The terrible year of famine was a
warning to British statesmanship of the need of a constructive and
Conservative policy for the reorganisation of Irish agricultural life
and for the broadening of the economic basis in Ireland by the
deliberate encouragement of new industries. Under a true conception of
Union, political and economic--and there were not wanting men like Lord
George Bentinck and Disraeli who entertained it--Ireland might within a
generation have been levelled up to the general standard of the United
Kingdom.
But the evil effects of political and economic separatism in the
eighteenth century were still unremedied when the whole economic policy
of Union was abandoned. The very principle and conception of Free Trade
is, inherently, as opposed to the maintenance of national as of Imperial
Union. Ireland was deprived of that position of advantage in the British
market which was one of the implied terms of the Union, and was not
allowed to protect her own market. Incidentally, and as a consequence of
the new fiscal policy, Ireland was saddled with a heavy additional
burden of taxation which only handicapped her yet further in the
struggle to recover from the famine and to meet foreign competition.
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