Pitt, undoubtedly, looked forward to a Customs Union with internal free trade as the ultimate solution of the difficulty, but a Customs Union was impossible without the fullest kind of legislative unity.  It is true that the closing years of the eighteenth century were years of prosperity to certain classes and districts in Ireland, but Mr. Fisher has shown beyond dispute that this prosperity neither commenced with Grattan’s Parliament nor ended with its fall.  It was based upon the peculiar economic conditions which years of war and preparations for war had fostered in England; it was bound in any case to disappear with the growing concentration of industrial interests which followed the general introduction of machinery.  The immediate result of the passing of the Act of Union was to increase the Irish population and Irish trade.

But to a certain extent that prosperity was fictitious and doomed to failure so soon as peace and the introduction of scientific methods of industry had caused the concentration of the great manufactures.  Then came the great economic disaster for Ireland—­the adoption of free trade by England.  The Irish famine of 1849 was not more severe than others that had preceded it, but its evil effects were accentuated by the policy of the English Government.  The economists decided that the State ought to do nothing to interfere with private enterprise in feeding the starving people, and as there was no private enterprise in the country, where all classes were involved in the common ruin, the people were left to die of hunger by the roadside.  The lands the potato blight spared were desolated by the adoption of free trade.  The exploitation of the virgin lands of the American West gradually threw the fertile midlands of Ireland from tillage into grass.  A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil.  The landlords and the farmers of Ireland were divided into two political camps, and, instead of uniting for their common welfare, each attempted to cast upon the other the burden of the economic catastrophe.  To sum up in the words of Mr. Amery—­

“The evils of economic Separatism, aggravated by 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 those evils.”

The political demand for the repeal of the Act of Union, which had lain dormant for so many years, was revived by the energies of Isaac Butt.  He found in the Irish landlords, smarting under the disestablishment of the Irish Church, a certain amount of sympathy and assistance, but the “engine” for which Finton Lalor had asked in order to draw the “repeal train,” was not discovered until Parnell linked the growing agrarian unrest to the Home Rule Campaign.  This is not the place to tell again the weary story of the land war or to show how the Irish Nationalists exploited the grievances of the Irish tenants in order to encourage crime and foment disloyalty in the country.