n had not come about, is, however, a more doubtful matter.
The immense industrial development of England during the next
half-century would probably, in any case, have crushed out the smaller
and weaker Irish industries, while the existence of a separate tariff in
Great Britain would have been a serious obstacle to the development of
Irish agriculture. A full customs union, with internal free trade, was
undoubtedly the best solution of the difficulty. But Pitt's Commercial
Propositions of 1785 failed, partly, indeed, owing to political
intrigues, but still more owing to the fundamental impossibility of
securing an effective customs union without some form of political
union.

When finally Ireland entered the Union it was with the severe handicap
of an industrial system artificially repressed for over a century. The
removal of the last traces of internal protection in 1824 only
accelerated the process, inevitable in any case, by which Irish
industries, with the exception of linen, were submerged. But
manufacturing industry was at the best a small matter in Ireland
compared with agriculture. And to Irish agriculture the Union meant an
immense development in every direction. Unfortunately the inheritance of
the preceding century, a vicious agrarian system and a low standard of
living, was not easily to be eliminated, and little attempt was made to
eliminate it. The great increase of agricultural production was
accompanied, not by a progressive and well-diffused rise in the standard
of national well-being, but by high rents and extravagance on the one
side, and, on the other, the rapid multiplication of a population living
on the very margin of subsistence. The terrible year of famine was a
warning to British statesmanship of the need of a constructive and
Conservative policy for the reorganisation of Irish agricultural life
and for the broadening of the economic basis in Ireland by the
deliberate encouragement of new industries. Under a true conception of
Union, political and economic--and there were not wanting men like Lord
George Bentinck and Disraeli who entertained it--Ireland might within a
generation have been levelled up to the general standard of the United
Kingdom.

But the evil effects of political and economic separatism in the
eighteenth century were still unremedied when the whole economic policy
of Union was abandoned. The very principle and conception of Free Trade
is, inherently, as opposed to the mainte