to acquire that nest-egg of industrial capital and training which
England won in the eighteenth century.

All this systematic oppression of national industry had produced its
natural fruit in a distressing scarcity of employment, and in 1778,
though it was a year of plenty, and meal was at its cheapest, many
thousands of the population were starving because they had not the
means to buy it; the farmers were unable to pay their rents because
they got such poor prices; processions of unemployed paraded the
streets of Dublin carrying a black fleece in token of their want; and
the Viceroy from the Castle warned the English ministry that an
enlargement of the trade of Ireland had become a matter of the merest
necessity, without which she could never pay her national obligations
to the English Exchequer.

But it was neither the voice of justice nor the cry of distress that
moved the Government; it was the alarm of external danger. The
strength of England was then strained as it has never been before or
since in an unequal war with the combined forces of France, Spain, and
America, and it was no time either to feed or to neglect discontent at
home. Ireland had already sent many recruits to the revolutionary army
in America, and at this very moment the Irish Protestants, incensed at
the indifference of Government to the protection of their ports, had,
under the lead of Lord Charlemont, raised an illegal army of 42,000
volunteers, and placed them under arms without the consent of the
Crown.

The demand of free trade for Ireland came therefore with sanctions
that could not be ignored, and Lord North's first idea was to give
Ireland the same rights of trading with the colonies and foreign
countries as England enjoyed, except in the two particulars of the
export of wool and glass and the import of tobacco. This proposal was
not satisfactory to the Irish, because it failed to remove their chief
grievance, the restriction on their trade in woollen goods, but it
provoked a storm of indignation in Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and
all the great manufacturing and trading centres of Great Britain. They
petitioned the Government declaring that the proposed measure would
ruin them, for a reason with which we are still very familiar, because
it would be impossible for any English or Scotch manufacturer to
compete against the pauper labour of Ireland. Lord North, frightened,
as Burke said, into some concessions by the menaces of Ireland