breaking out of the Spanish war, there was a fresh vote of credit, and still no relief to manufacturers or to agriculturists. This distress, caused by English-made laws, Hutchinson points out, produced the White Boys, and for the cure of this distress an increased attention to the Charter Schools was recommended. By 1771 the National Debt had largely increased, while income had diminished, and in a couple of years more the linen trade was rapidly declining, while pensions and charges on the establishment were greatly increased.

The Provost dwells on the illustrative fact, that, whether the Debt was increased or diminished, and however much the pensions and salaries were multiplied, the distress and wretchedness of the body of the people continued the same. The linen manufacture for a while prospered, and afforded a limited relief in a few places; but tillage was declining, and destitution was all round. The distress was noticed in the House, but nothing effectual was attempted, and Hutchinson cannot refrain from exclaiming: "Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe, enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give them employment and food, had not left sufficient memorials of their wretchedness; if their habitations, apparel, and food, were not sufficient proofs, I Ireland was for the first time called upon to contribute to England's war expenses. She passed a vote of credit for £200,000. See pages 44, 46.

should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of unemployed industry."

All these restrictions were enacted by England, not from any actual loss that she had sustained by Irish competition, but from an apprehension of loss. Hutchinson shows how groundless the apprehension was, and he protests against the iniquity of sacrificing the happiness of a great and ancient kingdom, and the welfare of millions of its people, to guard against an imagined decrease in the value of English land. If wool-spinning was cheaper in Ireland than in England, that was because the Irish operatives had to live on food-"potatoes and milk, or more frequently water "*-with which the English would not be content; but wages and the cost of producing would increase with the opening of trade, and with the increase of manufactures. England's greedy monopoly was sinking the Irish people, while fair trade would really lessen the cheap labour competition which the English masters professed to dread. An open wool trade in Ireland would, moreover, be mainly carried on by English capitalists and by English shipping, just as in ancient Egypt, China, and Hindostan, the export trade used to be conducted by foreigners; and just as in the victualling trade of Ireland, the natives were but factors to the English.

* The condition of the people would thus seem to have declined from what it was a century before. In 1672, Petty stated in his "Political Anatomy," that the drink of the Irish people was milk, and in winter small beer or water; and that their food was bread made into cakes, with eggs and rancid butter, and with muscles, cockles, and oysters, on the sea-shore parts.

On every side, therefore, the English themselves suffered as much by the restrictions as the Irish, and they would be, if they could but see it, proportionate gainers by the removal of the restrictions. Hutchinson goes on to show that England gets one-third of the wealth of Ireland, and that she would get more than the half of the benefit of the wool trade; but that even so the country would be the better for the small share of the gains that would be allowed to remain with her. Agriculture would be encouraged, and manufactures would be promoted; and there would be a circulation of money amongst the people. Taxes were proportionately heavier in Ireland than in England, when the annual earnings, expenditure, rentals, circulating specie, and personal property of the two countries were compared. The English were mistaken in some of the calculations on which they grounded the commercial restrictions, and they would be commercial gainers by the removal of the restrictions; but it was not for the benefit of England, and it was for the benefit of Ireland, that the Provost demanded free and open commerce for the produce and manufactures of this country. This was what he claimed and argued for, and this was what he very largely helped to obtain for Ireland; and this was the service that won him back a great deal of the popularity which he had forfeited by his hired subserviency to the English party.

There is a good deal of repetition in the Provost's book as we have it, but this is accounted for by the fact that the book was originally published in the form of letters.* The

There are also several inaccuracies in the printed edition, which are

repetitions, moreover, are not altogether artistic blemishes, for they are made to intensify, and, as it were, to multiply, the identical facts by presenting them in fresh connections. This is notably the case in regard of the Provost's doublings back on the wool trade, and on the linen trade, and on England's dealings with Ireland in regard of both these trades. After the destruction of the cattle trade these were the two sources of industry left to this country, and therefore the record of the treatment and evolution of these trades is in fact the history of the commercial relations between England and this country. The Provost accordingly takes the wool and the linen trade as the fixed pillars of his discourse, and he interpolates the spaces between them with coincident statistics that illustrate his thesis. It is thus that in page 83 he comes back to the wool trade to show the falsehood of the English trade returns, which asserted that the trade" was set up here since the reduction of Ireland" by Cromwell. The trade

reproduced as they stand. E.g., in page 81 "between £12,000 and £13,000" is set down as an increase on £1,100,000; and Petty's "Survey" is throughout put for his Political Anatomy. In the note to page 127 the literal misprints in the Greek quotation are corrected. The line is given "as Homer quoted by Longinus," and as if it were a Homeric line, but it is not a hexameter at all. The quotation joins the beginning of one line to a portion of another, and it is needless to say that the break was duly notified by Longinus, though apparently it was not perceived by the Provost.

The passage occurs in the 17th book of the Odyssey, V.V. 323-3:—

66

• ‘Πμισυ γαρ τ' αρετῆς ἀποαίνυται ευρυόπα Ζευς

Ανέρος, εντ' αν μιν κατά δούλιον ἦμαρ ἔλησιν.”

Rendered by Pope,

"Jove fix'd it certain, that whatever day

Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away."

had been a flourishing one in this country from the time of Edward III. Then in the Sixth Letter the Provost takes up the linen trade again, for the purpose of showing more emphatically, in the first place, that it was forced on Ireland as an equivalent for the loss of the wool trade; in the second place, that it was not at all an equivalent-and in the third place, that England before long broke her stipulations with this country, and so discouraged the hemp and linen manufacture of Ireland, that the Irish had to abandon the flax culture altogether. In 1705, leave was given to Ireland to export some sorts of linen to the colonies, but leave was not given to bring back dye stuffs or other colonial produce. In 1743, bounties were offered on exports of Irish linen, provided they were shipped from English ports; but there was already a duty of thirty per cent. on foreign linen imported into England; and thus Ireland was, of course, deprived of the colonial and other markets. Not till 1777 were the American markets opened to Ireland, and by that time the emigration of the Ulster linen-workers had become so enormous, that America was, in fact, a rival in the trade. What words can more offensively and more bitterly express the oppression of the country than this leave to trade with other countries? It took Grattan and Hussey Burgh "with their coats off," and it took the Volunteers with their motto "Free Trade, or to sweep away this badge of slavery. All the time England was multiplying pensions and salaries here; she was levying taxes and draining rents; and, as Hutchinson clearly puts it, Ireland "was paying to Great Britain double the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which Great Britain allows her. It would be