ndlord interest was not concerned, as in industrial and commercial
matters, Parliament seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom. It
endeavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander its
newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with Great Britain,
where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still continued to be
imposed. But Ireland was no longer an industrial country. All the
encouragement in the world could not replace lost aptitudes or bring
back the exiled craftsmen who, during a century past, had left Ireland
to enrich European countries with their skill. The favoured linen
industry alone survived to reach its present flourishing condition. The
revival in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was
remarkably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and
transient. No wonder; for, while Ireland had been stagnant for a
century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily building up
that capacity for organized industry which, under the inventive genius
of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and the economic genius of Adam
Smith, made the last twenty years of the eighteenth century such a
marvellous period of industrial expansion, and eventually converted
England from an agricultural into a manufacturing nation. Ireland was
hopelessly late in the race. On the other hand, the fertile land of
Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth and the prime
means of subsistence for the great bulk of the four and a half million
souls who inhabited the country. Parliament seems to have been almost
indifferent to the miseries of the agricultural population, wholly
indifferent, certainly, to their source, the vicious agrarian system
which it was the interest of its own members to sustain. Foster's famous
Corn Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with the
inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, gave a powerful
though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the trade in corn. But it
enriched only the landlords, and left untouched the real abuses,
absenteeism, middlemanism, insecurity of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes.
The Whiteboy risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met
with Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth
century. The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into civil war in
the nineteenth century, was never touched. While tenants in North-East
Ulster were painfully and forcibly establishing their custom