"Just as the country was thoroughly exhausted from the effects of the famine, the whole financial policy adopted towards Ireland changed, and Irish taxation began to be rapidly assimilated to British at a time when great prosperity had come to Great Britain, and the reverse to Ireland. The repeal of the Corn Laws had stimulated the commercial prosperity of Britain; large cities were expanding, railways were developing, and the foreign trade of the country was increasing by leaps and bounds. But Ireland had just passed through the awful ordeal of famine: her population had suddenly diminished by one fourth, there had been a universal decline in Irish manufactures, the repeal of the Corn Laws had begun the destruction of the Irish export trade in cereals, and the extension of the Poor Law system to Ireland had greatly increased the local rates. Just as the famine subsided the results of free trade began to take effect. Wheat-growing decayed; local industries were destroyed by the competition of large manufacturing towns in Great Britain; every class of Irish producers saw ruin staring him in the face, while landlords and farmers were further impoverished by the huge poor-rates, which sometimes reached 20_s._ in the L. The misery and poverty of the country could hardly have been greater, and to us at the present day it seems extraordinary that just at this inopportune time the Government should have thought fit to go back from the conciliatory fiscal policy which had existed since 1817." It is not to be wondered at that Gladstonian finance was ever after looked at with well-grounded suspicion in Ireland.