And thus is explained in part why Ireland, one of the most favoured by nature, and one of the most fertile countries in Europe, is yet one of the poorest. And why it is that, as recent statistics show, ninety-eight per cent of the export trade of the three kingdoms is in the hands of Britain and in Ireland's hands two per cent.

Even the bitter anti-Irish Froude, in his English in Ireland, is constrained to confess, "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving her moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe."

Says Lecky, "It would be difficult in the whole range of history, to find another instance in which various and powerful agencies agreed to degrade the character, and blast the prosperity of a nation."

And here endeth what may be considered by those who know not England's way with Ireland an amazing chapter-but quite commonplace to those who have a bowing acquaintance with Irish history.

6 Hear the testimony, two-edged, of Carew (sixteenth century): "Would you had seen the countries we have seen in this our journey, and then you would say you had not seen the like, and think it were much pity the same were not in subjection."

And again: "I never, nor no other man that ever I have communed with, but saith that for all things it is the goodliest land that they have seen, not only for pleasure and pastime of a prince, but as well for profit to his Grace and to the whole realm of England." The final clause is the kernel of the matter.

CHAPTER LVI

THE VOLUNTEERS

ON Lammas Eve of the year 1778, a certain harassed English official sat him down in his room in Dublin Castle to pen a letter to one Mr. Stewart Banks, the Sovereign of Belfast. The letter cannot have been a very pleasant one to write, for it confessed the utter bankruptcy of the system of government under which England had held Ireland since the advent of "civil and religious liberty," with the victory of William III. Such as it is, however, it is an historic document

"Sir:

"Dublin Castle, August 14th, 1778.

"My Lord Lieutenant having received information that there is reason to apprehend that three or four privateers in company may in a few days make an attempt on the northern coast of this kingdom, by his Excellency's command I give you the earliest account thereof, in order that there may be a careful watch, and immediate intelligence given to the inhabitants of Belfast, in case any party from such ships should attempt to land. The greatest part of the troops being encamped near Clonmel and Kinsale, his Excellency can at present send no further military aid to Belfast than a troop or two of horse, or part of a company of invalids, and his Excellency desires you will acquaint me by express, whether a troop or two of horse can be properly accommodated in Belfast, so long as it may be proper to continue them in that town. Richard Heron."

The shrewd Belfast man, who received this letter from Chief Secretary, Sir Richard Heron, was well able to read between the lines and interpret the panic confession of impatience it contained. He knew-none better-that all over the world the power of England was at a very low ebb. In America her affairs were desperate. The surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in the previous autumn (1777) had been followed in Spring by the formal adhesion of France to the American cause.

An invasion of England or Ireland by the allies was on the

1 This office in the smaller town corresponded to that of Mayor in the larger.

cards and how easy it would have been, Mr. Stewart Banks and his fellow townsmen had special reason for knowing; for in April, 1778, John Paul Jones in his saucy "Ranger," after a foray marked by the capture of Dublin and Wexford merchantmen, the plunder of Kircudbright, the burning of shipping at Whitehaven, had sailed boldly into Belfast Bay, in broad daylight, and sunk a British manof-war in sight of them all! Here he was back again, it seems, with new companions "three or four privateers in company"and all the pauper Irish Government (which had been refused a paltry loan of a few thousand pounds a month or two by its own official bankers) was able to send to oppose him was "a troop or two of horse, or part of a company of invalids."

Thus, moneyless, soldierless, amid the ruins of the industries it had deliberately set itself to wreck, amid the starving remnants of a people it had deliberately set itself to exterminate, the English power in Ireland stood, a shivering and impotent thing, after a century during which it had full scope to work its will, and to apply unopposed its own chosen methods!

What written answer the Sovereign of Belfast sent, in the name of his town, to the Chief Secretary's amazing document we do not know. But the real answer of Belfast is a matter of history.

It was the institution of the first corps of volunteers. "England sowed her laws in dragon's teeth, and they had sprung up in armed men i"

The example of Belfast was speedily followed over the country, and within two years the Volunteers numbered 100,000 armed and disciplined men, officered by the greatest personages in Ireland: Lord Charlemont, the Duke of Leinster, the Earl of Clanricarde, Flood, Grattan, Ponsonby, and the élite of the landed aristocracy, the professions, high finance and politics. Though Catholics were not admitted to their ranks at first, they supported the movement from the beginning, and to this circumstance the Volunteers themselves are indebted for the achievement which the after-world recognises as the only lasting one to their credit-their paternity of the "United Irishmen."

Government on the other hand looked askance on the Volunteers. But the position being described, it had no power to oppose them openly-and was finally constrained to help to equip them by turning over to them 16,000 stand of arms intended for the Militia.

The threat of invasion, though apparently increased when Spain joined America and France in 1779, did not materialise. But as the lessons of the American War were pondered by citizen

soldiers on their way to the reviews, which soon became a prominent feature in Irish colonial life, or discussed at the banquets which re-united them in good fellowship afterwards, the determination materialised in the movement to secure redress for the intolerable evils under which the British Colonists in Ireland, in common with the native Irish, were suffering. Of these evils none was more keenly felt than the trade restrictions, which with their disastrous consequences, have been discussed in a previous chapter. The ruin of the centuries old Irish woollen trade, completed by the third William, was followed, under the third George, by the destruction of the linen and provision trade, which had, to some extent, taken its place. The cries of the starving unemployed filled the land. In Dublin alone, twenty thousand artisans were out of work, and they and their families were only kept from dying of hunger by the exertions of charitable institutions. In Cork things were equally desperate. Ulster was quiet for the moment-but it was the quiet of exhaustion. Her fair countrysides had been drained of their population by landlord oppressions, and the ruin of the linen industry-and the flower of her manhood in Washington's armies was avenging her quenched hearths and wrecked homes.

The Volunteers therefore needed no special perspicacity to see that the most formidable enemy even of the English Colony in Ireland was the English trade interests, to which their advantages were ruthlessly sacrificed.

The first invasion they set themselves to repel was that of English manufactured goods.

Starting in Galway a "non-importation" movement spread itself rapidly through the country. Meetings organised by the Volunteers, and supported by the press and scientific societies, as well as the most influential people in the colony, high sheriffs, grand jurymen, county magnates, and-more important still-the women of fashion, adopted resolutions pledging themselves to boycott English manufacture, and to "wear and make use of the manufactures of this country only." Shopkeepers and merchants who imported foreign goods, or tried to impose them on their customers as Irish manufacture, were warned of the consequences. The Volunteers were there to see that the boycott was duly observed.

When Parliament met in October, 1779, Grattan moved his celebrated amendment to the Address to the Throne, demanding Free Trade for Ireland-that is the right to import and export what commodities she pleased, unrestrained by foreign legislation. His speech was doubtless very eloquent, as were those of Hussey,

Burgh and Flood, who supported him. But it is safe to say that the solid ranks of the placemen and "tied" borough members, who made up the Government's permanent majority in the Irish House of Commons, would have been as little moved by them, were it not that, outside in College Green, bold Napper Tandy had his artillery corps mustered, all in their gallant uniforms of emerald and scarlet, his cannon trained on the Parliament Houses and placarded with the inscription "Free Trade or

To the pregnant argument of that unwritten alternative, the prudent placemen yielded. The amended address was carried by a huge majority, and next day it was borne to the Castle, along streets lined by Volunteers in full war kit, and thence dispatched to England marked "urgent."

And as "urgent" the English Prime Minister and the British. Legislature treated it. Acts were rushed through the English Houses of Parliament in a few weeks which restored to the Irish the trade rights of which they had been robbed. The embargo was taken off their export of woollens and glass; the colonial trade was thrown open to them; trade between Ireland and the British settlements in America and Africa was placed on an equal footing with that between Great Britain and these settlements. Those Acts were repealed which prohibited the carrying into Ireland of gold and silver. "The Irish were allowed to import foreign hops, and to receive a drawback on the duty on British hops. They were allowed to become members of the Turkey Company, and to carry on a direct trade between Ireland and the Levant Sea."

But the British Parliament from which Free Trade had thus been wrung by the Volunteers-and the vivid fear of Ireland following the example of America-still held the Irish Parliament in bondage. At any moment England might revoke the concessions she had granted under duress. There still remained on the Statute Books of the two countries the Acts which gave her this power-Poyning's Act, and the Sixth of George I.

Poyning's Act was a piece of suicidal legislation imposed on the Parliament of the Pale in 1495, by Lord Deputy Sir Edward Poyning, who was sent over to supersede the Earl of Kildare after the latter had failed in two attempts to set up a rival kingdom in Ireland. It bound the Irish Parliament to legislate only as the British Parliament permitted it. The other provided that all the "causes and considerations" for calling a Parliament in Ireland, and all the Bills which were to be brought in during its Session, must be previously certified to the King by the Chief Governor and Council of Ireland, and affirmed by the King and his Council