Irish manufactures were ruined by legislation; the commerce of Ireland was destroyed by the same means; her schools became practically penitentiaries to the Catholic children, who were compelled 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_.