countries survived, and became almost the sole source of Irish trade
during the eighteenth century. The policy with raw wool was to admit
just as much as would satisfy the English weavers without arousing the
determined opposition of the competitive English graziers. The Irish
manufactured wool trade, a flourishing business, for which Irishmen
showed exceptionally high aptitude, and which in the normal course of
things would probably have become her staple industry, was destroyed
altogether, avowedly in the interests of the English staple industry, by
prohibitory export duties imposed in 1698. Subsidiary
industries--cotton, glass, brewing, sugar-refining, sail-cloth, hempen
rope, and salt--were successively strangled. One manufacture alone, that
of linen, centred in the Protestant North, was spared, and for a short
period was even encouraged, not because it was a Protestant industry,
but because at first it aroused no trade jealousy in England, and was in
some respects serviceable to her. In 1708, when it was proposed to
extend the industry to Leinster, considerations of foreign trade
provoked an outburst of hostility, and harassing restrictions were
imposed on this industry also. On the whole, however, it suffered less
than the rest, and lived to become one of the two important
manufacturing industries of present-day Ireland.

English policy was as fatuous as it was cruel. Numbers of the Irish
manufacturers and artisans, both Catholic and Protestant, emigrated to
Europe, and devoted their skill and energy to strengthening industries
which competed with those of England. Within Ireland, since industry and
commerce formed the one outlet left by the Penal Code for Catholic
brains and capital--though even here the Code imposed harassing
disabilities--the commercial restrictions completed the ruin of the
proscribed sect. But at this period the main source of weakness to
Ireland, of strength to America, and of danger to the Empire as a whole,