of West-India produce than might be necessary for his own market, in hopes that a scarcity might happen in England, and then he might send in the goods he had thus laid in upon speculation. This certainly was possible, but it was barely so, and he did not conceive that it could happen frequently. It might occur oftener, that the Irish merchant would, in case of scarcity on the continent, have an opportunity of supplying foreign countries, which would otherwise be supplied from England. But though, whatever might be thus gained by the Irish, would be taken from the British merchants, yet he hoped the loss would be rated very low, when it was recollected that this sacrifice would procure lasting friendship and harmony with Ireland; it would knit together the two great limbs, the remaining great members of the British empire, and bind them fast in bonds of eternal amity. To Ireland he did not wish to make this boon trifling and insignificant: he did not indeed think it was such as would do this country essential injury; but it would nevertheless procure to Ireland substantial good; and therefore he trusted it would be given cheerfully by the one as the best proof of affection and friendship, and be received by the other as a mark of that regard and community of interests which ought to subsist between the two countries, connected as England and Ireland are by the dearest ties. This regulation, however, did not stop here; he intended to propose farther, that all ships coming from Ireland to England with West-India produce should also be furnished with cockets, and give bonds in the same manner as coasting ships in England were bound to do. If Ireland should thus enjoy the benefit of the colony trade, it was but fit the colonies should derive some benefit in return; and therefore he would propose an amendment in the second of the Irish resolutions, which allows a drawback on exportation of all the duties laid on importation into either country; and the amendment was an exception from this allowance of drawback on all spirits not the produce of the British colonies in the West Indies. There was, besides, he observed, another branch of foreign degree, might be considered as allied to that of which he was speaking, and that was the trade to the East Indies. That trade, he observed, being by charter exclusively the property of the East-India company, there was no possibility of giving a share of it particularly and nominally to the Irish; on that subject, however, he was not very uncasy, as he was fully satisfied in his own mind, that, to suffer the East-India trade to remain in its present channel, was by no means a departure from the system that was now under discussion, a system of an equal and reciprocal participation of commercial benefits with Ireland. As long as the legislature of this country thought it advisable to suffer that trade to be exclusively engrossed by the company, Ireland had no better right to complain of the exclusion than one of our own out-ports, or even an individual merchant. Still, though he did not see either the practicability or the expediency of conceding to Ireland a part of our East-India trade, he thought it was fit that certain regulations affecting that country should be relaxed, in order to open a door for Ireland to proportional advantages, from which, by these regulations, she had been excluded. Thus, he would have the East-India company empowered to take in such part of their outward-bound cargo as they might find convenient, in the ports of Ireland, and also to import directly from the East Indies such part of the produce of that country as they might think proper. He then recapitulated what he had already laid before the House, enumerating the several objections which had been taken to that part of his plan that related to the colony trade, together with the several resolutions he meant to propose, in order to overturn such objections; and then, calling the recollection of the House to the period when the principal part of the commercial concessions were made to Ireland, he desired them to recollect the serious alarm which the demands of that kingdom at that time gave rise to, and to consider whether those alarms had not been found futile and groundless, though at first taken up as loudly, and extending as widely as the present; whether, having experienced how beneficial our bounty had already been E to that country, at the same time that it had been of no prejudice to this, they ought to stop short now, at a time when so very tle more would accomplish the whole, and when that little was necessary to give effect and operation to what had been done already. But he expected, that if any opposition were to be made to this measure, it might not come from a quarter which had already given so much, as to render the remainder not worth withholding, or if it were, not possible to be withheld. Above all, he hoped, that gentlemen would not oppose him on such grounds; as they must expose their own former arrangements to a great degree of censure, and involve, in their disapprobation of the present measure, a condemnation of those acts of which they themselves had already been the authors. What he meant to allude to, was the objection, that as a considerable part of his plan would necessarily depend on an adjustment of duties, drawbacks, and bounties, that adjustment was liable to so many errors, as to render it extremely uncertain and dangerous to place any dependence on the accuracy with which it could be done. In the first place, he flattered himself there was no person who would take upon himself to say that such an adjustment was absolutely impracticable, nor, for his own part, did he think it even in any great degree difficult; but whether it was difficult, or whether it was impracticable, it was a part of the system on which the noble lord in the blue ribband* had founded his former arrangement of that portion of the colony trade which, in his administration, had been given to Ireland. That concession had been made upon the same principle as the present, that of equalization between the two countries; nor could he see any reason why such an equalization could be less carried into effect upon the present than on the former occasion. Such, he said, were the outlines of the first part of his system, and which, accompanied by the necessary safeguards and regulations, he wished the House to adopt. We had hitherto bound, he observed, the friend we ought to cherish; we had treated as an alien, instead of caressing as a partner: but, by a system thus comprehensive, unambiguous, and complet~ remove the effect of former prejudices, and en... only to the zealous contribu was much more, to her gratitude. tie اف Junting That goods now prohibited, or subjected to a prohibition, should be admitted hereafter each kingdom, under a duty merely sufficient to countervail the internal excise, formed the outline of the second part of the system. As other bounties which might defeat its end were by a particular provision excluded, this must be looked on as a conciliatory sys tem, which would tend to diffuse, and thereby to increase, the wealth of both nations. To one effect only of this regulation an exception had been made; and an alarm had been spread in the northern part of this kingdom, as if the removal of the prohibition which now existed with respect to corn and grain would be highly injurious to the agriculture of Scotland: this dread, however, it was his intention to remove, by excepting corn, meal, &c. from the effects of this regulation. Beer, also, exported to Ireland, being already subject to a high duty, to countervail the internal imposition on that article in Ireland would form another exception. He then went through the different propositions as they had been submitted to the Irish parliament, making comments and alterations as he proceeded; after which he remarked, that of the numerous petitions which had been presented to the House, the objections of the greater part were perfectly wide of what might be expected from any who had given a proper attention to the subject. They had spoken of liberties now given, and of privileges unknown before; they dwelt on the rivalship that must take place between this country and Ireland in every foreign market; but they seemed not to know that these liberties, and this rivalship, subsisted by the laws already in existence. Every inconvenience that had been stated, flowed from the system that was now established, but went not to criminate that which was now about to be formed. He had been, also, arraigned of arrogance and self-sufficiency in the prosecution of this business; but it was not in the power of words such as these to deter him from the prosecution of his duty, to drive him to little, temporizing expedients, such as the sacrifice of a post office or a court of admiralty. He was not, he said, one of those who thought, that if a session were passed without any thing material being done, it was a circumstance of pleasure and self-congratulation. It was his wish to place the arrangements between the two kingdoms on a basis the most durable; and in the pursuit of an end so important, he would not be deterred by clamour or misrepresentation. Mr. Pitt then went into that part of the question which related to the apprehensions of certain persons, of being undersold, by the import of the manufactures of Ireland, in our own markets. He combated the doctrine, that Ireland, from the cheapness of labour, must necessarily be able to undersell the English manufacturer. Was it, he asked, because the rudest species of labour was somewhat cheaper in Ireland than in England, that the former therefore had the advantage of the latter? No. It did not depend on that sort of work which was required for the roughest and rudest occupations of agriculture, whether a nation was to flourish in manufacture or not; it was a habit of industry and ingenuity which were to effect it. He drew a distinction between the meaning of the words wages and labour, observing, that a man's wages might be extremely low, and yet the price of his labour very dear, provided that he did but a small quantity of work. He instanced in the example of an Englishman and an Irishman, that perhaps the latter, though receiving but five shillings per week, might really be a dearer workman to his employer than the former at eight shillings, provided the one worked hard, and the other was idle. He said also, that, besides the different degrees of the industry of the two nations, he was well informed, and sufficiently convinced, that the rate of wages, as well as of labour, was greater in Ireland than in England, in any branch of manufacture which required execution and ingenuity, instancing a gentleman, whom he described to be the first and the principal person in the cotton |