nance of national as of Imperial
Union. Ireland was deprived of that position of advantage in the British
market which was one of the implied terms of the Union, and was not
allowed to protect her own market. Incidentally, and as a consequence of
the new fiscal policy, Ireland was saddled with a heavy additional
burden of taxation which only handicapped her yet further in the
struggle to recover from the famine and to meet foreign competition. The
full severity of that competition was, however, not experienced till
towards the end of the seventies, when the opening up of the American
West, coupled with the demonetisation of silver, brought down prices
with a run. A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil. The same
conditions were experienced all over Europe, and were everywhere met by
raising tariffs to the level required to enable agriculture to maintain
itself. Even in England "Fair Trade" became a burning issue. Given
normal agrarian conditions in Ireland the Irish vote would have gone
solid with the Fair Traders, and the United Kingdom would in all
probability have reverted to a national system of economics a generation
ago. As things were, landlords and farmers in Ireland, instead of
uniting to defend their common interest, each endeavoured to thrust the
burden of the economic _debacle_ on the other. The bitterness of the
agrarian struggle which ensued was skilfully engineered into the channel
of the Home Rule agitation. In other words, the evils of economic
separatism, aggravated by the social evils surviving from the separatism
of an earlier age, united to revive a demand for the extension and
renewal of the very cause of these evils.
Since then the underlying conditions of Irish economic life have
undergone a complete transformation. The wealth and credit of the United
Kingdom have been used to inaugurate a settlement of the agrarian
question. The productive and competitive efficiency of Irish agriculture
has been enormously increased both by Government advice and assistance
and by patriotic private effort. Old Age Pensions have alleviated the
burden of an excessive residue of older persons, and irrigated the
poorer districts with a stream of ready money. In every direction there
is a deliberate effort to raise the economic standard of Ireland to the
British level. Last, but by no means least, the exclusion of all foreign
live stock from the United Kingdom, though originally designed only as a
precautionary
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