navigational, fiscal, and industrial repression, converted Ireland for a
century into a kind of trade helot. She was treated either as a foreign
country, as a Colony, or as something inferior to either, according to
the dictation of English interests, while possessing neither the
commercial independence of a foreign country nor the natural and
indefeasible immunity which distance, climate, variety of soil, and
unlimited room for expansion continued to confer, in spite of all
coercive restraints, upon the American Colonies. Though the British
trade monopoly was certainly a contributory cause in promoting the
American revolution, it was never, any more than the British claim to
tax, a severe practical grievance. The prohibition of the export of
manufactures, and the compulsory reciprocal exchange of colonial natural
products for British manufactured goods and the chartered merchandise of
the Orient, were not very onerous restrictions for young communities
settled in virgin soil; nor, with a few exceptions like raw wool, whose
export was forbidden, were the American natural products of a kind which
could compete with those of the Mother Country. The real damage
inflicted upon the Colonies by the mercantile system--one which its
modern defenders are apt to forget--was moral. To practise and condone
smuggling was habitual in America, and some of the English Governors set
the worst example of all by making a profit out of connivance at the
illicit traffic. "Graft" was their creation. The moral mischief done was
permanent, and it resembled in a lesser degree the mischief done in
Ireland both by bad agrarian and bad commercial laws. Ireland, owing to
her proximity, was in the unhappy position of being a competitor in the
great staples of trade, both raw and manufactured, and she was near
enough and weak enough to render it easy to stamp out this competition
so far as it was thought to be inimical to English interests. The cattle
and provision trade with England had been damaged as far back as 1663,
and was killed in 1666, though the export of provisions to foreign