other English landlords, or from the aristocratic American
concessionaires, just as their compatriot tenants and lessees were
identical in stock with the American colonists. Their descendants and
successors have been the victims of circumstance. Each generation has
inherited the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human
nature to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which
created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them. Doubly victimized
have been those resident landlords who at all periods, from the earliest
era of colonization, in spite of temptation and bad examples around
them, have acted towards their tenantry as humane and patriotic
citizens. A bad agrarian system infects the whole body politic. Good
landlords and contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest.

In commerce and industry, as in land, the Irish Colony stood at a heavy
disadvantage by comparison with America. From the Restoration onward,
English statesmen took the same view of both dependencies, namely, that
their commercial interests should be wholly subordinate to those of the
Mother Country, and the same Department, the Board of Trade and
Plantations, made the fiscal regulations for Ireland and America. The
old idea that for trade purposes Ireland counted as an integral part of
the United Kingdom did not last longer than 1663. But it was not wholly
abrogated by the great Navigation Act of that year, which, though it
placed harsh restrictions on the Irish cattle trade with England, did
not expressly exclude Irish ships from the monopoly of the colonial
trade conferred upon English vessels, so that for seven years longer a
tolerably prosperous business was carried on direct between Ireland and
the American Colonies.[7] An Act of 1670, prohibiting, with a few
negligible exceptions, all direct imports from the Colonies into
Ireland, gave a heavy check to this business, arrested the growth of
Irish shipping, and, in conjunction with subsequent measures of