The Open Secret of Ireland Part 3

This is all very well in its way, and a climate of incomprehension may suit orators and metaphysicians admirably; but it will not do for politics. The party or people that fails to make its programme understood is politically incompetent, and Ireland is a.s.suredly safe from any such imputation. She has her spiritual secrets, buried deep in what we may call the subliminal consciousness of the race, and to the disclosure of these secrets we may look with confidence for the inspiration of a new literature. But in politics Ireland has no secrets.

All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. Her political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic rect.i.tude of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about what she wants, and none about why she ought to have it. In that sense the case for Home Rule is made, and this book, having justified its t.i.tle, ought to come to an end. But convention prescribes that about the nude contour of principles there should be cast a certain drapery of details, and such conventions are better obeyed.

Where we are to begin is another matter. We are, as has been so often suggested, in presence of a situation in which one cannot see the trees for the forest. The principle of the government of Ireland is so integrally wrong that it is difficult to signalise any one point in which it is more wrong than it is in any other. A timber-chaser, that is to say a pioneer for a lumber firm, in the Western States of America once found himself out of spirits. He decided to go out of life, and being thorough in his ways he left nothing to chance. He set fire to his cabin, and, mounting the table, noosed his neck to a beam, drank a large quant.i.ty of poison, and, as he kicked over the table, simultaneously shot himself through the head and drew a razor across his throat. Later on the doctor had to fill in the usual certificate. At "Cause of Death"

he paused, pondered, and at last wrote, "Causes too numerous to specify." The fable possesses a certain suggestive value upon which we need not enlarge. How, one may well ask, are we to itemise the retail iniquities of a system of government which is itself a wholesale iniquity? But since we must begin somewhere let us begin with the Economics of Unionism.

In this often-written, and perhaps over-written story there is one feature of some little comfort. Whatever quarrel there may be as to causes, the facts are not disputed. Pitt and his friends promised that the Union would be followed by general prosperity, development of manufacturers, and expansion of commerce.

"Among the great and known defects of Ireland," he declared in a typical statement, "one of the most prominent features is its want of industry and of capital. How are these wants to be supplied but by blending more closely with Ireland the industry and capital of Great Britain?"

It was a Witches' Promise making smooth the path to d.a.m.nation. In every point in which Pitt had prophesied white the moving finger of history began, from the very day of the Union, to write black. The injury to the whole economic tissue of Ireland was immediate, c.u.mulative, in the end crushing.

We have at hand authoritative figures of the decline collected by various Commissions and private inquirers. Let us note some of these as summarised by Monsignor O'Riordan in his remarkable book, "Catholicism and Progress":

"Again, in 1800 there were 91 woollen manufacturers in Dublin and 4938 hands employed; in 1840 there were only 12 manufacturers, and 682 hands employed; in 1880, only 3 manufacturers in Dublin and around it. In 1800 there were 56 blanket manufacturers in Kilkenny, and 3000 hands employed; in 1840 there were 12 manufacturers and 925 hands employed. In 1800 there were 900 hands employed on ratteens and friezes in Roscrea; in 1840 the industry had completely disappeared. In 1800 there were 1000 flannel looms in County Wicklow; in 1840 there was not one. In 1800 there were 2500 looms at work in Dublin for the manufacture of silk and poplin; in 1840 there were only 250. In 1800 there were 27,000 cotton workers in Belfast and around it; in 1840 there were only 12,000. In 1800 there were 61,075 tradesmen in Dublin for the woollen, silk, and cotton industries; in 1834 there were only 14,446, and of these 4412 were idle, showing a decrease of 51,041 in the employed."

There was, we must add, an increase in other directions. For instance, whereas there had been only seven bankruptcies decreed in Dublin in 1799 there were 125 in 1810. The number of insolvent houses grew in seven years from 880 to 4719. These figures are not random but symptomatic. Mr Pitt had promised to blend Ireland with the capital and industry of Great Britain; he blended them as the edge of a tomahawk is blended with the spattered brains of its victim. We have glanced at the condition of manufacture. Lest it should be a.s.sumed that the tiller of land at least had profited by the Napoleonic Wars, with their consequent high prices, let me hasten to add that the Grey Commission, reporting in 1836, had to inform the Government that 2,385,000 persons, nearly one-third of the population, were "in great need of food."

"Their habitations," the Report proceeds, "are wretched hovels; several of the family sleep together on straw, or on the bare ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes not even so much to cover them. Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes; and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day.... They sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide."

But a truce to these dismal chronicles. The _post hoc_ may be taken as established; was it a _propter hoc_? Was the Union the cause as well as the antecedent of this decay? No economist, acquainted with the facts, can fail to answer in the affirmative. The causal connection between two realities could not be more manifest. Let us examine it very briefly.

I begin of necessity with the principle of freedom, for freedom is the dominating force in economic life. No instance can be cited of a modern people of European civilisation that ever prospered while held politically in subjection.

"All history," writes Professor Marshall of Cambridge, the doyen of Political Economy in England, "is full of the record of inefficiency caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, and other forms of civil and political oppression and repression."

The Act of Union was, as has been said, one of those spiritual outrages which, in their reactions, are like lead poured into the veins. It lowered the vital resources of Ireland. It made hope an absentee, and enterprise an exile. That was its first-fruits of disaster.

These commonplaces of the gospel of freedom "for which Hampden died in the field and Sidney on the scaffold" will possibly appear to their modern descendants mystical, sentimental, and remote from real life. For there is no one in the world so ready as your modern Englishman to deny that he is a man in order to prove that he is a business-man.

Fortunately we can establish for this strange being, who has thus indecently stripped himself of humanity, and establish in very clear and indisputable fashion the cash nexus between Unionism and decay. The argument is simple.

The Union came precisely in the period in which capital was beginning to dominate the organisation of industry. The Union denuded Ireland of the capital which would have enabled her to transform the technique of her manufactures, and so maintain the ground won under Grattan's Parliament.

The channels through which this export of capital proceeded were absenteeism and over-taxation.

The first statement in this paragraph of plaint calls for no elaboration. Arnold Toynbee took as the terminal dates of the Industrial Revolution the years 1760 and 1830. The last generation of the eighteenth century brought to birth the great inventions, but it was the first generation of the nineteenth that founded on them large scale production, and settled the structure of modern industry. Not without profound disturbance and incalculable suffering was the new system established in England; the story may be read in the pages of Marx, Cunningham, Cooke Taylor, or any of the economic historians. But, for all the blood and tears, it was established. Insulated from the continental turmoil, served by her t.i.tanic bondsmen coal and iron, England was able to defeat the t.i.tan, Napoleon. Now it is idle to deny that this period would under any government have strained Ireland, as the phrase goes, to the pin of her collar. But the Union made her task impossible. Lord Castlereagh was quite right in pointing to the acc.u.mulation of capital as the characteristic advantage of England.

Through centuries of political freedom that process had gone on without interruption. Ireland, on the contrary, had been scientifically pillaged by the application to her of the "colonial system" from 1663 to 1779; I deliberately exclude the previous waste of war and confiscation. She had but twenty years of commercial freedom, and, despite her brilliant success in that period, she had not time to acc.u.mulate capital to any great extent. But Grattan's Parliament had shown itself extraordinarily astute and steady of purpose in its economic policy. Had its guidance continued--conservative taxation, adroit bounties, and that close scrutiny and eager discussion of the movements of industry which stands recorded in its Journal--the manufactures of Ireland would have weathered the storm. But the luck was as usual against her. Instead of wise leadership from Dublin the G.o.ds decreed that she should have for portion the hard indifference and savage taxation of Westminster.

Reduced to the position of a tributary nation, stripped of the capital that would have served as a commissariat of advance in that crucial struggle, she went down.

I am not to make here the case for Ireland in respect of over-taxation.

It was made definitely in the Report of the Childers Commission, a doc.u.ment which no Englishman reads, lest in coming to the light he should have his sins too sharply rebuked. It has been developed and clarified in many speeches and essays and in some books. To grasp it is to find your road to Damascus on the Irish Question. But for the moment we are concerned with but one aspect, namely, the export of capital from Ireland as a result of the Union, and the economic reactions of that process. Since we are to use moderation of speech and banish all rhetoric from these pages, one is at a loss to characterise Union arrangements and post-Union finance. Let it suffice to say that they combined the moral outlook of Captain Kidd with the mathematical technique of a super-bucket-shop. From the first Great Britain robbed the Irish till; from the first she skimmed the cream off the Irish milk, and appropriated it for her own nourishment. One has a sort of gloomy pride in remembering that although cheated in all these transactions we were not duped. Mr Foster, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons--in those days the Speaker actually spoke, a whimsical Irish custom--tore the cloak off Lord Castlereagh's strutting statesmanship, and laid bare his real motives. Speaking on the first Union proposal in 1799 he said:

"But the n.o.ble Lord has told us the real motives of this scheme of Union, and I thank him for stating them so fairly. Ireland, he says, must contribute to every war, and the Minister won't trust to interest, affection, or connection for guiding her conduct. _He must have her purse within his own grasp_. While three hundred men hold it in Ireland he cannot put his hand into it, they are out of his reach, but let a hundred of you carry it over and lay it at his feet, and then he will have full and uncontrolled power."

So it came about. Even before the Union Grattan's Parliament had, of its own free will and out of an extravagant loyalty, run itself into debt for the first time to help England against France. But, as Foster indicated, the Irish members felt that they were coming to the end of their resources. They were about to call a halt, and so the Union became a necessary ingredient of Pitt's foreign policy. By it Ireland was swept into the vortex of his anti-French hysteria, and of what Mr Hartley Withers so properly styles his "reckless finance." In sixteen years she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1801 and 1817 her funded debt was increased from 28,541,157 to 112,684,773, an augmentation of nearly 300 per cent. In the first fifteen years following the Union she paid in taxes 78,000,000 as against 31,000,000 in the last fifteen years preceding the Union. After the amalgamation of the Exchequers in 1817 the case becomes clearer. In 1819-20, for instance, the revenue contributed by Ireland was 5,256,564, of which only 1,564,880 was spent in Ireland, leaving a tribute for Great Britain of 3,691,684. For 1829-30 the tribute was 4,156,576.

Let us now inquire how things stood with regard to absenteeism. This had existed before the Union'; indeed, if the curious reader will turn to Johnson's "Dictionary" he will find it d.a.m.ned in a definition. But it was enormously intensified by the shifting of the centre of gravity of Irish politics, industry, and fashion from Dublin to London. The memoirs of that day abound in references to an exodus which has left other and more material evidence in those fallen and ravaged mansions which now const.i.tute the worst slums of our capital city.

One figure may be cited by way of ill.u.s.tration. Before the Union "98 Peers, and a proportionate number of wealthy Commoners" lived in Dublin.

The number of resident Peers in 1825 was twelve. At present, as I learn from those who read the sixpenny ill.u.s.trateds, there is one. But when they abandoned Ireland they did not leave their rents behind. And it was a time of rising rents; according to Toynbee they at least doubled between 1790 and 1833. Precise figures are not easily arrived at, but Mr D'Alton in his "History of the County Dublin," a book quite innocent of politics, calculates that the absentee rental of Ireland was in 1804 not less than 3,000,000, and in 1830 not less than 4,000,000, an under-estimate. If we average these figures over the period we find that during the first thirty years of Union, that is to say during the most critical phase of the Industrial Revolution, not less than 105,000,000 of Irish capital was "exported" from Ireland to Great Britain through the channel of absenteeism.

Averaging the figures of the taxation-tribute in similar fashion, and taking the lowest estimates, I am unable to reach a less total than 120,000,000 for the same period. In other words, the effect of the Union was to withdraw from Ireland during the thirty years that settled the economic structure of modern industry not less than __225,000,000.

Let me draw the argument together in words which I have used elsewhere, and which others can no doubt easily better:

"We have heard, in our day, a long-drawn denunciation of a Liberal government on the score that it had, by predatory taxation, driven English capital out of the country, and compromised the industrial future of England. We have seen in our own day gilt-edged securities, bank, insurance, railway, and brewery shares in Great Britain, brought toppling down by a Tory waste of __250,000,000 on the Boer War. We know that in economic history effects are, in a notable way, c.u.mulative; so clearly marked is the line of continuity as to lead a great writer to declare that there is not a nail in all England that could not be traced back to savings made before the Norman Conquest. A hundred instances admonish us that, in industrial life, nothing fails like failure. When we put all these considerations together, and give them a concrete application, can we doubt that in over-taxation and the withdrawal of capital we have the prime _causa causans_ of the decay of Ireland under the Union?"

In this wise did Pitt "blend Ireland with the industry and capital of Great Britain." Cupped by his finance she gave the venal blood of her industry to strengthen the predominant partner, and to help him to exclude for a time from these islands that pernicious French Democracy in which all states and peoples have since found redemption. Such was the first chapter in the Economics of Unionism.

CHAPTER VI

THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2)

If the reader cares to push forward the line of thought suggested in the preceding pages and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so without difficulty. He has but to compare the post-Union history of linen with that of cotton. Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of mercantilism. Within certain limits--such as the steady resolve to confine it, in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point of geography, to Ulster--it had behind it at the Union a century of encouragement. It is calculated that between 1700 and 1800 it had received bounties, English and Irish, totalling more than,2,500,000. In other words it had a chance to acc.u.mulate capital. Even linen declined after the Union partly from the direct effects of that measure, partly from the growing intensity of the Industrial Revolution. But the capital acc.u.mulated, the commercial good name established under native government carried the manufacturers through. These were able towards 1830 to introduce the new machinery and the new processes, and to weather the tempest of compet.i.tion. Cotton, on the other hand, was a very recent arrival. It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave promise of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital told more and more as changes in the technique of transportation and production ushered in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival, involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the cotton manufacture of Ireland lost ground, lost heart, and disappeared.

But let us resume the parable. If the "business man" responds to capital, he will certainly not be obtuse to the appeal of coal. In this feeder of industry Ireland was geologically at a disadvantage, and it was promised that the free trade with Great Britain inaugurated by the Union would "blend" with her the resources of the latter country. Did she obtain free trade in coal? Miss Murray, a Unionist, in her "Commercial Relations between England and Ireland" tells the story in part:

"Coals again had hitherto been exported from Great Britain at a duty of gd. per ton; this duty was to cease but the Irish import duty on coal was to be made perpetual, and that at a time when all coasting duties in England and Scotland had been abolished. Dublin especially would suffer from this arrangement, for the duty there on coals imported was is. 8-4/5d. per ton, while that in the rest of Ireland was only 9-1/2d. This was because a local duty of 1s.

per ton existed in Dublin for the internal improvement of the city; this local duty was blended by the Union arrangements with the general duty on the article, and its perpetual continuance was thus enforced. All this shows how little Irish affairs were understood in England."

But was it a failure of the English intellect or a lapse of the English will? Except through the Platonic intuition which reduces all sin to terms of ignorance I cannot accept the former explanation. What is certain is that there was no lack of contemporary protest. There existed in Dublin in 1828 a Society for the Improvement of Ireland, an active body which included in its membership the Lord Mayor (a high Tory, of course), Lord Cloncurry, and a long list of notable names such as Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O'Brien, George Moore, and Daniel O'Connell. In the year mentioned the Society appointed a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture, commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal imported from Great Britain. The effect of the Union was to abolish the bounty and double the levy on imports. Writing twenty-eight years later the Committee summarise in a brief pa.s.sage the disastrous effects of a policy, so foolish and so unjust. The last sentence opens up sombre vistas to any student of economic history:

"Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of Ireland, in Dublin, under the circ.u.mstances to which your Committee are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion. It is a singular circ.u.mstance that, in the metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior, superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in Europe, _there is not a factory for the production of either silk, linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled by a steam engine_."

The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a duty on spirits. This course Belfast had been permitted to follow--one of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the side of the Protestant North. In my part of the country the people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation.

The Drummond Commission, appointed in 1836 to consider the question of railway construction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 which practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate "to accomplish so important a national object." What came after is best related in the official terminology of the Scotter Commission of 1906-10:

"This report was presented in July 1838, and early in the following year a great public meeting, held in Dublin, pa.s.sed a resolution that inasmuch as an adequate system of railways could not be constructed by private capital, the Government should be urged to take the work into its own hands, thereby saving the cost of Private Bill legislation. Promises were also made that the lands necessary for railway construction would be given free of cost.

Similar resolutions were adopted at another meeting held about the same time in the north of Ireland. In addition, an address to the Queen was presented by a number of Irish Peers, headed by the Duke of Leinster, praying that action might be taken on the Drummond Commission Report."

The government saw the light, and proceeded to sin against it. They embodied the Dublin programme in resolutions which were adopted by the House of Commons in March 1839, and they then abruptly abandoned the whole business. The last chance was not yet lost. During the Great Famine of 1847 the Opposition proposed to raise, 16,000,000 by State loans for the construction of railways as relief works. A suggestion so sane could not hope to pa.s.s. It was in fact rejected; the starving peasants were set to dig large holes and fill them up again, and to build bad roads leading nowhere. And instead of a national railway system Ireland was given private enterprise with all its waste and all its clash of interests.

The two most conspicuous gifts of Unionism to Ireland have been, as all the world knows, poverty and police. Soon after 1830, that is to say when the first harvest of government from Westminster was ripe to the sickle, Irish dest.i.tution had a.s.sumed what politicians call men-acing proportions. One person in every three of the population never had any other alimentary experience than the difference between hunger and starvation. In these circ.u.mstances a Royal Commission was appointed to consider the advisability of extending the English Poor Law to Ireland.

Their report is a pioneer doc.u.ment in the development of economic thought. Just as the Railway Commission a few years later was to give the watchword of the future, nationalisation, so the Poor Law Commission gave within its province the watchword of the future, prevention before relief. They pointed the contrast between the two countries. I quote the words of the later Irish Poor Law Commission of 1903-6:

"Having regard to the dest.i.tution and poverty that were prevalent in Ireland owing to want of employment, the Royal Commissioners in their Report of 1836 came to the conclusion that the English workhouse system would be unsuitable for Ireland, because after unchecked demoralisation by profuse out-door relief _in England, the Work-house system was devised in order to make the lazy and idle seek ordinary employment which could be got. The situation in Ireland was, on the contrary, one in which the able-bodied and healthy were willing and anxious to work for any wages, even for twopence a day, but were unable to obtain such or any employment_."

Ireland at the end of a generation of Unionism was suffering, as the commissioners proceed to point out, not from over-population, but from under-development. They tabled two sets of recommendations. The relief programme advised compulsory provision for the sick, aged, infirm, lunatics, and others incapable of work; in all essential matters it antic.i.p.ated in 1836 that Minority Report which to the England of 1912 still seems extravagantly humane. The prevention programme outlined a scheme for the development of Irish resources. Including, as it did, demands for County Fiscal Boards, agricultural education, better cottages for the labourers, drainage, reclamation, and changes in the land system, it has been a sort of lucky bag into which British ministers have been dipping without acknowledgment ever since. But the report itself was, like the Railway Report, too sane and too Irish to stand a chance. There was sent over from England a Mr Nicholls, who, after a six weeks flutter through the country, devised the Poor Law System under which we still labour. Mr Nicholls afterwards became Sir George, and when he died it is probable that a statue was erected to him. If that is so the inscription must always remain inadequate until this is added: "Having understood all about Ireland in six weeks he gave her, as the one thing needful to redeem her, the workhouse."

But, of course, the capital exploit of the Economics of Unionism was its dealing with the problem of land tenure. I shrink from inviting the reader into the desert of selfishness and stupidity which const.i.tutes English policy, in this regard, from the Union to the triumph of the Land League. Let him study it at large in Davitt's "Fall of Feudalism."

We are not concerned here to revive that calamitous pageant. Our interest is of another kind, namely to signalise the malign influence introduced into the agrarian struggle by government from Westminster as against government from Dublin. Even had Grattan's Parliament remained, the battle for the land would have had to go forward; for that Parliament was an a.s.sembly controlled by landlords who, for the most part, believed as strongly in the sacredness of rent as they did in the sacredness of nationality. But by the Union the conflict was embittered and befouled. The landlords invented their famous doctrine of conditional loyalty. They bargained with Great Britain to the effect that, if they were permitted to pillage their tenantry, they would in return uphold and maintain British rule in Ireland.

It was the old picture with which M. Paul-Dubois has acquainted us, that of the "Garrison" kneeling to England on the necks of the Irish poor. In this perversion, which under autonomy would have been impossible, we find the explanation of the extreme savagery of Union land policy in Ireland. Its extreme, its bat-eyed obtuseness is to be explained in another way. Souchon in his introduction to the French edition of Philippovich, the great Austrian economist, observes with great truth that England has not even yet developed any sort of _Agrarpolitik_, that is to say any systematic Economics of Agriculture. In the early nineteenth century her own land problems were neglected, and her political leaders were increasingly dominated by an economic gospel of shopkeepers and urban manufacturers. Forced into the context of agrarian life such a gospel was bound to manifest itself as one of folly and disaster.

If we put these two elements together we are enabled to understand why the Union land policy in Ireland was such a portentous muddle and scandal. In 1829 the question a.s.sumed a fresh urgency, in consequence of the eviction campaign which followed the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the small holders under Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation. That Irish opinion, which in an Irish Parliament would have had its way, began to grapple with the situation.

Between 1829 and 1858 twenty-three Irish Land Reform Bills were introduced in the House of Commons; every one was rejected. In the same period thirty-five Coercion Bills were introduced; every one was pa.s.sed.

So it began, so it continued, until at last Irish opinion did in some measure prevail. The Westminster Parliament clapped the "agitators" into prison, and while they were at work breaking stones stole their programme.... But I have promised to spare the reader the detailed hideousness of this Inferno, and this section must close without a word said about that miserable triad, famine, eviction, and emigration. What may be called the centre of relevancy lies elsewhere. We have been concerned to show how Unionism, having wrecked the whole manufacturing economy of Ireland, went on, at its worst, to wreck, at its best, to refuse to save, its whole agricultural economy.