rate desire to ruin Ireland, but as a natural and inevitable
consequence of exclusion from the Union under the economic policy of the
age. Whatever outlet Irish economic activity took there was always some
English trade whose interests were prejudicially affected, and which
promptly exercised a perfectly legitimate pressure upon the Government
to put a stop to the competition. The very poverty of Ireland, as
expressed in the lowness of Irish wages, was an ever convenient and
perfectly justifiable argument for exclusion. The linen industry alone
received a certain amount of toleration, and even encouragement. These
regulations were so little animated by direct religious or racial
antipathy that it was upon the Protestant Scotch and English settlers
that they fell with the greatest severity, driving them into exile by
thousands, to become, subsequently, one of the chief factors in the
American Revolution. But if the direct economic effect of political
separation weighed less heavily upon the Catholic majority, they
suffered all the more from the utter paralysis of all industry and
enterprise consequent upon the Penal Laws. These laws, monstrous as they
seemed even to Burke, were in their turn a natural outcome of a
political separation which made the security of Protestantism in Ireland
rest upon the domination of a narrow oligarchy in instant terror of
being swamped. Under Union they would never have been devised, or could
certainly never have endured.
The revolution by which the Irish Parliament, in 1782, asserted its
constitutional equality with the British Parliament, subject only to the
power of bribery, direct or indirect, retained by the Crown, brought out
in still more glaring relief the utter unsoundness of the existing
political structure under separation. After eighteen years of ferment
within Ireland and friction without, British and Irish statesmen, face
to face with civil war and French invasion, realised that the sorry
farce had to come to an end. Meanwhile the immediate economic effect of
liberation from the direct restrictions on Irish foreign trade, already
conceded in 1779, and helped in various directions by judicious
bounties, was undoubtedly to give a new impetus to production in
Ireland. The first ten years of Grattan's Parliament were, on the whole,
years of growing prosperity. Whether, even apart from civil war and
increasing taxation, that prosperity would have continued to increase,
if the Unio
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