he condition of
manufacture. Lest it should be assumed that the tiller of land at least
had profited by the Napoleonic Wars, with their consequent high prices,
let me hasten to add that the Grey Commission, reporting in 1836, had to
inform the Government that 2,385,000 persons, nearly one-third of the
population, were "in great need of food."

"Their habitations," the Report proceeds, "are wretched hovels;
several of the family sleep together on straw, or on the bare
ground, sometimes with a blanket, sometimes not even so much to
cover them. Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes; and with
these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to
stint themselves to one spare meal in the day.... They sometimes
get a herring or a little milk, but they never get meat except at
Christmas, Easter, and Shrovetide."

But a truce to these dismal chronicles. The _post hoc_ may be taken as
established; was it a _propter hoc_? Was the Union the cause as well as
the antecedent of this decay? No economist, acquainted with the facts,
can fail to answer in the affirmative. The causal connection between two
realities could not be more manifest. Let us examine it very briefly.

I begin of necessity with the principle of freedom, for freedom is the
dominating force in economic life. No instance can be cited of a modern
people of European civilisation that ever prospered while held
politically in subjection.

"All history," writes Professor Marshall of Cambridge, the doyen of
Political Economy in England, "is full of the record of
inefficiency caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, and
other forms of civil and political oppression and repression."

The Act of Union was, as has been said, one of those spiritual outrages
which, in their reactions, are like lead poured into the veins. It
lowered the vital resources of Ireland. It made hope an absentee, and
enterprise an exile. That was its first-fruits of disaster.

These commonplaces of the gospel of freedom "for which Hampden died in
the field and Sidney on the scaffold" will possibly appear to their
modern descendants mystical, sentimental, and remote from real life. For
there is no one in the world so ready as your modern Englishman to deny
that he is a man in order to prove that he is a business-man.
Fortunately we can establish for this strange being, who has thus
indecently stripped himself of huma