The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII | Page 4

to receive a
Protestant instruction; her agriculture was degraded to the degree that
cattle could not be exported nor the wool sold or shipped from her own
ports to other countries; her towns swarmed with beggars and thieves,
forced there by the desolation which prevailed in the country districts,
where people starved by the wayside, and where those who lived barely
kept body and soul together to pay the rents of the absentee landlords.
Swift has himself, in the pamphlets printed in the present volume,
given a fairly accurate and no exaggerated account of the miserable
condition of his country at this time; and his writings are amply
corroborated by other men who might be considered less passionate
and more temperate.
The people had become degraded through the evil influence of a
contemptuous and spendthrift landlord class, who considered the tenant
in no other light than as a rent-paying creature. As Roman Catholics
they found themselves the social inferiors of the ruling Protestant
class--the laws had placed them in that invidious position. They were
practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and
half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the autumn
what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's support.
Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless creatures,
who herded together like wild beasts and became dangerous pests.
Swift knew all this. He had time, between the years 1714 and 1720, to
find it out, even if he had not known of it before. But the condition was
getting worse, and his heart filled, as he told Pope in 1728, with a
"perfect rage and resentment" at "the mortifying sight of slavery, folly,

and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live."
He commenced what might be called a campaign of attack in 1720,
with the publication of his tract entitled, "A Modest Proposal for the
Universal Use of Irish Manufactures." As has been pointed out in the
notes prefixed to the pamphlets in the present volume, England had,
apparently, gone to work systematically to ruin Irish manufactures.
They seemed to threaten ruin to English industries; at least so the
people in England thought. The pernicious legislation began in the
reign of Charles II. and continued in that of William III. The Irish
manufacturer was not permitted to export his products and found a
precarious livelihood in a contraband trade. Swift's "Proposal" is one of
retaliation. Since England will not allow Ireland to send out her goods,
let the people of Ireland use them, and let them join together and
determine to use nothing from England. Everything that came from
England should be burned, except the people and the coal. If England
had the right to prevent the exportation of the goods made in Ireland,
she had not the right to prevent the people of Ireland from choosing
what they should wear. The temper of the pamphlet was mild in the
extreme; but the governing officials saw in it dangerous symptoms. The
pamphlet was stigmatized as libellous and seditious, and the writer as
attempting to disunite the two nations. The printer was brought to trial,
and the pamphlet obtained a tremendous circulation. Although the jury
acquitted the printer, Chief Justice Whitshed, who had, as Swift puts it,
"so quick an understanding, that he resolved, if possible, to outdo his
orders," sent the jury back nine times to reconsider their verdict. He
even declared solemnly that the author's design was to bring in the
Pretender. This cry of bringing in the Pretender was raised on any and
every occasion, and has been well ridiculed by Swift in his
"Examination of Certain Abuses and Corruptions in the City of
Dublin." The end of Whitshed's persecution could have been
foretold--it fizzled out in a nolle prosequi.
Following on this interesting commencement came the lengthened
agitation against Wood's Halfpence to which we owe the remarkable
series of writings known now as the "Drapier's Letters." These are fully
discussed in the volume preceding this. But Swift found other channels

in which to continue rousing the spirit of the people, and refreshing it to
further effort. The mania for speculation which Law's schemes had
given birth to, reached poor Ireland also. People thought there might be
found a scheme on similar lines by which Ireland might move to
prosperity. A Bank project was initiated for the purpose of assisting
small tradesmen. But a scheme that in itself would have been excellent
in a prosperous society, could only end in failure in such a community
as peopled Ireland. Swift felt this and opposed the plan in his satirical
tract, "The Swearer's Bank." The tract sufficed, for no more was heard
of the National Bank after the House of Commons rejected it.
The thieves and "roughs" who infested Dublin came