It was inevitable that a city of very limited industry like Dublin should suffer from the disappearance of its Parliament, which brought into residence for some months in every year some hundreds of persons of wealth and distinction.  It was also inevitable that the mechanical inventions to which we have already alluded—­the steam-engine, the “spinning jenny,” and the “mule”—­which revolutionised the world’s industry, should have their effect in Ireland also.  Under primitive conditions, with lands almost roadless and communications slow, difficult and costly, the various districts of any country had of necessity to produce articles of food and clothing to satisfy their requirements, or they had to go without.  With the progress of invention, and with the opening up of the world by roads and canals, a totally different state of things presents itself.  Industries tend to become centralised—­the fittest survive and grow, the unfit wither away.  This is what occurred in many districts of England and Scotland, and the course of events was naturally the same in Ireland.

When we read of small towns now lying idle, which in the eighteenth century produced woollen cloth, linen, cotton, fustian, boots, hats, glass, beer, and food products, it simply means that a more highly organised system of industry has in its progress left such districts behind in the race.  The woollen manufacture has centred in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, linen in Belfast, and so forth—­one district dwindled as others advanced and tended to monopolise production, without the legislature having anything to say to it.  To say that this or that manufacture is not so prosperous in Ireland as it was a century ago before power looms, spindles, steamships, and railways came to revolutionise industry, is simply to say that Ireland, like other countries, has had its part, for better or for worse, in the great world-movement of nineteenth-century industry.

The figures of Irish exports and imports lend no countenance to the story of decay setting in with the Union.  Taking the two decennial periods, before and after the Union, the figures are as follows:—­[15]

Total value      Total value
of imports.      of exports.

1790-1801 ... ...  L49,000,000 L51,000,000
1802-1813 ... ...  L74,000,000 L63,000,000
                      ----------- -----------
        Increase ...  L25,000,000 L12.000,000

an increase of over fifty per cent. in imports, and over twenty-three per cent. in exports in the ten years after the Union as compared with the ten years before it.