Notwithstanding this benevolence of the Irish people, the English persisted in ruining their cattle trade, and before the end of William's reign they passed a further law to ruin the Irish woollen trade. This was in 1699, and the long depression and degradation which resulted from it prove, says Hutchinson, "this melancholy truth, that a country will sooner recover from the miseries and devastations occasioned by war, invasion, rebellion, and massacre, than from laws restraining the commerce, discouraging the manufactures, fettering the industry, and, above all, breaking the spirit of the people."

This melancholy truth the Provost goes on to illustrate and enforce, and he does this by reciting the facts from the beginning, and from year to year continually, as they are recorded in the journals of Parliament. The restriction of the cattle trade in 1666, when the people, in reliance on the continuance of the trade, had greatly increased their live-stocks, compelled the Irish to develop their wool trade. They had been encouraged by their English rulers to devote their energies to this industry, because the "country was so fertile by nature, and so advantageously situated for trade and navigation." Suddenly a Bill was introduced into the English parliament in 1697 and passed in 1699, restraining the exportation of woollen manufactures from Ireland, and beseeching His Majesty "in the most public and

Cromwellian Fellow of Trinity College, the Rev. Samuel Mather, an excellent man, who on the Restoration was thrown into a Dublin prison, probably the "Black Dog," for declining to sign the Act of Uniformity. The New England collection was made by his brother, the Rev. Nathaniel Mather, Minister of the New-row Meeting-house. The collection for London was made by the Duke of Ormond.

effectual way that may be, to declare to all his subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woollen manufacture hath long, and will ever be, looked upon with jealousy by all his subjects of this [England] kingdom." and further "to enjoin all those he employed in Ireland to make it their care and use their utmost diligence, to hinder the exportation of wool from Ireland except to be imported hither [to England], and for the discouraging the woollen manufacture," &c. To this address King William gave the ever memorable reply: "I shall do all that in me lies to discourage the woollen trade in Ireland, and to encourage the linen manufacture there;* and to promote the trade of England;" and he wrote to the Lords Justices over here to have a measure to that effect passed in the Irish parliament. The Lords Justices accordingly made "a quickening speech" to both Houses; a Bill for their acceptance was transmitted from the Castle, and the Irish parliament, in which the Williamite influence was dominant, passed the measure that annihilated the industry and prosperity of their country.† By this law an additional duty of twenty per cent. was imposed on broadcloth, and of ten per cent. on all new draperies except friezes; and the law which was enacted in January, 1699, was to be in force for three years. This law, prohibitive as it was, did not, however, satisfy England. In the June of the same year the English parliament passed a perpetual law, not overtaxing but expressly prohibiting the exportation from

• This encouragement of the linen trade here proved a hypocrisy and imposture. The linen trade was never an equivalent for the wool trade. + Excepting, perhaps, Poyning's Act, and the Act of Union, this was the most disgraceful Act ever passed by an Irish Parliament.

Ireland of all goods made of or mixed with wool, except to England and Wales, and with the licence of the Revenue Commissioners. Previous English Acts had made the duties on the importation into England practically prohibitive, and therefore the last Act operated as a suppression of exportation. The Irish were already prevented from importing dye-stuffs from the colonies, and from exporting their woollen manufactures thither. What England wanted was, not a fair competition with Ireland, but a monopoly ; she was resolved to prevent Ireland not merely from underselling her in foreign markets, but from selling there at all.

The natural and actual result of this exorbitant greed was that the Irish people were driven to have recourse to the method of "running the wool," i.e. smuggling it away to foreign markets. The severest penalties were enacted by the British legislature and by the Irish House of Commons against this practice, but they were enacted in vain. It was impossible to seal up a country of whose thirty-two counties nineteen are maritime and the rest washed by fine rivers that empty themselves into the sea. The wool running prevailed to an immense extent, and by means of it France, Germany, and Spain were able to undersell England in the foreign markets, and England lost millions of pounds by virtue of the Irish contraband supplies. The market price of Europe mocked the English importation duties, and more than defeated the prohibition. At last, in 1739, after forty years of oppression here and loss to herself, England relaxed the severity of the restrictions, and as her own House of Commons Journal acknowledges, this relaxation was made for the benefit of the English woollen manufactures. For the twenty-three

years that succeeded King William's pledge to ruin the best trade in this country, there is an unvaried record of the depression and misery of the Irish people, and during all this period and in the face of all this acknowledgment, there was not even a proposal of any law, saving one about casks for butter and tallow, to encourage our manufactures, or to tolerate our trade, or to let the country revive. There was a native parliament here, and why did they exhibit this wondrous apathy? "Because," "Because," says our author, "it was well understood by both Houses of Parliament that they had no power to remove those restraints which prohibited trade and discouraged manufactures, and that any application for that purpose would at that time have only offended the people on one side of the Channel without bringing any relief to those on the other."

In 1723, the petition of the woollen weavers and clothiers of Dublin forced from the Lord Lieutenant in his speech from the throne a recommendation to find out some employment for the poor, but neither petition nor speech produced any effect. From 1723 to 1729 the distress continued ; in the latter year it was aggravated by a famine. The scarcity was caused not by any blight of the land produce, but by the despair of the farmers; for when exportation is prohibited, and the manufacturing class at home is without employment and without money to buy, farmers will abandon tillage and dearth must ensue. In a few years more there was another scarcity of food, and then the Lord Lieutenant congratulated the country on the success of the linen trade, and recommended the encouragement of tillage. Nothing, however, was done to alter the conditions on which the improvement of the tillage depended, "because

the Commons said that the evil was out of their reach and that the poor were not employed because they were discouraged by restrictive laws from working up the materials of the country." Thus matters went on from bad to worse until after the peace of 1745, when there came an influx of money, by which the debt that had been contracted for England's Jacobite war of 1715 was paid off in 1754, and the result of this discharge was increased burdens on the country without any accompanying relief to commerce and industries. The Treasury balance led, in 1753, to a dispute as to the right of disposing of it between the King and the Commons; and this dispute was the first beginning of parliamentary life in Ireland.* To get rid of the redundancy and to leave the less for English pensions and Government salaries, works of local improvement were undertaken, and these undertakings, so far as they were carried out, helped to give employment and to stimulate agriculture.

This, however, was but a partial and insufficient remedy for the universal distress, and small as it was, it was obtained against the will of the English Government. No real relief was conferred on the country, and within a couple of years more the revenue fell off, and £20,000 was voted for the relief of the poor.

In 1757+ it was thought an amazing feat when Pery carried his Land Carriage and Coal Acts; and then, in 1761, came the augmentation of the army. On the

* See page lxx, note, and 35.

+ See page lxx, note, and 43.

It was on the Army Augmentation Bill that Hutchinson made one of his early "strides in apostasy." It was on this occasion also that