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.

It was a ghastly specimen of doctrinaire dogmatism run mad, and though
it was not the fault of the Government so much as of the arid doctrines
of ill-understood economics which then prevailed in the schools, it did
more than anything to embitter the relations between the Irish people
and the Imperial Government. The death-rate from famine and famine-fever
was appalling. The poor law system--then a new experiment in
Ireland--broke down hopelessly, and agitators were not slow to improve
the occasion by denouncing the "callousness" of the Imperial Government.

Nations, as a rule, recover from such calamities as famine, war, and
pestilence with surprising quickness; but there were certain incidents
connected with the famine of 1846-47 that intensified and perpetuated
the evil in the case of Ireland. We have already referred to the
high-and-dry doctrines of _laissez faire_ then in the ascendant, and any
real or permanent recovery of Irish agriculture was rendered practically
impossible by England's adhesion to the doctrine of free imports, by the
abolition of the Corn Laws, and by the crushing increase of taxation
under Mr Gladstone's budgets of 1853 and the succeeding years.

Ireland was entitled under the Act of Union to "special exemptions and
abatements" in taxation, in consideration of her backward economic
condition. All Chancellors of the Exchequer till Mr. Gladstone's time
respected these exemptions, and although no one could suggest, in view
of Ireland's recent progress, that she could have been permanently
exempted from the burdens imposed on the British taxpayer, it will be
admitted that the time chosen by Mr. Gladstone for abruptly raising the
taxation of Ireland from 14_s._ 9_d._ per head to 26_s._ 7_d._ was
inopportune, not to say ungenerous.

Sir David Barbour, in his minority report on the Financial R