Let us examine it very briefly.
I begin of necessity with the principle of freedom, for freedom is the dominating force in economic life.

No instance can be cited of a modern people of European civilisation that ever prospered while held politically in subjection.
"All history," writes Professor Marshall of Cambridge, the doyen of Political Economy in England, "is full of the record of inefficiency caused in varying degrees by slavery, serfdom, and other forms of civil and political oppression and repression." The Act of Union was, as has been said, one of those spiritual outrages which, in their reactions, are like lead poured into the veins.

It lowered the vital resources of Ireland.

It made hope an absentee, and enterprise an exile.

That was its first-fruits of disaster.
These commonplaces of the gospel of freedom "for which Hampden died in the field and Sidney on the scaffold" will possibly appear to their modern descendants mystical, sentimental, and remote from real life.