One figure may be cited by way of illustration.  Before the Union “98 Peers, and a proportionate number of wealthy Commoners” lived in Dublin.  The number of resident Peers in 1825 was twelve.  At present, as I learn from those who read the sixpenny illustrateds, there is one.  But when they abandoned Ireland they did not leave their rents behind.  And it was a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled between 1790 and 1833.  Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr D’Alton in his “History of the County Dublin,” a book quite innocent of politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not less than L3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than L4,000,000, an under-estimate.  If we average these figures over the period we find that during the first thirty years of Union, that is to say during the most critical phase of the Industrial Revolution, not less than L105,000,000 of Irish capital was “exported” from Ireland to Great Britain through the channel of absenteeism.

Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute in similar fashion, and taking the lowest estimates, I am unable to reach a less total than L120,000,000 for the same period.  In other words, the effect of the Union was to withdraw from Ireland during the thirty years that settled the economic structure of modern industry not less than L225,000,000.  Let me draw the argument together in words which I have used elsewhere, and which others can no doubt easily better: 

“We have heard, in our day, a long-drawn denunciation of a Liberal government on the score that it had, by predatory taxation, driven English capital out of the country, and compromised the industrial future of England.  We have seen in our own day gilt-edged securities, bank, insurance, railway, and brewery shares in Great Britain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of L250,000,000 on the Boer War.  We know that in economic history effects are, in a notable way, cumulative; so clearly marked is the line of continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a nail in all England that could not be traced back to savings made before the Norman Conquest.  A hundred instances admonish us that, in industrial life, nothing fails like failure.  When we put all these considerations together, and give them a concrete application, can we doubt that in over-taxation and the withdrawal of capital we have the prime causa causans of the decay of Ireland under the Union?”

In this wise did Pitt “blend Ireland with the industry and capital of Great Britain.”  Cupped by his finance she gave the venal blood of her industry to strengthen the predominant partner, and to help him to exclude for a time from these islands that pernicious French Democracy in which all states and peoples have since found redemption.  Such was the first chapter in the Economics of Unionism.

CHAPTER VI