facturers and British farmers alike might protest against being
taxed to facilitate the competition of rivals in their own markets. An
Irish Government would have neither sufficient money nor sufficient
interest to give the subsidies necessary to secure a three days' service
across the Atlantic. A British Government would naturally develop one of
its existing ports, or some new port on the west coast of Scotland,
rather than build up a new source of revenue and national strength in a
separate State. No one could blame it, any more than we could blame the
Canadian Government for wishing to subsidise a fast service from Halifax
or some other port in the Dominion rather than one from St. John's,
Newfoundland. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Navigation
Acts deliberately destroyed Irish shipping. A policy of _laisser faire_
in matters of national communication has hitherto prevented its revival.
To-day new ideas are in the air. Those ideas can be applied, either
from the standpoint of the Union or from that of separatism. In the one
case Ireland has the prospect of becoming, what her geographical
position entitles her to be, the eastern bridge-head of the North
Atlantic. In the other the immense power of the larger capital and
larger subsidies of Great Britain will be as effective as any navigation
laws of the past in leaving her a derelict by the wayside, continuing to
wait idle and hungry, with empty harbours, while the great streams of
commerce flow past her to north and south.

And if the theory of _laisser faire_ is rapidly dying out in matters of
trade and communications, it has already been largely superseded in
regard to social questions. The duty of the State to expend money in
order to level up the standard of life of its citizens, or to prevent
their sinking below that standard, is to-day universally recognised. The
methods by which that object is aimed at are various. There is the
crudest form, that of direct money relief, such as is involved in Old
Age Pensions. There is the subsidising of socially desirable economic
operations, such as insurance against sickness or the acquisition of
freehold by tenants. There is the expenditure of money on various forms
of education, in the scientific assistance of industry and agriculture,
in promotion of forestry, drainage, or the improvement of local
communication. There is the enforcement of innumerable regulations to
safeguard the health and safety of the w