that it was upon the Protestant Scotch and English settlers that they fell with the greatest severity, driving them into exile by thousands, to become, subsequently, one of the chief factors in the American Revolution.  But if the direct economic effect of political separation weighed less heavily upon the Catholic majority, they suffered all the more from the utter paralysis of all industry and enterprise consequent upon the Penal Laws.  These laws, monstrous as they seemed even to Burke, were in their turn a natural outcome of a political separation which made the security of Protestantism in Ireland rest upon the domination of a narrow oligarchy in instant terror of being swamped.  Under Union they would never have been devised, or could certainly never have endured.

The revolution by which the Irish Parliament, in 1782, asserted its constitutional equality with the British Parliament, subject only to the power of bribery, direct or indirect, retained by the Crown, brought out in still more glaring relief the utter unsoundness of the existing political structure under separation.  After eighteen years of ferment within Ireland and friction without, British and Irish statesmen, face to face with civil war and French invasion, realised that the sorry farce had to come to an end.  Meanwhile the immediate economic effect of liberation from the direct restrictions on Irish foreign trade, already conceded in 1779, and helped in various directions by judicious bounties, was undoubtedly to give a new impetus to production in Ireland.  The first ten years of Grattan’s Parliament were, on the whole, years of growing prosperity.  Whether, even apart from civil war and increasing taxation, that prosperity would have continued to increase, if the Union had not come about, is, however, a more doubtful matter.  The immense industrial development of England during the next half-century would probably, in any case, have crushed out the smaller and weaker Irish industries, while the existence of a separate tariff in Great Britain would have been a serious obstacle to the development of Irish agriculture.  A full customs union, with internal free trade, was undoubtedly the best solution of the difficulty.  But Pitt’s Commercial Propositions of 1785 failed, partly, indeed, owing to political intrigues, but still more owing to the fundamental impossibility of securing an effective customs union without some form of political union.

When finally Ireland entered the Union it was with the severe handicap of an industrial system artificially repressed for over a century.  The removal of the last traces of internal protection in 1824 only accelerated the process, inevitable in any case, by which Irish industries, with the exception of linen, were submerged.  But manufacturing industry was at the best a small matter in Ireland compared with agriculture.  And to Irish agriculture the Union meant an immense development in every direction.  Unfortunately the inheritance of the preceding century,