rs no longer ago than in 1785 testified before a
Parliamentary Committee that unless a duty was clapped on Irish
manufactures of iron, the Irish ironmasters had such advantages through
cheaper labour and through the discrimination in their favour under the
then existing relations with the new Republic of the United States that
they would "ruin the ironmasters of England."

In Ireland, as in America, the benign spirit of Free Trade is thwarted
and intercepted at every turn by the abominable ghost of British
Protection. What a blessing it would have been if the meddlesome
palaverers of the Cobden Club, American as well as English, could ever
have been made to understand the essentially insular character of
Protection and the essentially continental character of Free Trade!

It should never be forgotten, and it is almost never remembered, that
when the Treaty of Versailles was making in 1783 the American
Commissioners offered complete free trade between the United States and
all parts of the British Dominions save the territories of the East
India Company. The British Commissioner, David Hartley, saw the value of
this proposition, and submitted it at London. But King George III. would
not entertain it.

When I rose to leave him Father Keller courteously insisted on showing
me the "lions" of Youghal. A most accomplished cicerone he proved to be.
As we left his house we met in the street two or three of the "evicted"
tenants, whom he introduced to me. One of these, Mr. Loughlin, was the
holder of farms representing a rental of L94. A stalwart, hearty,
rotund, and rubicund farmer he was, and in reply to my query how long
the holdings he had lost had been in his family, he answered, "not far
from two hundred years." Certainly some one must have blundered as badly
as at Balaklava to make it necessary for a tenant with such a past
behind him to go out of his holdings on arrears of a twelvemonth. Father
Keller gave me, as we left Mr. Loughlin and his friend, a leaflet in
which he has printed the story of "the struggle for life on the Ponsonby
estate," as he understands it.

A minute's walk brought us to Sir Walter Raleigh's house, now the
property of Sir John Pope Hennessey. It was probably built by Sir Walter
while he lived here in 1588-89, during the time of the great Armada; for
it is a typical Elizabethan house, quaintly gabled, with charming Tudor
windows, and delightfully wainscoted with richly carved black oak. A
chimn