As soon as the Irish Parliament met in October a new member of the House, who was presently to become a new power in the country, Henry Grattan, rose and moved an amendment to the address, urging the necessity for a free export trade; and the amendment was, on the suggestion of Flood, extended to a general demand for free trade, including imports as well as exports, and in this form was carried without a division.  The reply to the address, however, seemed studiously ambiguous, and inflamed the prevailing discontent.  On King William’s birthday the statue of that monarch in Dublin was hung over with expressive placards, and the city volunteers turned out and paraded round it; a few days later a mob from the Liberties attacked the house of the Attorney-General, and proceeding to Parliament, swore all the members they found to vote only short money bills till free trade were conceded; and then Grattan, in his place in the House, carried by three to one a resolution to grant no new taxes and to give only six months’ bills for the appropriated duties.

The Government was now thoroughly alarmed; they must at last face the question of free trade for Ireland in dead earnest, and applied themselves without delay to learn from all who understood the subject what would be the real effect on England of removing the Irish restrictions.  They requested many of the leading public men whom they trusted in Ireland—­Lord Lifford, Hely Hutchinson, Henry Burgh, and others—­to prepare detailed statements of their views on the commercial grievances of their country and the operation of the proposed remedies.  Mr. Lecky, who has seen those statements at the Record Office, says they are conspicuous for their clear grasp of the principles of free trade, and I think that they may with great probability be considered a fruit of Smith’s then recently published work, because Hely Hutchinson’s statement, or its substance, has been published—­it was, indeed, the last book publicly burned in this country—­and it makes frequent quotations from the Wealth of Nations.  It was in these circumstances that the Board of Trade made a double application to Adam Smith for his opinion on the subject.  Lord Carlisle, the head of the Board, applied to him through Adam Ferguson, who had been Secretary of the Commission, of which Lord Carlisle had been President, sent out to America the year before to negotiate terms of peace; and Mr. William Eden, Secretary of the Board, applied to him through Henry Dundas.  With Eden (afterwards the first Lord Auckland) Smith became later on well acquainted; he was married in 1776 to a daughter of Smith’s old friend, Sir Gilbert Elliot, but at the date of this correspondence their personal acquaintance does not seem to have been intimate.

Smith’s letter to Lord Carlisle is as follows:—­