Another important result was that smuggling immediately began on an enormous scale.  Wool was now a drug in the legitimate market, and woollen goods had practically no market.  A vast contraband trade sprang swiftly up upon the ruins of the legitimate one.  Wool, which at home was worth only 5d. or 6d. a lb., in France fetched half-a-crown.  The whole population, from the highest to the lowest, flung themselves energetically on the side of the smugglers.  The coast-line was long and intricate; the excise practically powerless.  Wool was packed in caves all along the south and south-west coast, and carried off as opportunity served by the French vessels which came to seek it.  What was meant by nature and Providence to have been the honest and open trade of the country was thus forced to be carried on by stealth and converted into a crime.  It alleviated to some degree the distress, but it made Law seem more than ever a mockery, more than ever the one archenemy against which every man’s hand might legitimately be raised.

Even this, if bad enough, was not the worst.  The worst was that this arbitrary Act—­directed, it must be repeated, by England, not against the Irish natives, but against her own colonists—­done, too, without there being an opportunity for the country to be heard in its own defence—­struck at the very root of all enterprise, and produced a widespread feeling of hopelessness and despair.  Since this was the acknowledged result of too successful rivalry with England, of what use, it was openly asked, to attempt any new enterprise, or what was to hinder the same fate from befalling it in its turn?  The whole relationship of the two islands, even where no division of blood or creed existed, grew thus to be strained and embittered to the last degree; the sense of hostility and indignation being hardly less strong in the latest arrived colonist than in the longest established.  “There was scarce an Englishman,” says a writer of the time, “who had been seven years in the country, and meant to remain there, who did not become averse to England, and grow into something of an Irishman.”  All this must be taken into account before those puzzling contradictions and anomalies which make up the history of this century can ever be properly realized.

XLVII.

MOLYNEUX AND SWIFT.

The early half of the eighteenth century is such a very dreary period of Irish history that there is little temptation to linger over it.  Two men, however, stand out conspicuously against this melancholy background, neither of whom must be passed over without a few words.