PREFERENTIAL TARIFFS.
from trading with the Colonies in the interest of the British merchant. When Lord North and Mr. Pitt endeavoured to remove the restrictions under which Irish industry and Irish commerce laboured, they were met by a tremendous outcry from Lancashire and some of the principal commercial centres of Great Britain, an outcry which is characterised by the eminent historian, Mr. Lecky, as an 'ebullition of intense commercial selfishness.' If we bear in mind that, while during the era of free trade there has been an enormous increase in the commercial prosperity and the material well-being of the people of Great Britain, the population of Ireland diminished to nearly one-half, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the British fiscal policy of the nineteenth century has been as selfish and as detrimental to Ireland as was the policy of the centuries which preceded it. On this point the opinion of Mr. Childers, a Liberal statesman and Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations between Great Britain and Ireland at the time of his death, is entitled to the greatest respect. In clause 91 of his draft report he says:—
'Ireland, being a country mainly inhabited by agricultural producers, could support its present population upon the corn and meat produced there without having recourse, under ordinary circumstances, to a foreign supply of those articles, and could at the same time export a surplus of these foodstuffs. The population of Ireland consumes a rather large amount, in proportion to its wealth, of spirits, tea, and tobacco. This being so, it does not appear that a fiscal system which raises no revenue from foreign foodstuffs, but does raise a rather large revenue from spirits, tea, and
141
