I used two 20th Century sources about the demographic and economic conditions of Ireland at the time Swift write “A Modest Proposal”, and in my opinion these would have strengthened the paper overall by placing it in a more detailed historical context. Neither of the articles would have changed my basic conclusions that Ireland was suffering from extreme poverty, hunger and poverty because of England’s colonial policies. They would have offered further proof of my main thesis that even though Swift’s essay was intended only to be satire, he had a very serious political purpose. In my opinion, during the 1720s, Swift and his supporters were part of a serious debate about the true conditions in Ireland, which their English rulers often imagined to be a rich and prosperous country with a rapidly growing population. He knew that the reality was the exact opposite, and the true situation in the country was extreme poverty for most of the population, hunger, famine and mass emigration to America. Although no one at the time knew the exact population of the country, Swift did not believe that it was growing very rapidly at all, but that the death rate was probably higher than the birth rate. As the original essay indicated, he blamed these appalling conditions on English colonial policies and hoped that Ireland would be given its freedom someday. Swift knew that the Navigation Acts had destroyed manufacturing in Ireland, and that English taxes and rents had driven most of the people to desperation, while enclosure of the land for sheep and cattle had increased starvation. Ireland could have been one of the richest nations in Europe, Swift argued, but English colonial policies made it one of the poorest.
Louis Landa pointed in his 1942 article “’A Modest Proposal’ and Populousness” that contemporary mercantilist theory regarded a large and rapidly expanding population as a sign of great prosperity, and also the function of colonies like Ireland was to supply the Mother Country with raw materials and cheap agricultural imports. Economics and demography were in their infancy in the 18th Century, and Jonathan Swift was a clergyman and popular writer rather than a specialist in these subjects, but he was also very skeptical of the mercantilist theory that “people were the riches of a nation” (Landa 161). No one at the time even knew the exact population of Ireland but Swift was aware that it was a very poor country and the majority of people lived in extreme poverty. Like most Irish patriots then and later, he knew that British colonialism was the real cause of Ireland’s plight, and that for the common people the only real choices were crime, starvation or emigration to America. Mercantilist writers like Sir William Petty imagined that large populations always correlated to greater national wealth, but this was obviously not the case in Ireland. More properly, the mercantilists thought that labor was the wealth of a country, especially a large force of low-wage workers. As Bernard Mandeville put it, the more working poor there were the lower the prices for a nation’s exports, even though the workers never shared in any of the wealth. Surveying the mass poverty and unemployment of Ireland, though, Swift concluded that “a person who does not function productively in economic or political society makes the nation poorer” (Landa 165).
Swift insisted that these conditions led to mass emigration to America, and in the 19th Century famines they became even worse, with half of the population either dying or fleeing from starvation. Britain’s Parliament had also destroyed the woolen industry in Ireland, forcing its workers to depart for Europe or the Americas, but Britain had no use for colonies that competed with it in manufacturing (Landa 168). In other satirical essays of the time, Swift commented that many Irish could only survive by serving as mercenaries for France and Spain, and that the country would even be better off if they were allowed to sell themselves into slavery. He also wrote that when the settlers went to America they were simply used as “a screen between his Majesty’s English subjects and the savage Indians”, which in reality was not just a joke or an exaggeration (Landa 169).
In the 1975 article “Jonathan Swift and the Population of Ireland”, Clayton Lien also notes that neither Swift nor anyone else knew the real population of Ireland in the 1720s, although he doubted those who estimated that it was as high as two or three million. He simply could not believe this was possible given the regular famines and high levels of emigration, although modern estimates have found that the figure of three million was probably correct for the 1720s and 1730s. At the time, many English observers imagined “that Ireland was experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity”, which Swift thought was absolutely ludicrous (Lein 432). Many of his friends and allies like Thomas Sheridan were also outraged at the thought of anyone finding Ireland to be a rich country. Swift used the limited records that were available to show that the population of Ireland had grown relatively little in the prior fifty years and the rate was “abysmally below that of England herself, even below that of many despotic European countries” (Lein 447).
No real science of demography existed in the 18th Century and census records are inaccurate and incomplete. In the 1670s, Sir William Petty guessed that the population of Ireland was about 1.2 million, which Swift and his contemporaries used as a baseline to extrapolate the actual population fifty years later. David Bindon, a Dublin banker, thought that it was about two million in the 1720s and a 1731 census came to a similar conclusion, but Swift doubted it was that high (Lein 436). More recent studies indicate that the population was probably three million in 1726 and four million by 1780, but Swift and his supporters were “actively concerned with establishing a much lower estimate of Ireland’s human resources” (Lein 437). It is not as if they were deliberately falsifying these numbers since everyone at the time was only guessing about household size and birth and death rates, and even about the number of households. Swift knew that Ireland had many famines in the 18th Century that considerably reduced the population, and even though no one knew the exact number of immigrants, it was certainly in the tens of thousands per year. He also regarded the enclosure of land for cattle and sheep as “criminal” since it further reduced the amount of food available to the peasants (Lein 445).
These new sources did not fundamentally change my conclusions about “A Modest Proposal”, when I wrote that Jonathan Swift considered Ireland an oppressed colony of the English. They did not have any relation to my conclusions about how Swift used satire, logos and pathos to persuade his audience. These were purely historical sources would have greatly strengthened my original essay by showing that Swift was very much part of the political and economic debates of the time. They did not change my conclusions that “A Modest Proposal” was a satirical or ironic essay used to make a very serious point. In my opinion, Swift may not have known all of the statistical details about the poverty, hunger and oppression of Ireland under British rule, but he had certainly observed it personally. He knew the mass of peasants and tenants were suffering due to English taxes and landlords, and that enclosure was worsening the condition of the common people. No one at the time knew what the exact population really was or how many people were emigrating every year, but Swift saw that the majority of people were hungry and desperate, and that every ten years or so another famine would bring mass starvation. For all of these reasons, he argued that Ireland should be freed of its colonial bondage, which did not finally occur until the 1920s.
WORKS CITED
Landa, Louis A. “’A Modest Proposal’ and Populousness”. Modern Philology 46(2), November 1942: 161-70.
Lein, Clayton D. “Jonathan Swift and the Population of Ireland.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8(4), Summer 1975: 431-53.
