The ruthless Sinn Fein policy of the English in Ireland called forth an equivalent Irish retort. Sinn Fein with its programme of national economics, has its roots in the history of the commercial relations between the two countries. From 1663, when the Cattle and Navigation Acts laid the first avowed restrictions on Irish industry and commerce, down to the present, the destruction of the economic, in addition to the national, freedom of Ireland, has been the deliberate policy of Britain. The programme of industrial revival, the plea for industrial autonomy, which was the point of departure for Sinn Fein many years ago, what is it, after all, but the crystallization of ideas common to three centuries of Irish economic literature? From the beginning of the seventeenth century a vast library of protest against English commercial jealousy has grown up, and is still growing. Obscure pamphleteers and writers of the highest fame stand side by side in this indictment of a country which dares now to assert that its crimes have not been deliberate. Swift's _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures_, his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, his _Modest Proposal_; the _Querist_ of Bishop Berkeley; Hely Hutchinson's _Commercial Restraints of Ireland_;--these are only some of the most prominent documents in the history of the economic revolt, subsequently known as the Sinn Fein movement. A sharp corrective of the lazy ignorance of the fiction which describes the Irish case against England as one of retrospective sentimentality is provided by the economic writings of Irishmen for the past three hundred years.