nd also. Under primitive
conditions, with lands almost roadless and communications slow,
difficult and costly, the various districts of any country had of
necessity to produce articles of food and clothing to satisfy their
requirements, or they had to go without. With the progress of invention,
and with the opening up of the world by roads and canals, a totally
different state of things presents itself. Industries tend to become
centralised--the fittest survive and grow, the unfit wither away. This
is what occurred in many districts of England and Scotland, and the
course of events was naturally the same in Ireland.

When we read of small towns now lying idle, which in the eighteenth
century produced woollen cloth, linen, cotton, fustian, boots, hats,
glass, beer, and food products, it simply means that a more highly
organised system of industry has in its progress left such districts
behind in the race. The woollen manufacture has centred in Yorkshire,
cotton in Lancashire, linen in Belfast, and so forth--one district
dwindled as others advanced and tended to monopolise production, without
the legislature having anything to say to it. To say that this or that
manufacture is not so prosperous in Ireland as it was a century ago
before power looms, spindles, steamships, and railways came to
revolutionise industry, is simply to say that Ireland, like other
countries, has had its part, for better or for worse, in the great
world-movement of nineteenth-century industry.

The figures of Irish exports and imports lend no countenance to the
story of decay setting in with the Union. Taking the two decennial
periods, before and after the Union, the figures are as follows:--[15]

Total value Total value
of imports. of exports.

1790-1801 ... ... L49,000,000 L51,000,000
1802-1813 ... ... L74,000,000 L63,000,000
----------- -----------
Increase ... L25,000,000 L12.000,000

an increase of over fifty per cent. in imports, and over twenty-three
per cent. in exports in the ten years after the Union as compared with
the ten years before it.

Taking single years the result is similar. The amalgamation of the two
Exchequers and the financial re-arrangements that followed, put an end
to the accurate record of exports and imports until quite recently, but
the increase during the early years of the Union and also over the wh