“Their habitations,” the Report proceeds, “are wretched hovels; several of the family sleep together on straw, or on the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes not even so much to cover them.  Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes; and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day....  They sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide.”

But a truce to these dismal chronicles.  The post hoc may be taken as established; was it a propter hoc?  Was the Union the cause as well as the antecedent of this decay?  No economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to answer in the affirmative.  The causal connection between two realities could not be more manifest.  Let us examine it very briefly.

I begin of necessity with the principle of freedom, for freedom is the dominating force in economic life.  No instance can be cited of a modern people of European civilisation that ever prospered while held politically in subjection.

“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.