THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2)

If the reader cares to push forward the line of thought suggested in the preceding pages and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so without difficulty.  He has but to compare the post-Union history of linen with that of cotton.  Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of mercantilism.  Within certain limits—­such as the steady resolve to confine it, in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point of geography, to Ulster—­it had behind it at the Union a century of encouragement.  It is calculated that between 1700 and 1800 it had received bounties, English and Irish, totalling more than,L2,500,000.  In other words it had a chance to accumulate capital.  Even linen declined after the Union partly from the direct effects of that measure, partly from the growing intensity of the Industrial Revolution.  But the capital accumulated, the commercial good name established under native government carried the manufacturers through.  These were able towards 1830 to introduce the new machinery and the new processes, and to weather the tempest of competition.  Cotton, on the other hand, was a very recent arrival.  It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave promise of supplanting linen.  But the weight of capital told more and more as changes in the technique of transportation and production ushered in our modern world.  Lacking the solid reserves of its rival, involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared.  But let us resume the parable.  If the “business man” responds to capital, he will certainly not be obtuse to the appeal of coal.  In this feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at a disadvantage, and it was promised that the free trade with Great Britain inaugurated by the Union would “blend” with her the resources of the latter country.  Did she obtain free trade in coal?  Miss Murray, a Unionist, in her “Commercial Relations between England and Ireland” tells the story in part: 

“Coals again had hitherto been exported from Great Britain at a duty of gd. per ton; this duty was to cease but the Irish import duty on coal was to be made perpetual, and that at a time when all coasting duties in England and Scotland had been abolished.  Dublin especially would suffer from this arrangement, for the duty there on coals imported was is. 8-4/5d. per ton, while that in the rest of Ireland was only 9-1/2d.  This was because a local duty of 1s. per ton existed in Dublin for the internal improvement of the city; this local duty was blended by the Union arrangements with the general duty on the article, and its perpetual continuance was thus enforced.  All this shows how little Irish affairs were understood in England.”

But was it a failure of the English intellect or a lapse of the English will?  Except through the