's policy for the free importation of foodstuffs. The
effect of that policy upon Ireland sinks into insignificance beside an
agrarian system which had reduced the mass of the Irish peasants to
serfs, kept them near the borders of destitution, and in a state of
sporadic crime for a century and a half before, and for forty years
after the repeal of the Corn Laws, and, at the climax of a period of
high protection for agricultural products, rendered it possible for a
mere failure of the potato-crop to cause death to three-quarters of a
million persons. These things do not happen in properly governed, in
other words in self-governed, countries, whatever their fiscal system,
and they have never happened to Irishmen in any other part of the world
but in their own fertile island. Manufacturing industries stand on a
different footing. Most of the staple industries of Ireland, notably the
woollen industry, and the aptitudes which brought them into being, were
deliberately destroyed long ago by fiscal measures imposed by England,
and their destruction aggravated the misery and exhaustion produced by a
bad land system. How far their partial revival under the fiscal Home
Rule of Grattan's Parliament was genuine, and might, with a continuance
of fiscal Home Rule, have been permanent, it is impossible to say. The
retarding effect of the Rebellion, and the long start already obtained
by Great Britain in the industrial race, are factors beyond accurate
calculation. But one thing is certain, that the revival of industries
was, at that stage, of trivial importance beside the rural regeneration
of Ireland, and that Grattan's Parliament had not the remotest influence
for good upon the land question, which it neglected as heartlessly as
its predecessors for a century before and its successors for seventy
years afterwards.[102]

Industries are valuable assets for any country; but countries almost
wholly agricultural, like Denmark, can prosper remarkably, and without
Protection, provided that they possess or evolve a sound system of
agrarian tenure, in other words, a sound relation between tenant and
landlord, or, in default of that, peasant ownership. In every country in
the world that has been a _sine qua non_ of prosperity. Suppose that
English labourers had built out of their own money and by their own
hands the factories, docks, and railways in which they worked, and that
the resulting profits, wages deducted, went solely to ground landlor