Taking single years the result is similar.  The amalgamation of the two Exchequers and the financial re-arrangements that followed, put an end to the accurate record of exports and imports until quite recently, but the increase during the early years of the Union and also over the whole country is unmistakable.  The average annual value of Irish exports at the time of the Union was, according to Mr. Chart.[16] L4,000,000.  In 1826 they had increased to L8,000,000, a corresponding increase being recorded in imports.  Coming down to the period of the Financial Relations Commission (1895), that very cautious and painstaking statistician, the late Sir Robert Giffen,[17] roughly estimated Irish imports at L25,000,000 and exports at L20,000,000.  Since that time the Irish Agricultural Department has been created, and has undertaken the collection and tabulation of such statistics.  Turning to their latest report we find that the imports had in 1910 attained the relatively enormous figure of L65,000,000, and the exports L65,800,000, a total of over L130,000,000 in place of nine or ten millions, at the very outside, of the time of the Union.  And it is worth noting in addition that, for the first time in these recorded tables, Ireland’s exports exceed her imports.

But we are assured with triumphant and invincible despondency that population has decreased alarmingly.  The movements of population since the time of the Union have been, it may be admitted, very remarkable, but the figures are double-edged and require a more careful handling than they generally receive.  If we are to assume, as the prophets of gloom will have it, that increase and decrease of population are an infallible test of a country’s growth or decay, then Ireland for nearly half a century after the Union must have been the most prosperous country in Europe.  The population of Ireland, which in 1792 was estimated at 4,088,226, had increased in 1814 to 5,937,856, in 1821 to 6,801,827, and in 1841 to 8,196,597.  In other words, the population, like the trade, of the doomed island had more than doubled since the Union.  We doubt if any European country could say as much.

Then came the great disaster, the potato famine of 1846-47, which, undoubtedly, dealt a stunning blow to Irish agriculture.  It was not the first, nor the worst, of Irish famines—­there is evidence that the famines of 1729 and 1740 were, proportionately, more widespread and more appalling in their effects.  But, occurring as it did, in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the press of the world as witnesses, it attracted immense attention, and the nations, whom England, then high and mighty in the undisputed supremacy of the doctrines of laissez faire and free trade, were not slow in retorting on their mentor.  The State, it was laid down dogmatically by the economists, must not do anything to feed the starving people, because that would interfere with the principle of private enterprise; and as there was naturally no private enterprise in wide stretches of country where landlord and tenant, shopkeeper and labourer, were involved in common ruin, the people starved.  For the same reason, the sufferers must not be paid to do useful work, so they were set to make roads that led to nowhere—­and that have been grass-grown ever since—­and to build walls that had to be pulled down again.