Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/177

Rh in such a system can be so forcibly illustrated as in our own. Tn the first place, let us look at Ireland till the year 1782. The many other causes which contributed to keep that fertile island in a state of misery and depression, I shall pass by on the present occasion; but is it not a well-known fact, that, till the year 1780, the agriculture, the internal industry, the manufactures, the commerce, the navigation of Ireland, were all held in the most rigid subserviency to the supposed interests of Great Britain?" In 1778, a partial relaxation of this exculsive system was proposed in the English Parliament: "and what was the reception these proposals met with in the House of Commons, and on the part of the trading and manufacturing interests of the country? The opponents of these limited concessions, enumerating the boons already conferred on Ireland, declared that to grant more would be fatal to the commerce and manufactures of England. . . . Our merchants and manufacturers, our shipowners, our country gentlemen, all took the alarm—all were to be ruined, if we granted the proposed participations to a country almost without debt, and paying the same taxes with ourselves. Resting on these and other grounds, petitions poured in from all quarters. The merchants of Glasgow prayed 'that neither the present nor any future advantage should be granted to Ireland, which might in the least degree operate to the disadvantage of Great Britain.'. . . The language of Manchester was still more decided in reprobating the proposed concession. Liverpool, also, did not hesitate to predict, that by the adoption of the proposals that town and port would be speedily reduced to their original insignificance. In 1779, a more limited concession to Ireland was proposed in the British House of Commons, but this measure was negatived on a division. Towards the close of that year, the events of the war in North America, and the state of things in Ireland, produced a different feeling in tho British Parliament, State necessity, acting under a sense of political danger, yielded without grace, that which good sense and good feeling had before recommended in vain." Greville's Policy of England towards Ireland.