Ireland -- Politics and government; Political parties -- Ireland -- History; Sinn Fein
circumstances the State might have expended in bounties to the industry;
public bodies might insist upon the use of goods of Irish manufacture;
port authorities should arrange port dues so that they should fall most
heavily on manufactured goods brought into the country, and should publish
periodical returns of the imports of manufactured goods at every port in
Ireland; Irish capital should be invited and encouraged to undertake the
development of the country on industrial and commercial lines, being
assured, in the support of industrial and corporate public feeling, of
encouragement and success in its enterprise.
In expounding this theory of protection and of the vital necessity to a
country of developing its industrial life Mr. Griffith was confessedly
following the economic doctrines of the German economist Friedrich List,
"the man whom England caused to be persecuted by the Government of his
native country, and whom she hated and feared more than any man since
Napoleon--the man who saved Germany from falling a prey to English
economics, and whose brain conceived the great industrial and economic
Germany of to-day." A man with credentials like these might well be
listened to with profit. The commercial policy that made the New Germany
could not fail to make a New Ireland, and List made seductive promises. He
foretold an increase in population by a combination of agricultural and
industrial enterprise greater in proportion than by the development of
either industry or agriculture by itself: he denied the possibility of
intellectual progress to a country relying solely or mainly upon
agriculture: culture marched behind the mill and the factory. But the
chief merit of the policy undoubtedly was that it promised a
self-contained and independent economic existence, serving as the basis of
a distinctive national culture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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