Writing twenty-eight years later the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a policy, so foolish and so unjust.

The last sentence opens up sombre vistas to any student of economic history: "Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion.

It is a singular circumstance that, in the metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior, superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in Europe, _there is not a factory for the production of either silk, linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled by a steam engine_." The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a duty on spirits.

This course Belfast had been permitted to follow--one of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the side of the Protestant North.

In my part of the country the people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland.