diminishing with the development of the work, owing to the success of its operations.

The success is indeed remarkable. Financiallyexcluding cases of migration-the work shows only a very small deficit.12 As for the peasants, they are in a condition of rejoicing. No more rent to pay, no more landlords, no more business with the local tyrants called agents, middlemen, or bailiffs who used to humiliate and terrorise these unfortunates. Instead of them they are now dealing with men who, like Mr. Doran, the Board's Inspector, wish them well, meet them sympathetically, and try to help them to a living. "One can hardly understand it ! " they say. We may indeed be tempted to ask why the Board progresses so slowly. In fifteen years (up to March 31st, 1905) it has bought 397,765 acres, upon which room will be found for 16,000 to 17,000 tenants. But what does this achievement amount to, when one considers that Connaught alone contains over 2,750,000 acres of cultivable land and over 110,000 families of peasants; and when one remembers that, during those fifteen years, emigration has swept away nearly 100,000 inhabitants from that province of Connaught alone. Does not the disproportion only seem all the more flagrant between what there was to do and what has been done? reply made is that the experimental phase was necessarily a long one, because the problem was entirely new. was necessary to advance prudently, by gradual steps, in order to avoid making mistakes that would have endangered the future of the work.. But the truth is that, although the Board can claim the credit of having recognised the true solution of agrarian congestion in the West of Ireland, and of having tested that solution by practical experiments, nevertheless it has not had the energy-or the freedom of action-to apply it on a large scale. It has allowed secondary considerations to usurp the

The

It

2 Average deficit: 5.5 per cent. of the purchase price of the land (14th Report, p. 14). In several cases the resettling of estates carried out by the Board has resulted in a profit.

principal place. It has worked after the manner of an amateur or a dilettante. It has marked down and pegged out the right way, but it has not followed it with determination.

In the first place, to carry out its programme, more money would be necessary. It is a fact to be remembered that from Imperial sources it only receives £45,000, despite the huge tribute of taxation which Connaught pays to the Imperial Exchequer. But, more especially, it ought to have wider powers. It ought to have the power of expropriation in the interests of the public, for which it applied officially in 1894,13 but to which the Government has always refused to agree. Without this power it can do nothing. It may require certain untenanted lands in a district, in order to enlarge the holdings on a neighbouring property. The owner refuses to sell them; consequently the whole operation is blocked; at every turn its progress is checked; and we need hardly observe that speculation is duly carried on at its expense. Nevertheless, is the work to be given up? The required remedy is to hand. Ought it not to be applied once and for all? Surely it is evident that here we have a question which concerns not merely the welfare, more or less, of 500,000 to 600,000 peasants in the West, but which is for them, in the words of Dr. Healy, Archbishop of Tuam, “a question of life or death." The Board must make haste unless it wishes to see the solution of the problem postponed to that day, when, in the words of Canon Sheehan in My New Curate, the English will really begin to understand Irish affairs; namely, the day of judgment.14

13 V. 4th Report, p. 10.

14 An official Commission of Enquiry was appointed by the Liberal Government in July, 1906, under the Chairmanship of Lord Dudley, former Viceroy of Ireland, to study the whole problem of the West and the work done by the Congested Districts Board.

In an administrative sense the powers of the Congested Districts Board in the Congested Districts find a competitor within those very same districts in the Estate Commissioners, and also the Department of Agriculture (V. below p. 437). Reorganisation is evidently necessary in order to unify these various powers and thus simplify procedure. The Nationalists demand the introduction of an elective and representative element into the C. D. B., or any other authority that may replace it.

CHAPTER IV.-THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL

SITUATION

IRELAND, according to her English rulers, is not so poor as is generally believed. In any case, they say, during the last half century she has made material advances on the road to prosperity. They will tell you to consult statistics. The deposits and money balances in the great banks, which in 1849 only amounted to £7,469,675, on December 31st, 1884, reached a total of £30,627,000, and on December 31st, 1904, a total of £46,115,000. The savings-bank deposits, which amounted in 1866 to only £1,761,215, had risen by December 31st, 1884 to £4,321,000, and by December 31st, 1904, reached the total of £12,302,000. The gross receipts of the railways amounted to £2,566,799 in 1874, but in 1904 to £4,139,948. Surely, they conclude, these figures are convincing! Unfortunately such figures, in any case, are merely relative, and can only supply vague indications as to the economic situation of the country. We must, therefore, make a closer examination of the question.I

I. NATURE AND HISTORY.

In the first place, it must not be thought that the land of Ireland is by nature unendowed with the goods

I V. on the economic question in general, E. Wakefield, An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political, London, 1812. Sir R. Kane, Industrial Resources of Ireland, 1844. T. W. Grimshaw, Facts and Figures about Ireland, London and Dublin, 1893. Report of the Recess Committee, 1896 (new edition, 1907). Ireland, Industrial and Agricultural, Dublin, 1902. Th. Lough, England's Wealth Ireland's Poverty, London, 1896. Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, Dublin (Ponsonby). Cf. Cardinal Perraud op. cit. I., 451, etc.; II., passim.

of this world, and predestined to misery for reasons either geological or climatic. Nature did not intend the island to be exceptionally poor any more than she intended her to be exceptionally rich. Situated at the extreme West of Europe and endowed with splendid natural harbours, she seems marked out as the port of call between the old world and the new. Her soil is celebrated for its pasture land. If well cultivated, it is fertile, and produces crops of various kinds, from flax to tobacco. Ireland has no mineral wealth, it is said, no coal, and therefore no possibilities for industrial development. This is a mistake. She contains 209 million tons of coal, which might easily be worked. In County Antrim there are estimated to be 30 million tons of iron ore.2 In Ireland we find also copper ore, lead, zinc, excellent clays for bricks and pottery, admirable marble,3 granite, and slate quarries. And finally she possesses immense reserves of power stored up in her turf bogs, or lying unused in her rivers and waterfalls. But all this, unfortunately, is as though it did not exist. Ireland is not a country without value. It is a country in which there are genuine possibilities and resources, but they are possibilities that have been undeveloped, and, in some cases, unexplored, down to our own days. We must begin by tracing the historical fatality to which this result is due.

It is true that at certain periods of her history Ireland has been fairly prosperous. She prospered, for instance, under James I. and Charles I. Her agriculture and commerce were then in a flourishing condition, as were also her woollen and linen manufactures. After the appalling cataclysm of the Revolution had passed away, she gradually began to recover. So well, indeed, did she progress that England, who was then laying the

2 Figures given by Professor Hull in 1886 (Eardley-Wilmot Committee), and also by Sir R. Kane in his work, Industrial Resources of Ireland, 1844.

3 Donegal marbles, black Galway marble, and green Connemara marble, the latter being exceptionally beautiful.

foundation of her economic supremacy, became uneasy, and very soon denounced Irish competition as dangerous. At the end of the seventeenth century, as Froude said, "the mere rumour of a rise of industry in Ireland created a panic in the commercial circles in England. The commercial leaders were possessed of a terror of Irish rivalry which could not be exorcised."4

commerce.

England then undertook, with a selfishness for which the dominant mercantile theories of that day form but a poor excuse, to paralyse, and finally to destroy the industry and the commerce of Ireland by means of prohibitory measures. Soon after his coronation William III., in reply to a petition received from some English weavers and supported by a resolution of the House of Commons, said that for his part he would do all that he could to discourage the woollen manufacture in Ireland.5 As early as 1663 a Navigation Act, confirmed in 1670, and completed in 1696, excluded Ireland from colonial In 1663 and 1669 the English market was closed to Irish cattle, which were declared "a public and common nuisance," as also to Irish meat, butter, and like products. In 1699 the Irish were forbidden to export woollen goods, the importation of which into England had been restricted from 1660 by means of prohibitive duties. The exportation of raw wool being already forbidden (from the same date) there remained only the resource of smuggling. This was soon organised on a large scale, and, as was said at the time, turned Munster and Connaught into a French province. But even this was not the culminating point. Under William III. and Anne, the cotton industry was paralysed by an English

4 The English in Ireland, I., 443, 446.

5" The English," says Froude, I deliberately determined to keep Ireland poor and miserable, as the readiest means to prevent it being troublesome." Concerning the history of the economic restrictions imposed by England on Ireland, V. the classic work by Hely Hutchinson, Commercial Restraints of Ireland (1779), Edition of 1882. Cf. an excellent monograph by Miss A. E. Murray. History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland. London, 1903.

Y