in 1858, at 8s. a gallon; while in 1860 both duties were raised to 10s.  In the seven years 1853-1860 the taxation of Ireland was raised by no less than two and a half millions per annum.  It will be recalled that the great famine had taken place in 1846-47, and that between the Census of 1841 and that of 1861 the population sank from eight to six millions, while the British population rose from eighteen and a half to twenty-three millions.  The statistical result of the increased taxes, therefore, was to show a rise in taxation per head of the Irish people from 13s. 11d. in 1849 to L1 5s. 4d. in 1859, while in Great Britain it rose only from L2 7s. 8d. to L2 10s. during the same period.  Equality of taxation has never been wholly established, for to this day a few quite unimportant taxes are not levied, or are levied on a lower scale in Ireland;[101] but from 1858 onward we may regard the taxation of the two countries as almost identically the same.

In the meantime a great revolution, also beginning at the time of the famine, had taken place in the fiscal system of the United Kingdom.  Free Trade with the outside world had been established, and whatever we may conclude about its effect, it had been established, as we know, with a special view to British industrial interests, and without the smallest concern for Irish interests, which were predominantly agricultural.  It was certainly followed by an immense industrial expansion and prosperity in Great Britain; it was certainly initiated at the lowest point of Ireland’s moral and physical wretchedness.  Opinions differ as to the precise economic effect upon Ireland.  Miss Murray, in her thoughtful and exhaustive study of the commercial relations between England and Ireland, holds that, as agricultural producers, the Irish lost far more than they have gained as consumers of foodstuffs, while a number of small and struggling rural industries, whose powerful counterparts in Great Britain could easily withstand foreign competition, did undeniably succumb in Ireland.

My own opinion is that the past influence upon Ireland of free trade, in the first instance with Great Britain, and later with the outside world, though a highly interesting and important topic in itself, is commonly exaggerated, to the neglect of the vastly more important question of the tenure of land.  Free trade did not cause the famine.  On the contrary, the presage of the famine was one of the minor causes which induced Peel to take up Cobden’s policy for the free importation of foodstuffs.  The effect of that policy upon Ireland sinks into insignificance beside an agrarian system which had reduced the mass of the Irish peasants to serfs, kept them near the borders of destitution, and in a state of sporadic crime for a century and a half before, and for forty years after the repeal of the Corn Laws, and, at the climax of a period of high protection for agricultural products, rendered it possible for a mere failure of the potato-crop