The
full severity of that competition was, however, not experienced till
towards the end of the seventies, when the opening up of the American
West, coupled with the demonetisation of silver, brought down prices
with a run. A series of bad harvests aggravated the evil. The same
conditions were experienced all over Europe, and were everywhere met by
raising tariffs to the level required to enable agriculture to maintain
itself. Even in England "Fair Trade" became a burning issue. Given
normal agrarian conditions in Ireland the Irish vote would have gone
solid with the Fair Traders, and the United Kingdom would in all
probability have reverted to a national system of economics a generation
ago. As things were, landlords and farmers in Ireland, instead of
uniting to defend their common interest, each endeavoured to thrust the
burden of the economic _debacle_ on the other. The bitterness of the
agrarian struggle which ensued was skilfully engineered into the channel
of the Home Rule agitation. In other words, the evils of economic
separatism, aggravated by the social evils surviving from the separatism
of an earlier age, united to revive a demand for the extension and
renewal of the very cause of these evils.
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