And yet, in spite of this success, the Anglo-Irish had made a bad bargain. Cut off from their fellow-countrymen, having renounced the right to have a country, the Protestant land-hunters were no more respected in England than in Ireland. The English parliament did with them as it chose. Their subjection tempted the commercial classes. To safeguard their own profits of commerce and industry English traders made statutes to annihilate Irish competition. They forbade carrying of cattle or dairy stuff to England, they forbade trade in soap or candles; in cloth, in glass, in linen save of the coarsest kind; the increase of corn was checked; it was proposed to stop Irish fisheries. The wool which they might not use at home must be exported to England alone. They might not build ships. From old time Ireland had traded across the Gaulish sea: her ports had seen the first discoverers of America. But now all her great harbours to the west with its rising American trade were closed: no merchant ship crossing the Atlantic was allowed to load at an Irish port or to unload. The abundance of harbours, once so full of commerce, were now, said Swift, "of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon." In 1720 all trade was at a stand, the country bare of money, "want and misery in every face." It was unfortunate, Englishmen said, that Ireland had been by the act of God doomed to poverty--so isolated in geographical position, so lacking in industrial resources, inhabited by a people so indolent in tillage, and unfitted by their religion to work. Meanwhile they successfully pushed their own business in a country which they allowed to make nothing for itself. Their manufacturers sent over yearly two millions of their goods, more than to any other country save their American colonies, and took the raw material of Ireland, while Irish workers were driven out on the hillsides to starve. The planters' parliament looked on in barren helplessness. They had no nation behind them. They could lead no popular resistance. They had no call to public duty. And the English knew it well. Ministers heaped up humiliations; they quartered on Irish revenues all the pensioners that could not safely be proposed to a free parliament in England--the mistresses of successive kings and their children, German relations of the Hanoverians, useful politicians covered by other names, a queen of Denmark banished for misconduct, a Sardinian ambassador under a false title, a trailing host of Englishmen--pensions steadily increasing from £30,000 to over £89,000. Some £600,000 was at last yearly sent over to England for absentees, pensions, government annuities, and the like. A parliament servile and tyrannical could not even pretend to urge on the government that its measures, as a patriot said, should sometimes "diverge towards public utility." It had abandoned all power save that of increasing the sorrows of the people.