It is quite true that the latter part of the eighteenth century was, on the whole, a time of considerable prosperity to certain classes in Ireland—­a prosperity varied by periods of acute depression and distress.  But that prosperity, such as it was, neither began with Grattan’s Parliament nor ended with it—­had, indeed, no more connection with the Irish Parliament in any of its phases than had the Goodwin Sands with Tenterden steeple.  With the exception of the respite between the Treaty of Versailles and the outbreak of the French Revolution, England was almost constantly at war, or feverishly preparing for war.  Simultaneously came the unprecedented increase of urban industry, following on the invention of the steam-engine and spinning machinery.  The result was an enormous and growing demand for corn, beef, and pork, sailcloth, stores of all kinds for our armies and fleets, a demand which England, owing to the growth of her town population and the consequent growth of the home demand, was unable adequately to meet.

Ireland reaped the benefit.  As a largely agricultural country, she was as yet little influenced by the discoveries of Watt, of Hargreaves, of Arkwright, or of Crompton.  But her long-rested soil could produce in apparently unlimited quantities those very products of which the British forces stood most in need.  The fleets were victualled and fitted out at Cork, and they carried thence a constant stream of supplies of all sorts for our armies in the field.  Indeed, so keen was the demand that it was soon discovered that not only our own troops, but those of the enemy, were receiving Irish supplies, and smugglers on the south and west coasts reaped a rich harvest.

The result was obvious.  Cattle graziers and middlemen made enormous profits, rents were doubled and trebled.  Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Belfast flourished exceedingly on war prices and war profits.  But there is no evidence that the mass of the people in their degraded and debased condition shared to any extent in this prosperity.  It was at this very period that Arthur O’Connor spoke of them as “the worst clad, the worst fed, the worst housed people in Europe.”  Whiteboyism, outrage and lawlessness spread over the face of the country, and, as Lord Clare reminded Parliament, “session after session have you been compelled to enact laws of unexampled rigour and novelty to repress the horrible excesses of the mass of your people.”  It has been made a charge against the Union that during some disturbed periods of the nineteenth century the United Parliament had to pass “Coercion” Acts at the rate of nearly one every session.  The complainants should look nearer home and they would find from the records of the Irish Legislature that during the “halcyon” days of “Grattan’s Parliament”—­the eighteen years between 1782 and the Union—­no less than fifty-four Coercion Acts were passed, some of them of a thoroughness and ferocity quite unknown in later legislation.  The close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth were, in reality, in spite of a certain amount of agrarian crime, organised and subsidised from abroad, a period of much greater peace and more widespread prosperity than the bloodstained years that marked the close of the eighteenth century—­and of the Irish Parliament.