To take another instance, illustrative of the same system, which was in full operation sixty years later. The heads of a bill were introduced in 1771 to prevent corn from being wasted in making whisky, and to put some restraint on the vice of drunkenness, which was increasing. This bill was warmly recommended to the English Privy Council by Townshend, the Lord-Lieutenant of the day, who said, "the whisky shops were ruining the peasantry and the workmen. There was an earnest and general desire to limit them. It will be a loss to the revenue, but it is a very popular bill, and will give general content and satisfaction throughout the kingdom."[71] "The Whisky Bill," says Mr. Froude, "was rejected because the Treasury could not spare a few thousand pounds which were levied upon drunkenness."[72] It must also be borne in mind that although the English Parliament could, and, in fact, did, place prohibitory duties on Irish goods imported into England, it was quite impossible for the Irish Parliament to exercise the same power. Bills of such a nature would, of course, never obtain the sanction of the English Privy Council, to whom they must have been submitted. The difference between the duties on the same goods when imported from England into Ireland, and from Ireland into England, were in some cases striking. "In Ireland," says Mr. Parsons, speaking in the Irish Parliament in 1784, "no more than 6d. a yard was imposed on the importation of English cloths, while ours in England were charged with a duty of £2 0s. 6d."[73] Mr. Pitt, speaking as Prime Minister in the British House of Commons in February, 1785, stated that on most of the manufactures of Ireland prohibitory duties were laid by Great Britain. "They (the Irish) had not," he said, "admitted our commodities totally free from duties; they bore, upon an average, about ten per cent."[74] The helplessness of the Irish Parliament during this period is demonstrated by Hely Hutchinson. He states that in 1721, during a period of great distress, the speech from the Throne, and the Addresses to the King and the Lord-Lieutenant declare in the strongest terms the great decay of trade, and the very low and impoverished state to which the country was reduced. "But," he says, "it is a melancholy proof of the desponding state of this kingdom, that no law whatever was then proposed for encouraging trade or manufactures, or, to follow the words of the address, for reviving trade or making us a flourishing people, unless that for amending laws as to butter and tallow casks deserves to be so called. And why? Because it was well understood by both Houses of Parliament that they had no power to remove those restraints which prohibited trade and discouraged manufactures, and that any application for that purpose would at that time have only offended the people on one side of the Channel, without bringing any relief to those on the other."[75]