a vicious agrarian system and a low standard of living, was not easily to be eliminated, and little attempt was made to eliminate it.  The great increase of agricultural production was accompanied, not by a progressive and well-diffused rise in the standard of national well-being, but by high rents and extravagance on the one side, and, on the other, the rapid multiplication of a population living on the very margin of subsistence.  The terrible year of famine was a warning to British statesmanship of the need of a constructive and Conservative policy for the reorganisation of Irish agricultural life and for the broadening of the economic basis in Ireland by the deliberate encouragement of new industries.  Under a true conception of Union, political and economic—­and there were not wanting men like Lord George Bentinck and Disraeli who entertained it—­Ireland might within a generation have been levelled up to the general standard of the United Kingdom.

But the evil effects of political and economic separatism in the eighteenth century were still unremedied when the whole economic policy of Union was abandoned.  The very principle and conception of Free Trade is, inherently, as opposed to the maintenance of national as of Imperial Union.  Ireland was deprived of that position of advantage in the British market which was one of the implied terms of the Union, and was not allowed to protect her own market.  Incidentally, and as a consequence of the new fiscal policy, Ireland was saddled with a heavy additional burden of taxation which only handicapped her yet further in the struggle to recover from the famine and to meet foreign competition.  The full severity of that competition was, however, not experienced till towards the end of the seventies, when the opening up of the American West, coupled with the demonetisation of silver, brought down prices with a run.  A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil.  The same conditions were experienced all over Europe, and were everywhere met by raising tariffs to the level required to enable agriculture to maintain itself.  Even in England “Fair Trade” became a burning issue.  Given normal agrarian conditions in Ireland the Irish vote would have gone solid with the Fair Traders, and the United Kingdom would in all probability have reverted to a national system of economics a generation ago.  As things were, landlords and farmers in Ireland, instead of uniting to defend their common interest, each endeavoured to thrust the burden of the economic debacle on the other.  The bitterness of the agrarian struggle which ensued was skilfully engineered into the channel of the Home Rule agitation.  In other words, the evils of economic separatism, aggravated by the social evils surviving from the separatism of an earlier age, united to revive a demand for the extension and renewal of the very cause of these evils.