefore resolved that they should no longer be manufactured. The Lords and Commons, in 1698, called upon William III. to protect the interests of English merchants; and his majesty replied in the well-known words “I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen manufacture of Ireland.” Accordingly, an export duty of four shillings in the pound was laid on all broadcloths carried out of Ireland, and half as much on kerseys, flannels, and friezes. This, in fact, was equivalent to a prohibition, and the ruin of the Irish woollen manufactures which followed was not an unforeseen, but the directly intended, consequence of this measure. The linen manufacture, since there were at the time no rival English interests, was opposed only in an indirect way by offering large bounties for the making of linen in the Highlands of Scotland, bounties on the exportation of English linen, and by imposing a tax of 30 per cent. on all foreign linens, with which most of the Irish linens were classed.
Still other measures were needed for the complete destruction of Irish commerce and industry. The
Navigation Laws forbade all direct trade between Ireland and the British colonies; so that all produce intended for Ireland had first to be unloaded in an English port. The Irish were not allowed to build or keep at sea a single ship. “Of all the excellent timber,” said Dean Swift in 1727, “cut down within these fifty or sixty years, it can hardly be said that the nation hath received the benefit of one valuable house to dwell in, or one ship to trade with.” The forests of Ireland, which so greatly added to the beauty of the country, were felled and carried to England to build ships which were to bring the wealth of the world into English ports. Even the Irish fishery “must be with men and boats from England.”
By these and similar measures, commercial and industrial Ireland was blotted out of existence, and even the possibility of her ever entering into competition with England for the trade of the world disappeared. The unjust legislation by which Irish industry was repressed was not inspired by religious passion nor directed against the Catholic population. Their condition was already so wretched and helpless that it would have been difficult to discover anything by which it could have been made worse. “The aboriginal inhabitants,” says Macaulay—“more than five-sixths of the population—had no more interest in the matter than the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in the Parliament which sat at Dublin than in the Parliament which sat at Westminster. They had less to dread from legislation
at Westminster than from legislation at Dublin.… The most acrimonious English Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of hatred, fear, and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian who dwelt among them.”[193]
Molyneux, who at this time came forward as the champion of Ireland and of liberty, demanded nothing for the Irish Catholics but a more cruel slavery; and Dean Swift, who gained much popularity for his advocacy of Irish rights, declared he would as soon think of consulting the swine as the aboriginal inhabitants of the island.
Indisputable as the fact is that the Irish Catholics had no direct interest in the contest in which the commerce and industry of their country were destroyed, the consequences of the iniquitous policy of England proved nevertheless most disastrous to them. Manual labor was the only work which they were permitted to do, and there now remained for them nothing but the tillage of the soil, either as tenants-at-will or common laborers. Ireland was to supply England with beef and butter, and the work of exterminating the Irish Catholics was not to be pushed further than the exigencies of successful cattle-grazing might demand. Society was constituted in the simplest manner. There were but two classes—the possessors of the soil and the tillers of the soil: the lord and the peasant; the master and the slave; the Protestant and the Catholic; the rich man and the beggar. There were but two kinds of human dwellings—the castle, with its high walls and splendid park, and the mud cabin, in which
it was impossible that there should be anything but filth and rags. The multitude lived for a few men, by whom they were valued as their horses or their dogs, but not treated so humanly. A contrast more absolute has never existed, even in the despotisms of Asia. The picture is revolting; it cannot be contemplated even in imagination without loathing, or thought of with any composure. It is a blot on humanity, an infamy which no glory and no services can condone. Ireland was in the hands of the worst class of men whom history has ever made odious—an aristocracy which hated the land from which it derived its titles, despised the people from whom it received its wealth, shirked the duties and responsibilities imposed by its privileges, and used its power only to oppress and impoverish the nation. The Irish people were thus under the weight of a double tyranny—that of England and that of their lords; and the fiend best knows which was the worst.