in Ireland opposed a scheme for minting Irish copper halfpence and farthings which came about because of the need to fund a pension for a mistress of the King. Wolverhampton entrepreneur William Wood got the contract to mint coins to the face value of £100,800 for £10,000. The King signed his approval in July 1722 and the Irish Revenue Commissioners had objected strenuously to the Treasury in London some two years before Swift joined the fray as Drapier. Ireland had not been permitted to mint currency since Tudor times, and sometimes the circulation of money was poor. Wood’s scheme was perceived by the Irish Establishment as the wanton mismanagement of Irish affairs by Englishmen and as a test of strength between officials in Dublin and London. The scheme unravelled. The London government under Walpole proposed some concessions, a smaller issue of coins with more copper in them than proposed by Wood. But the compromises were politically unsuccessful. Wood lost his patent and was recompensed. For Swift the underlining problem was one of attitudes to the Irish with whom he, born in Dublin to English parents, sided. As put in a 1724 open letter to Lord Chancellor Middleton from the Drapier:
As to Ireland, they know little more than they do about Mexico, further than is a country subject to the king of England, full of bogs, inhabited by wild Irish Papists, who are kept in awe by mercenary troops sent from thence. And their general opinion is, that it were better for England if this whole island were sunk into the sea; for they have a tradition that, every forty years there must be a rebellion in Ireland. I have seen the grossest suppositions pass upon them; that the wild Irish were taken in toils, but that, in some time, they would grow so tame as to eat out your hands. I have been asked by hundreds, and particularly by my neighbours, your tenants at Pepper-harrow, whether I had come from Ireland by seas. And upon the arrival of an Irishman to a country town, I have known crowds coming about him, and wondering to see him look so much better than themselves.
But like Molyneux, Swift’s focus was on the rights of the Protestant Irish. Papists and peasants only figured in his pamphlets as objects of concern when ‘British natives’ like himself were disparaged alongside them in the same breath. In the same year in which A Modest Proposal was published, Swift wrote despairingly about the consequences of the constitutional disabilities under which the Protestant Irish laboured. In the unpublished bitter Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Hands (1729) he argued that the ‘British Natives’ of Ireland were emigrating out of despair of things getting better in their own country. Three reforms were needed, he argued, to cure the misgovernment of Ireland.3 ‘First, a Liberty of Trade, Secondly, a Share of preferments in all kinds to the British Natives, and Thirdly, a return of those absentees, who take away almost one half of the Kingdom’s Revenues.’ He made no plea to rescind the penal laws against the Catholic majority.
Prudent laws, Swift first argued in A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, encouraged industrious cultivation in England but in Ireland landlords were ‘everywhere, by penal clauses, absolutely prohibiting their tenants from ploughing’. As a result it was cheaper to import corn from England. Swift lambasted country landlords (and landed clerics by implication) who ‘by unmeasurable screwing and racking their tenants all over the kingdom have already reduced a miserable people to a worse condition than peasants in France, or the vassals in Germany and Poland’. In various 1729 writings he disparaged the modest proposals of others for schemes for improvement that, for all that these might work in other countries, ignored the fundamental barriers to the economic improvement of Ireland:
There is hardly a scheme proposed for improving the trade of this kingdom, which doth not manifestly shew the stupidity and ignorance of the proposer: and I laugh with contempt at those weak wise heads, which proceed upon general maxims, or advise us to follow the Examples of Holland or England. These Empiricks talk by rote, without understanding of the Constitution of the Kingdom; as if a physician knowing that Exercise contributed much to health should prescribe to his Patient under a severe fit of gout, to walk ten miles every morning.4
Another 1729 unpublished essay, The Truth of Some Maxims in State and Government examined with reference to Ireland – his most coherent analysis of the political context of Irish social and economic problems – summed up how trade barriers imposed by England, patronage on matters such as charters to mint coinage and an absentee landlord system that promoted rack-renting, made maxims for improving land and industry ineffectual in Ireland. Such maxims presumed that the people of Ireland enjoyed natural rights in common with the rest of mankind who had entered into civil society. And as for the maxim ‘that people are the riches of a nation’, this clearly did not hold in the Irish case. With little of the satire of A Modest Proposal, Swift declared:
But, in our present situation, at least five children in six who are born lie in dead weight upon us for the want of employment. And a skilful computer assured me, that above one half of the souls in the kingdom supported themselves by begging and thievery, whereof two thirds would be able to get their bread in any other country on earth. Trade is the only incident to labour: where that fails, the poorer native must either beg, steal, or starve, or be forced to quit his country. This has made me often wish, for some years past, that, instead of discouraging our people from seeking foreign soil, the public would pay for transporting all our unnecessary mortals, whether Papists or Protestants, to America, as drawbacks are sometimes allowed where a nation is over-stocked. I confess myself to be touched with a very sensible pleasure, when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes treble the worth, brought up to steal or beg, for want of work, to whom death would be the best thing to be wished of, on account of both themselves and the public.5
Swift’s grim unpublished assertion that the Irish poor might be better off dead was reworked as satire in A Modest Proposal. But he disagreed with the unnamed ‘skilful computer’ in an undated sermon, Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland, that must have been written around the same time as A Modest Proposal:
It is a very melancholy reflection, that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want, our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, labourers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.6
The opening paragraph of this sermon seems to be subverted in the opening paragraph of A Modest Proposal. It begins almost the same way (‘It is a melancholy object to those …’) but instead of workers unable to provide for themselves we are told about female beggars followed by their children in rags, destined to become thieves or sell themselves to Barbados. A Modest Proposal was close in content and argument but often only slightly more sardonic in tone than the bitter unpublished writings, serious polemics and sermons he wrote during the 1720s on the condition of Ireland. Across these, the same voice, the same arguments and the same obsessions are readily discernible. As such A Modest Proposal cannot be understood in isolation.
In The Battle of the Books (1704) Swift described satire ‘as a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally observe everybody’s face but their own’, which was the chief reason why so few were offended by it. A Modest Proposal was not just the palatable and humorous expression of Swift’s frustration but a satire on the impossibility of schemes of improvement proposed by others and a mirror held up to his own face that mocked the Protestant patriot case for economic autonomy and constitutional reform he earnestly advanced. For making this case he came to be celebrated by subsequent generations of patriots and nationalists as varied as Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. In 1847, Mitchel edited a pamphlet on behalf of the Irish Confederation entitled Irish Political Economy that republished Swift’s A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture and pressed it into the service of a new separatist ideal.
Swift