ng their gains, and they
cried loudly, therefore, for legislative protection. Their prayer was
granted. In 1699, the last year of the century, an Act was passed
forbidding the export of Irish woollen goods, not to England alone, but
to _all_ other countries.

The effect of this Act was instantaneous and startling. The
manufacturers, who had come over in large numbers, left the country for
the most part within six months, never to return again. A whole
population was suddenly thrown out of employment Emigration set in, but,
in spite of the multitude that left, famine laid hold of many of those
who remained. The resources of the poorest classes are always so low in
Ireland that a much less sweeping blow than this would at any time have
sufficed to bring them over the verge of starvation.

Another important result was that smuggling immediately began on an
enormous scale. Wool was now a drug in the legitimate market, and
woollen goods had practically no market. A vast contraband trade sprang
swiftly up upon the ruins of the legitimate one. Wool, which at home was
worth only 5d. or 6d. a lb., in France fetched half-a-crown. The whole
population, from the highest to the lowest, flung themselves
energetically on the side of the smugglers. The coast-line was long and
intricate; the excise practically powerless. Wool was packed in caves
all along the south and south-west coast, and carried off as opportunity
served by the French vessels which came to seek it. What was meant by
nature and Providence to have been the honest and open trade of the
country was thus forced to be carried on by stealth and converted into a
crime. It alleviated to some degree the distress, but it made Law seem
more than ever a mockery, more than ever the one archenemy against which
every man's hand might legitimately be raised.

Even this, if bad enough, was not the worst. The worst was that this
arbitrary Act--directed, it must be repeated, by England, not against
the Irish natives, but against her own colonists--done, too, without
there being an opportunity for the country to be heard in its own
defence--struck at the very root of all enterprise, and produced a
widespread feeling of hopelessness and despair. Since this was the
acknowledged result of too successful rivalry with England, of what use,
it was openly asked, to attempt any new enterprise, or what was to
hinder the same fate from befalling it in its turn? The whole
relationship of the two