rise of prices during the French wars, stimulated the popular tendency to self expansion, until by a logical sequence of events the spectacle was presented of a nation doubling its population every fifty years, yet entirely dependent for its support upon an agricultural area which had been found barely sufficient for its needs when it was a third less numerous; under such conditions, high rents, low wages, and all the other indications of destitution would be as inevitable as famine prices in a beleaguered city.
But I may be told this frantic clinging of the Irish to the land is natural to their genius, and not a result of commercial restrictions. History supplies the perfect refutation of such a theory: Though the hostile tariff of England comprehended almost every article produced in Ireland; one single exception was permitted. From the reign of William III. the linen trade of Ireland has been free; as a consequence, at this day Irish linens are exported in enormous quantities to every quarter of the globe, and their annual value nearly equals half the rental of the island.
Many attempts were made by the rival interest in England to deprive us of this boon, and in 1785 a petition—signed by 117,000 persons—was presented[1] by Manchester, praying for the prohibition of Irish linens, but justice and reason for once prevailed, and the one surviving industry of Ireland
- ↑ Wade's Chronology, Vol. I. p. 539.
