The first statement in this paragraph of plaint calls for no elaboration.  Arnold Toynbee took as the terminal dates of the Industrial Revolution the years 1760 and 1830.  The last generation of the eighteenth century brought to birth the great inventions, but it was the first generation of the nineteenth that founded on them large scale production, and settled the structure of modern industry.  Not without profound disturbance and incalculable suffering was the new system established in England; the story may be read in the pages of Marx, Cunningham, Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic historians.  But, for all the blood and tears, it was established.  Insulated from the continental turmoil, served by her Titanic bondsmen coal and iron, England was able to defeat the Titan, Napoleon.  Now it is idle to deny that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin of her collar.  But the Union made her task impossible.  Lord Castlereagh was quite right in pointing to the accumulation of capital as the characteristic advantage of England.  Through centuries of political freedom that process had gone on without interruption.  Ireland, on the contrary, had been scientifically pillaged by the application to her of the “colonial system” from 1663 to 1779; I deliberately exclude the previous waste of war and confiscation.  She had but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, despite her brilliant success in that period, she had not time to accumulate capital to any great extent.  But Grattan’s Parliament had shown itself extraordinarily astute and steady of purpose in its economic policy.  Had its guidance continued—­conservative taxation, adroit bounties, and that close scrutiny and eager discussion of the movements of industry which stands recorded in its Journal—­the manufactures of Ireland would have weathered the storm.  But the luck was as usual against her.  Instead of wise leadership from Dublin the gods decreed that she should have for portion the hard indifference and savage taxation of Westminster.  Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, stripped of the capital that would have served as a commissariat of advance in that crucial struggle, she went down.

I am not to make here the case for Ireland in respect of over-taxation.  It was made definitely in the Report of the Childers Commission, a document which no Englishman reads, lest in coming to the light he should have his sins too sharply rebuked.  It has been developed and clarified in many speeches and essays and in some books.  To grasp it is to find your road to Damascus on the Irish Question.  But for the moment we are concerned with but one aspect, namely, the export of capital from Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that process.  Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union arrangements and post-Union finance.  Let it suffice to say that they combined the moral