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Labour in Irish History
by James Connolly
Chapter V
Grattan's Parliament
Dynasties and thrones are not half so
important as workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say
that dynasties and thrones, and even provisional governments, are
good for anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play,
justice and freedom to those who labour.
-- John Mitchell, 1848.
We now come to the period of the
Volunteers. In this year, 1778, the people of Belfast, alarmed by
rumours of intended descents of French privateers, sent to the Irish
Secretary of State at Dublin Castle asking for a military force to
protect their town. But the English Army had long been drafted off
to the United States -- then rebel American colonies of England --
and Ireland was practically denuded of troops. Dublin Castle
answered Belfast in the famous letter which stated that the only
force available for the North would be `a troop or two of horse, or
part of a company of invalids'.
On receipt of this news the people began
arming themselves and publicly organising Volunteer corps throughout
the country. In a short time Ireland possessed an army of some
80,000 citizen soldiers, equipped with all the appurtenances of war;
drilled, organised, and in every way equal to any force at the
command of a regular Government. All the expenses of the embodiment
of this Volunteer army were paid by subscriptions of private
individuals. As soon as the first alarm of foreign invasion had
passed, the Volunteers turned their attention to home affairs and
began formulating certain demands for reform -- demands which the
Government was not strong enough to resist. Eventually, after a few
years' agitation on the Volunteer side, met by intrigue on the part
of the Government, the `patriot' party, led by Grattan and Flood,
and supported by the moral (?) pressure of a Volunteer review
outside the walls of the Parliament House, succeeded in obtaining
from the legislature a temporary abandonment of the claim set up by
the English Parliament to force laws upon the assembly at College
Green. This and the concession of Free Trade (enabling Irish
merchants to trade on equal terms with their English rivals )
inaugurated what is known in Irish History as Grattan's Parliament.
At the present day our political agitators never tire of telling us
with the most painful iteration that the period covered by Grattan's
Parliament was a period of unexampled prosperity for Ireland, and
that, therefore, we may expect a renewal of this same happy state
with a return of our `native legislature' as they somewhat
facetiously style that abortive product of political intrigue --
Home Rule.
We might, if we choose, make a point
against our political historians by pointing out that prosperity
such as they speak of is purely capitalistic prosperity -- that is
to say, prosperity gauged merely by the volume of wealth
produced, and entirely ignoring the manner in which the wealth is
distributed amongst the workers who produce it. Thus in a previous
chapter we quoted a manifesto issued by the Munster Peasantry in
1786 in which -- four years after Grattan's Parliament had been
established -- they called upon the legislature to help them, and
resolved if such help was not forthcoming -- and it was not
forthcoming -- to `resist our oppressors until they are glutted with
our blood', an expression which would seem to indicate that the
`prosperity' of Grattan's Parliament had not penetrated far into
Munster. In the year 1794 a pamphlet published at 7 Capel Street,
Dublin, stated that the average wage of a day labourer in the County
Meath reached only 6d. per day in Summer, and 4d. per day in Winter;
and in the pages of the Dublin Journal, a ministerial
organ, and the Dublin Evening Post, a supporter of
Grattan's Party, for the month of April, 1796, there is to be found
an advertisement of a charity sermon to be preached in the Parish
Chapel, Meath Street, Dublin, in which advertisement there occurs
the statement that in three streets of the Parish of St.
Catherine's `no less than 2,000 souls had been found in a starving
condition'. Evidently `prosperity' had not much meaning to the
people of St. Catherine's.
But this is not the ground we mean at
present to take up. We will rather admit, for the purpose of our
argument, that the Home Rule capitalistic definition of `prosperity'
is the correct one, and that Ireland was prosperous under Grattan's
Parliament, but we must emphatically deny that such prosperity was
in any but an infinitesimal degree produced by Parliament. Here
again the Socialist philosophy of history provides the key to the
problem -- points to the economic development as the true solution.
The sudden advance of trade in the period in question was almost
solely due to the introduction of mechanical power, and the
consequent cheapening of manufactured goods. It was the era of the
Industrial Revolution when the domestic industries we had inherited
from the Middle Ages were finally replaced by the factory system of
modern times. The warping frame, invented by Arkwright in 1769; the
spinning jenny, patented by Hargreaves in 1770; Crampton's
mechanical mule, introduced in 1779; and the application in 1778 of
the steam-engine to blast-furnaces, all combined to cheapen the cost
of production, and so to lower the price of goods in the various
industries affected. This brought into the field fresh hosts of
customers, and so gave an immense impetus to trade in general in
Great Britain as well as in Ireland. Between 1782 and 1804 the
cotton trade more than trebled its total output; between 1783 and
1796 the linen trade increased nearly threefold; in the eight years
between 1788 and 1796 the iron trade doubled in volume. The latter
trade did not long survive this burst of prosperity. The invention
of smelting by coal instead of wood in 1750, and the application of
steam to blast- furnaces, already spoken of, placed the Irish
manufacturer at an enormous disadvantage in dealing with his English
rival, but in the halycon days of brisk trade -- between 1780 and
1800. -- this was not very acutely felt. But, when trade once more
assumed its normal aspect of keen competition, Irish manufacturers,
without a native coal supply, and almost entirely dependent on
imported English coal, found it impossible to compete with their
trade rivals in the sister country who, with abundant supplies of
coal at their own door, found it very easy, before the days of
railways, to undersell and ruin the unfortunate Irish. The same
fate, and for the same reason, befell the other important Irish
trades. The period marked politically by Grattan's Parliament was a
period of commercial inflation due to the introduction of mechanical
improvements into the staple industries of the country. As long as
such machinery was worked by hand, Ireland could hold her place on
the markets, but with this application of steam to the service of
industry, which began on a small scale in 1785, and the introduction
of the power-loom, which first came into general use about 1813, the
immense natural advantage of an indigenous coal supply finally
settled the contest in favour of English manufacturers.
A native Parliament might have hindered the
subsequent decay, as an alien Parliament may have hastened it; but
in either case, under capitalistic conditions, the process itself
was as inevitable as the economic evolution of which it was one of
the most significant signs. How little Parliament had to do with it
may be gauged by comparing the positions of Ireland and Scotland. In
the year 1799, Mr. Foster in the Irish Parliament stated that the
production of linen was twice as great in Ireland as in Scotland.
The actual figures given were for the year 1796 -- 23,000,000 yards
for Scotland as against 46,705,319 for Ireland. This discrepancy in
favour of Ireland he attributed to the native Parliament. But by the
year 1830, according to McCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, the one
port of Dundee in Scotland exported more linen than all Ireland.
Both countries had been deprived of self-government. Why had
Scottish manufacture advanced whilst that of Ireland had decayed?
Because Scotland possessed a native coal supply, and every facility
for industrial pursuits which Ireland lacked.
The `prosperity' of Ireland under Grattan's
Parliament was almost as little due to that Parliament as the dust
caused by the revolutions of the coach-wheel was due to the presence
of the fly who, sitting on the coach, viewed the dust, and fancied
himself the author thereof. And, therefore, true prosperity cannot
be brought to Ireland except by measures somewhat more drastic than
that Parliament ever imagined.
Continued...
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