CHAPTER VI

THE RAVAGES OF UNIONISM (2)


If the reader cares to push forward the line of thought suggested in the
preceding pages and to submit it to a concrete test he can do so without
difficulty. He has but to compare the post-Union history of linen with
that of cotton. Linen in Ireland had been a perfect type of the
State-created, spoon-fed industry characteristic of the period of
mercantilism. Within certain limits--such as the steady resolve to
confine it, in point of religion, to Protestants, and, in point of
geography, to Ulster--it had behind it at the Union a century of
encouragement. It is calculated that between 1700 and 1800 it had
received bounties, English and Irish, totalling more than,£2,500,000. In
other words it had a chance to accumulate capital. Even linen declined
after the Union partly from the direct effects of that measure, partly
from the growing intensity of the Industrial Revolution. But the
capital accumulated, the commercial good name established under native
government carried the manufacturers through. These were able towards
1830 to introduce the new machinery and the new processes, and to
weather the tempest of competition. Cotton, on the other hand, was a
very recent arrival. It had developed very rapidly, and in 1800 gave
promise of supplanting linen. But the weight of capital told more and
more as changes in the technique of transportation and production
ushered in our modern world. Lacking the solid reserves of its rival,
involved in all the exactions that fall on a tributary nation, the