to cause death to three-quarters of a million persons.  These things do not happen in properly governed, in other words in self-governed, countries, whatever their fiscal system, and they have never happened to Irishmen in any other part of the world but in their own fertile island.  Manufacturing industries stand on a different footing.  Most of the staple industries of Ireland, notably the woollen industry, and the aptitudes which brought them into being, were deliberately destroyed long ago by fiscal measures imposed by England, and their destruction aggravated the misery and exhaustion produced by a bad land system.  How far their partial revival under the fiscal Home Rule of Grattan’s Parliament was genuine, and might, with a continuance of fiscal Home Rule, have been permanent, it is impossible to say.  The retarding effect of the Rebellion, and the long start already obtained by Great Britain in the industrial race, are factors beyond accurate calculation.  But one thing is certain, that the revival of industries was, at that stage, of trivial importance beside the rural regeneration of Ireland, and that Grattan’s Parliament had not the remotest influence for good upon the land question, which it neglected as heartlessly as its predecessors for a century before and its successors for seventy years afterwards.[102]

Industries are valuable assets for any country; but countries almost wholly agricultural, like Denmark, can prosper remarkably, and without Protection, provided that they possess or evolve a sound system of agrarian tenure, in other words, a sound relation between tenant and landlord, or, in default of that, peasant ownership.  In every country in the world that has been a sine qua non of prosperity.  Suppose that English labourers had built out of their own money and by their own hands the factories, docks, and railways in which they worked, and that the resulting profits, wages deducted, went solely to ground landlords.  That gives us some idea of the old Irish land system, whose overthrowal began only in 1870; a system under which the landlord put no capital into the land, though his rent represented the full profits of the tenant’s capital and labour, less an amount equivalent to a bare subsistence wage, governed by competition.

The present influence upon Ireland of the Imperial fiscal system, now that peasant proprietorship has been half accomplished, is another matter upon which I shall have to say more presently, when we have completed our review of Anglo-Irish finance.  Let us return to the point we had reached:  that free trade with the outside world and the equalization of taxation between Great Britain and Ireland approximately coincided in point of time, and were also contemporaneous with rapid and continuous growth in the wealth and population of Great Britain, and a steady and continuous decline in the Irish population.  We know now, moreover, though nobody knew it then, because the calculation