SWIFT IN IRELAND
 
 THE NEW IRISH LIBRARY. 
 
 Sir CHARLES GAYAN DUFFY, K.C.M.G. 
 
 ASSISTANT EDITORS: 
 
 DOUGLAS HYDE, LLD., 
 
 National Literary Society, 
 
 4 College Green, 
 
 DUBLIN. 
 
 R. BARRY O'BRIEN, 
 
 Irish Literary Society, 
 
 Adelphi Terrace, 
 
 LONDON, W.C.
 
 SWIFT IN IRELAND 
 
 r-v 
 
 RICHARD ASHE KING, M.A. 
 
 Author of " Love the Debt," " The Wearing of the Green,' 
 etc., etc. 
 
 atl dcaysa-vl/?;." LUCIAN 
 
 
 Eontion 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 DubUn 
 
 SEALY, DRYERS & WALKER 
 MIDDLE ABBEY STREET
 
 TO MY BROTHER, 
 DEPUTY SURGEON-GENERAL 
 
 HENRY KING, 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, 
 
 WITH THE AUTHOR'S LOVE. 
 
 2060576
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 i. SWIFT'S MOTIVES 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 II. EDUCATION 12 
 
 III. STELLA AND VANESSA ... ... ... 26 
 
 IV. THE ENGLAND OF SWIFT'S DAY ... ... 34 
 
 V. IN POWER 54 
 
 VI. THE IRELAND OF SWIFT'S DAY ... ... 68 
 
 vii. SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET 92 
 
 vni. FIRST "DRAPIER'S LETTER" 105 
 
 ix. FOURTH "DRAPIER'S LETTER" 120 
 
 x. "A MODEST PROPOSAL" 136 
 
 XI. "ON DOING GOOD" 148 
 
 xii. "THE STORY OF THE INJURED LADY" ... 157 
 
 XIII. MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION... ... 169 
 
 xiv. SWIFT'S DETRACTORS 180 
 
 XV. "IRELAND IS MY DEBTOR" 195
 
 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. 
 
 WIFT drew his first breath and his 
 last in Ireland, spent in her the 
 best years of his youth and of his 
 maturity, owed her his literary 
 education, and paid her with a 
 political education by which she has never ceased to 
 profit to this day ; but in no sense was he an Irish- 
 man. Indeed, a man less Irish by blood, character, 
 temperament and sympathy it would be hard to point 
 to in Irish history. He came by the father's side of 
 a Yorkshire family, while his mother, as he tells us, 
 was "Mrs. Abigail Erick, of Leicestershire, descended 
 from the most ancient family of the Ericks, who derive 
 their lineage from Erick the forester, a great com-
 
 2 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 mander, who raised an army to oppose the invasion of 
 William the Conqueror." It needed Swift's singularity 
 to discover an English ancestor who did not come 
 over with the Conqueror. But if by blood Swift was 
 English of the English, he was more English than the 
 English themselves in his detestation of Ireland. " I 
 happened to be dropped there," he says, " and was a 
 year old before I left it, and to my sorrow did not die 
 before I came back to it." Never once does he use 
 any other tone in speaking of the deplorable accident 
 of his Irish birth. Even in lines jotted down in a 
 note-book which were never meant to see the light, 
 and which, indeed, saw the light at last only lately and 
 by accident, he cries out for the mere relief of his 
 feelings : 
 
 "Remove me from this land of slaves, 
 Where all are fools and all are knaves ; 
 Where every knave and fool is bought, 
 Yet kindly sells himself for naught ; 
 Where Whig and Tory fiercely fight, 
 Who's in the wrong, who in the right ; 
 And when their country lies at stake, 
 They only fight for fighting's sake, 
 While English sharpers take the pay, 
 And then stand by to see fair play." 
 
 And when Swift speaks thus and always thus of Ire- 
 land, be it remembered ; t is of Ireland of the Pale. 
 It is this Ireland alone that he ever even professes to . 
 represent. " Our ancestors," he says, " reduced this
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. 3 
 
 kingdom to the obedience of England ;" and wherevei 
 he makes a grudging acknowledgment of being an 
 Irishman at all, it is as one of the English garrison in 
 Ireland. The other and greater Ireland without the 
 Pale he regards sometimes with indifference : " The 
 Irish Papists are as inconsiderable in point of power 
 as the women and children " sometimes with fear. 
 " The absentees are in the strongest view our greatest 
 enemies first, by consuming above one-half of the 
 rents of this nation abroad j and secondly, by turning 
 the weight, by their absence, so much on the Popish 
 side by weakening the Protestant interest" but 
 generally with a kind of S.P.C.A. 
 
 "Pity for a horse o'er-driven, 
 And love in which his hound had part." 
 
 And if by blood and in sympathy Swift was an alien, 
 he was yet more un-Irish by temperament and in 
 character. The one characteristic which all students 
 of Celtic history and Celtic genius agree in attributing 
 to the race is what M. Henri Martin describes as its 
 " readiness always to react against the despotism of 
 fact ; " while the one characteristic which distinguishes 
 Swift above all writers is the frenzied fury with which 
 he tore off from Nature, from life, and from man every 
 rag, not of ornament only, or only of sentiment, but 
 even of decency, to turn upon them the lurid light of 
 an Inferno.
 
 4 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Yet, un-Irish or even anti-Irish as Swift was by 
 blood, sympathy, character and temperament, Ire- 
 land owes him as deep a debt of gratitude for the 
 motives of his immense services to her as for those 
 services themselves. They were not patriotic motives, 
 as I have shown ; but neither were they, as most of 
 Swift's biographers assume, malignant motives. Un- 
 questionably they were mixed with political malice 
 in the first years of his championship of our cause and 
 in the first bitterness of his fall from power. When he 
 first feared this fall and felt himself face to face with 
 obscure exile in Ireland, he quoted to Stella the words 
 of Wolsey as ever in his ears : 
 
 "An old man, broken with the storms of state, 
 Is come to lay his weary bones among ye." 
 
 When, however, a little later, he did come an exile to 
 Ireland, he came, not as Wolsey to Leicester, but as 
 Coriolanus to Antium : 
 
 "Now this extremity 
 Hath brought me to thy hearth not out of hope 
 
 But in mere spite, 
 To be full quit of those my banishers, 
 Stand I before thee here. Then, if thou hast 
 A heart of wreak in thee, that will revenge 
 Thine own particular wrongs, and stop those maims 
 Of shame seen through thy country, speed thee straight, 
 And make my misery serve thy turn ; so use it 
 That my revengeful services may prove 
 As benefits to thee."
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. t| 
 
 It is not possible to express in closer or apter words 
 the mood of mind which at first stirred Swift to offer 
 Ireland his services for the redress of her grievances. 
 Rage, revenge, daemonic pride mortified, and baffled 
 party hate at first enlisted him against, not the English, 
 so much as the Whig, misgovernment of Ireland ; but, 
 once enlisted, he fought with a higher than mere Swiss 
 loyalty to the flag of his adoption. He never owned, 
 nor did he owe, natural loyalty to Ireland ; but he 
 found the Irish flag the fittest in all the world to fight 
 under against the enemies he most hated cant, base- 
 ness, injustice and oppression. Those who maintain 
 that Swift hated these things, not in themselves, but in 
 his political enemies, or in his arch-enemy human 
 nature have, I admit, a weighty authority on their 
 side Swift himself. Such was his horror of the 
 hypocrisy of goodness that he became a kind of devil's 
 hypocrite, and affected a Satanic cynicism amply be- 
 lied by his private life and by the faithfulness, the 
 affectionateness, the tenderness of his friendships. As 
 with Goldsmith's Man in Black) the humanity of his 
 acts are in continual contradiction with the inhumanity 
 of his words, and such shocks of bereavement as dis- 
 close to you for a moment the depths of his heart, 
 reveal a more than womanly tenderness. In truth, 
 to judge Swift fairly you must see him in those rare 
 moments when the mask of his devil's hypocrisy is
 
 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 torn roughly off by some trouble. Let me take 
 a case in which you can absolutely see him shame- 
 facedly replacing this mask that the shock of 
 a bereavement had torn off. I shall not take 
 such a shattering blow as his mother's death, or 
 Stella's, or that even of a friend, but only that 
 of a man he had befriended. Hearing that a young 
 fellow named Harrison a mere protege* of promise, 
 in no sense a friend lay ill and destitute in mean 
 and lonely London lodgings, he had him removed 
 to the healthier air of Knightsbridge, and hurried 
 hither to him with ;ioo he had begged and 
 borrowed for his relief. " I took Parnell," he writes, 
 " this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. 
 
 1 had the hundred pounds in my pocket. I told 
 Parnell I was afraid to knock at the door ; my mind 
 misgave me. I knocked, and his man, in tears, told me 
 his master was dead an hour before. Think what 
 grief this is to me. I went to his mother, and have 
 been ordering things for his funeral, with as little cost 
 as possible, to-morrow at ten at night. Lord Treasurer 
 was much concerned when I told him, I could not 
 dine with the Lord Treasurer nor anywhere else ; but 
 got a bit of meat towards evening.'' But a little later, 
 when he had time to master and to mask his heart, he 
 writes of all his unwearying kindness to the lad as 
 feebleness and folly, and concludes with the cynical
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. 7 
 
 resolution " I shall never have courage again to care 
 for making anybody's fortune." 
 
 Now, in estimating Swift's motives for throwing 
 himself into the cause of our country, his continual 
 hypocrisy of inhumanity must not be lost sight of. 
 To call these motives patriotic would be to flatter 
 ourselves, though not to flatter him ; for they were 
 higher, or at least broader and deeper than patriotic, 
 "I do profess without affectation," he writes to 
 Pope, " that your kind opinion of me as a patriot, 
 since you call it so, is what I do not deserve; 
 because what I do is owing to perfect rage and 
 resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly 
 and baseness about me among which I am forced to 
 live." Now, what is all this fury against oppression 
 and corruption and injustice but inverted love of fair 
 and pure and just dealing ? It is nothing else. " Do 
 not," he cries furiously to a friend, " Do not the cor- 
 ruptions and villainies of men in power eat into your 
 flesh and exhaust your spirits ? " " Well, no ; they 
 don't." " No ! Why why how can you help it, 
 how can you avoid it ? " 
 
 It is not conceivable of any man that he should 
 hate only for hate's sake; and it is less con* 
 ceivable of Swift than of most men because of the 
 singular intensity and tenderness of his attachments.
 
 8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 If you would know why he hated you must see how 
 he loved, and then it will not seem to you an unten- 
 able paradox that his inhumanity itself sprang out of 
 his humanity, as the tartest vinegar, according to the 
 Italian proverb, is a ferment of the sweetest wine. This 
 is not to deny or to justify the vinegar the sceva 
 indignatio of his epitaph which was the ruling passion 
 of his life. But, if it cannot be denied or justified, it 
 can be explained on the human principle suggested by 
 Chamfort's aphorism, " Whoso is not a misanthropist 
 at forty can never have loved his kind." Swift's mis- 
 anthropy, it is true, dates from youth, not middle-age, 
 but a man with his eye and insight and experience is 
 older at twenty than most men at forty ; and his ex- 
 perience up to twenty was of a specially souring kind. 
 For a good deal of his sardonic misanthropy he was 
 as little responsible as he was for the miserable cir- 
 cumstances of his birth, of his education, and of his 
 start in life, or for the insane taint in his blood and the 
 pressure upon his brain due to congenital disease. 
 Sam Johnson, a man singularly like Swift in many traits 
 of his character, and in many circumstances of his 
 education, no less than in the natural gloom of his 
 temperament, said once of himself what with more 
 truth might have been Swift's confession : " I have 
 been mad all my life, sir ; at least not quite sane." 
 Here is Addison's first experience of Swift, years before
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. 9 
 
 he was to acknowledge him in a Dedication as " the 
 greatest genius of the age." He was astonished by 
 the appearance day after day, in St. James' Coffee 
 House, of a clergyman known as " the mad parson," 
 who entered, laid his hat upon a table, and strode up 
 and down the room, heeding no one in his absorption. 
 He was known to speak only once, and that was to 
 a country gentleman whom he confounded by the 
 abrupt question, "Pray, sir, do you remember any 
 good weather in the world?" "Yes, sir; I thank 
 God I remember a great deal of good weather in my 
 time." " Sir, that is more than I can say. I never 
 remember any weather that was not too hot or too 
 cold, too wet or too dry ; but however God Almighty 
 contrives it, at the end of the year 'tis all very well," 
 and with this Swift strode from the house. Had Swift 
 here, like so many young men of genius, been merely 
 challenging attention by eccentricity, surely he would 
 have said something less inept and inconsequent. 
 Though not a sane speech, however, its sentiment of 
 embittered discontent was as characteristic of his 
 temper and of his life as his caged-beast pacing to and 
 fro. It was about this time, as he tells us, not without 
 a Swiftian sneer, that " A person of great honour in 
 Ireland (who was pleased to stoop so low as to look 
 into my mind) used to tell me that my mind was like 
 a conjured spirit that would do mischief if I would not
 
 10 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 give it employment." We all know what happens 
 when a spirit of this sort is turned in upon itself. 
 Trench somewhere remarks upon the significance of 
 the etymology of English words for enjoyment diver- 
 sion, distraction, transport, rapture, ecstasy, &c., &c. 
 all meaning to be taken out of yourself. Con- 
 versely, being driven in upon yourself disposes you to 
 melancholy and to misanthropy, and to become a 
 " rogue elephant " to your species. Now Swift, in all 
 the impressionable years of his life in his childhood, 
 boyhood, youth and early manhood was driven in 
 upon himself. He had no home and no intimates : a 
 dependant in his boyhood upon the grudging bounty 
 of an uncle, and in his manhood upon the fitful and 
 oppressive patronage of Temple; he was sensitively 
 solitary, and this shrinking solitariness tended in him, as 
 in an animal driven apart from the herd, to savageness. 
 
 Have you not here in the taint of insanity in 
 his blood, in his congenital disorder, labyrinthine ver- 
 tigo, which caused such pressure upon his brain, in the 
 gloomy circumstances ot his birth seven months after 
 his father's death, and in the bitter and solitary years 
 of his dependent youth, some explanation and extenu- 
 ation of his misanthropy ? 
 
 Anyway, the ordinary explanation a bad heart 
 shows at once an ignorance of the stuff of which mis-
 
 SWIFT'S MOTIVES. II 
 
 anthropists are made and of the stuff of which Swift 
 specially was made. Timon's disease is not a black, 
 but a broken heart ; while black-hearted men cannot 
 even hate enthusiastically. They can sneer only, and 
 their sneer is cold as the light on graves ; but Swift's 
 fury poured from a heart hot within him and con- 
 vulsed with volcanic agonies. In truth his hatred was 
 but the shadow of his love; and as shadows are 
 darkest where the lights are most intense, so you find, 
 what a knowledge of human nature would lead you to 
 expect, that Swift loved as profoundly as he hated. 
 But while, with that odd inverted hypocrisy which 
 characterised him, he hid away his love as something 
 sinful or shameful, his hate he paraded with a 
 Pharisaic ostentation. 
 
 While, then, we must exclude patriotism from the 
 motives of Swift's Irish crusade, we must reckon 
 among them a love which, if not higher than that of 
 country, is deeper and wider a love of liberty, pro- 
 bity and justice. The filthy ferment of post-revo- 
 lutionary politics was nowhere anything like so foul 
 as in Ireland ; and Swift's gorge rose at it, not the 
 less because it was Whig, though not merely because 
 it was Whig, and he " created here a soul under the 
 ribs of death " through his own intense hatred of 
 tyranny, injustice and corruption.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 ITH unconscious Shan- 
 dean humour, Swift, in 
 his fragment of an auto- 
 biography, says of him- 
 self, "He felt the con 
 sequences of the indis- 
 creet marriage of his parents, not only through the 
 whole course of his education, but during the greatest 
 part of his life." A moderate estimate, it will be 
 admitted, of the consequences of one's parents, mar- 
 riage. But Swift drops here the graver count against 
 his parents for having produced him at all, and 
 arraigns them only for having improvidently produced 
 him. His horror of improvident marriages, which 
 affected disastrously, I think, his own whole life, was 
 natural and inevitable, since there was hardly a day of 
 all his impressionable years which did not give him
 
 EDUCATION I^ 
 
 bitter reason to reflect upon the consequences to him- 
 self of the destitution in which his father's early death 
 left his mother. Two years after his marriage, and 
 seven months before the birth of his great son, 
 Jonathan Swift, the elder, died, leaving his widow to 
 look where she could for the support of herself and 
 her two children. All we know of Swift's mother is 
 his deep love for her; his character of her at her 
 death : " I have now lost my barrier between me and 
 death ; God grant I may live to be as well prepared 
 for it as I confidently believe her to have been ! If 
 the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice and 
 charity, she is there," and this pleasant anecdote, which 
 suggests that her piety was consistent with a whimsical 
 humour : On one of her rare visits to Dublin to see 
 her son, then in Trinity, she bound over her landlady 
 to keep the delicate secret of an amour with a gentle- 
 man, who was to be admitted with due mystery into 
 her lodgings whenever he called. He called daily 
 and the romantic landlady assisted for weeks, with 
 much bustle and diplomatic finesse, at these assigna- 
 tions before Mrs. Swift informed her that their hero 
 was her son ! Swift, who tells this story of his mother, 
 showed his usual grateful sense of faithful service by 
 appointing this landlady, Mrs. Brent, to be his house- 
 keeper in after years in the deanery, where she figures 
 under the nickname of " Walpole," and where at her
 
 14 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 death she was succeeded by her daughter, Mrs. Ridge- 
 way. This instance of Swift's gratitude is worth 
 casual mention in connection with his complaint that 
 " he felt the consequences of the indiscreet marriage 
 of his parents through the whole course of his educa- 
 tion." This is not the first, nor the last, nor the most 
 bitter reflection Swift makes upon the grudging charity 
 of his uncle Godwin, to which he owed his maintenance 
 at Kilkenny School and in Trinity College, and these 
 recurring complaints have been cited by biographer 
 after biographer in support of the charge of ingratitude 
 reported to have been publicly made at a Visitation 
 dinner against Swift by the Archdeacon of Dublin. At 
 this dinner Dr. Whittingham is said to have shouted 
 across the table at Swift this intentionally exasperating 
 question, " Pray, Mr. Dean, was it not your uncle God- 
 win who educated you ?" Swift disregarded the attack 
 until the question was reiterated so often and so loudly 
 that he was forced to notice it. "Yes, he gave me the 
 education of a dog!" "Then," retorted Whitting- 
 ham, " you have not the gratitude of a dog ! " Now, 
 in the first place, it does not make for the truth of 
 this story that the Dean and the Archdeacon remained, 
 as they did unquestionably, fast friends after this public 
 encounter. But to admit its truth is not to admit 
 the charge of ingratitude it makes against Swift. Why 
 should a man show a dog's gratitude for a dog's treat-
 
 EDUCATION. Ig 
 
 ment ? " The dog," says a Portuguese proverb, " wags 
 his tail, not for you, but for your bread ; " but with a 
 man it is the hand, and not the bread, which evokes 
 gratitude not what you give, but how you give it. 
 If Swift were given to the not unnatural ingratitude of 
 a proud man for irrepayable benefits, he would not 
 speak with such warmth of the goodness to him of 
 this uncle's eldest son, nor would he distinguish another 
 uncle, to whom he owed much, as " the best of his 
 relations." It is odd, too, that those biographers who 
 charge Swift with ingratitude admit him to have been 
 the faithfullest of friends, as though an ingrate could 
 be a friend at all. I do not think there can be a doubt 
 that Swift, in all the sensitive and impressionable years 
 of his life, felt the full bitterness of what Dante, in 
 the most pathetic passage in all poetry, perhaps, puts 
 as a prophecy in the mouth of an ancestor : 
 
 " Tu proverai si come sa di sale 
 Lo pane altrui, e com' e duro calle 
 Lo scender e salir per 1'altrui scale." 
 
 " Thou shalt be taught how salt is the savour of the 
 bread of others ; how hard the task of climbing and 
 descending the stranger's stairs." 
 
 But what were the " consequences " of this de- 
 pendence or of its consciousness, which, he says, he 
 felt throughout the whole course of his education? 
 Morally, we know they made, or helped to make him
 
 I (f SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 a pessimist and misanthropist, but they had, he tells 
 us, also a benumbing mental effect. "He was ad- 
 mitted," he says of himself, " into the University of 
 Dublin, a pensioner, on the 24th April, 1682, where, 
 by the ill-treatment of his nearest relations, he was 
 so discouraged and sunk in his spirits that he too 
 much neglected his academic studies, for some parts 
 of which he had no great relish by nature, and turned 
 himself to reading history and poetry, so that, when 
 the time came for taking his degree of Bachelor of 
 Arts, although he had lived with great regularity and 
 due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his 
 degree for dulness and insufficiency, and at last hardly 
 admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called 
 in that College speciali gratia^ on the i5th February, 
 1685, with four more on the same footing; and this 
 discreditable mark, as I am told, stands upon record 
 in their College registry." It also stands there on 
 record how Swift did at this degree examination : 
 "Physics male. Greek and Latin bene. Thema 
 (Latin Essay) negligenter" 
 
 In truth, the most effective of Swift's teachers was 
 his first an old nurse who kidnapped him when a 
 year old to carry him off to her native town, White- 
 haven, where she kept him till he was three. Hearing 
 that a relative from whom she expected a legacy was 
 dying, she reconciled her duties to this gentleman, to
 
 EDUCATION. 1 7 
 
 herself, and to her infant charge, by carrying off the 
 baby surreptitiously to Whitehaven, where Mrs. Swift 
 was fain to let him stay in her dread of the effect of 
 the formidable sea-passage of that day upon so young 
 a child. To this nurse, then, belongs the distinction 
 of being the only one of Swift's teachers who found 
 him or made him a promising pupil ; since she taught 
 him so early and so well, that at three he could read 
 any chapter in the Bible. Perhaps, though, I am 
 doing an injustice to Kilkenny School, which in this 
 generation had the unique distinction of turning out 
 three men, each supreme in his own walk Congreve, 
 Swift, and Berkeley. This famous school, which 
 Swift entered at six and quitted for Trinity at fourteen, 
 may have found or made more of their pupil than the 
 University of Dublin discovered. It could hardly 
 have found or made less. The sole distinction he 
 achieved in Trinity, according to a contemporary, 
 who afterwards became its Provost, was that of a char- 
 woman ! " Dr. Baldwin had an utter aversion to 
 Dean Swift because he was a Tory, and used to say 
 scornfully of him, that he was remarkable for nothing 
 else, while in college, except for making a good fire. 
 He would not, he said, allow the college woman to 
 do it, but took that trouble on himself." Only the 
 head of an University, I fancy, could be so wooden as 
 to think this story convicted, not himself, but Swift, of 
 
 c
 
 1 8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 stupidity. " No man," says Goethe, " is a hero to 
 his valet, because a valet is capable only of estimating 
 the high and low as they are manifested in the per- 
 sons of valets." Only an old woman could have dis- 
 covered in Jonathan Swift only an old woman's 
 cleverness. However, I do not mention this silly 
 saying in support of what I suppose none will ques- 
 tion that an University course is as little likely to dis- 
 cover or develop a genius as a circus is likely to 
 recognise or produce a Pegasus. It is designed not 
 for the encouragement, but for the suppression of 
 originality of any kind ; and Swift's originality which 
 consists of stripping all things bare to the bone, was 
 little likely to be appreciated by Fellows and Pro- 
 fessors, who dealt only in cast off clothes. My real 
 reason, however, for quoting Dr. Baldwin's fatuous 
 story is the indirect contradiction it gives to the hun- 
 dred times reiterated charges against Swift of being a 
 rebel within the University and a roue* without We 
 owe these charges partly, perhaps, to an idea that 
 Swift ought to have been a rebel in Dublin, because 
 his temper and circumstances were those that made 
 Sam Johnson a rebel in Oxford. u Ah ! sir," he con- 
 fesses to Boswell, "I was mad and violent. It was 
 bitterness that they mistook for frolic. I was miserably 
 poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature 
 and wit ; so I disregarded all power and all authority."
 
 EDUCATION. 19 
 
 With this prepossession the rolls and records of Trinity 
 have been examined, and Swift has been confounded 
 with his cousin and namesake, and also with another 
 contemporary who was expelled for lampooning the 
 college authorities. But if Swift's own assertion, " I 
 lived there with great regularity and due observance 
 of the statutes," is to be discredited and a more scru- 
 pulously truthful man ne^er lived surely credit must 
 be given to such an advocatus diaboli as Dr. Baldwin ? 
 Would this virulent political antagonist have brought 
 up against Swift only the charge of being an old 
 woman, if any other could have been recalled to his 
 discredit ? Swift was himself so hard a hitter, and was 
 so indiscreet and indiscriminate in his choice of the 
 persons and things he attacked, that he was assailed 
 from all sides and with charges of all kinds ; and a 
 biographer who wishes to be merely just to him must 
 be prepared to fight almost every inch of his ground. 
 The present Provost, Dr. Salmon, the worthiest the 
 University has yet had, has looked into the evidence 
 and satisfied himself that " Swift's shortcomings were 
 not very great, and were due to his confining his 
 studies to subjects which interested himself, neglecting 
 some parts of the prescribed curriculum." Swift's 
 sole college distinction for good or evil, then, was his 
 skill in lighting a fire, and this also is the distinction 
 to which the author of the " Drapier's Letters " owes
 
 20 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 his place among Irish benefactors. But he had a long 
 apprenticeship to serve before he became a political 
 power either in England or Ireland, and this appren- 
 ticeship was served under a competent master, Sir 
 William Temple. Let us see for a moment how he 
 came to learn under Temple's roof that scorn for the 
 back-stairs of statesmanship which was one day to 
 stand Ireland in good stead. Even in an early ode 
 to Temple himself he expresses it : 
 
 "The wily shafts of state, those juggler's tricks, 
 Which we call deep designs and politics. 
 
 How plain I see through the deceit ! 
 How shallow, and how gross the cheat ! " 
 
 An odd incident was the occasion, if not the cause 
 of a resolution which decided the course of Swift's life. 
 As he stood one day looking gloomily out of the 
 windows of his rooms upon the college quadrangle, 
 troubled about his debts and difficulties, and des- 
 pondent about his prospects, he saw a sailor evidently 
 out of his bearings, looking perplexedly round the 
 court. If only he had come with supplies from his 
 cousins, who were settled as merchants in Lisbon ! 
 He had. He found, at last, Swift's rooms, and poured 
 out from a bag the gold the Lisbon cousins had 
 trusted him with for the distressed student. Nothing 
 would induce the honest tar to take a farthing for his
 
 EDUCATION. 21 
 
 trouble and his trustworthiness, though Swift pressed 
 upon him a larger sum than he was ever again likely to 
 press upon a similar commissionaire. For, from that 
 hour, he tells us, dated two resolutions which at 
 bottom were one of independence and of economy. 
 He would never again draw upon his cousins, and he 
 would henceforth be rigid in his economy and in his 
 accounts. Here again, let me say in passing, Swift's 
 detractors have found a text and theme for their 
 attacks. Even Johnson sneers at " the passion which 
 seems to have been deeply fixed in Swift's heart 
 the love of a shilling." What Swift loved was, not a 
 shilling, but independence ; as he writes to Pope : 
 " Wealth is liberty." If he loved a shilling in the 
 sordid sense of Johnson's sneer, how happens it that 
 few more generous men than Swift ever lived? j 
 have before me now an account of his expenditure for 
 the year 1700, and I find from it that nearly one-sixth 
 of a narrow income went in charity. And when he 
 grew older and his income larger when, that is, not 
 age only but increasing means (Crescit amor nummi 
 quantum ipsa pecunia crescif) ought to have hardened 
 habit into avarice, Sheridan tells us that he lived on a 
 third of his income, gave a third away, and saved a 
 third for posthumous charity. Swift loved a shilling 
 only as he hated the bitter dependence and the 
 stinging memory of that dependence, to which the
 
 22 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 lack of a shilling subjected him in the most sensitive 
 years of his life. 
 
 Whether Swift's resolution of independence would 
 have set him to seek an opening in Ireland I cannot 
 say, for the breaking out of the Revolution drove him 
 to England and to his mother's home in Leicester. 
 Here, after some time and debate, it was decided to 
 apply for employment to Sir William Temple. Mrs. 
 Swift could claim relationship to Lady Temple the 
 Dorothy Osborne whose love-letters have all the charm 
 of the best papers in the Spectator while Swift could 
 plead a family friendship between Sir William's father 
 and his uncle Godwin. Therefore they applied to 
 Temple with some confidence and successfully ; and 
 towards the close of 1689 Swift entered on his unde- 
 fined, and therefore unsatisfactory, duties in the 
 Temple household. When you do not know your 
 precise position you are pretty sure, in such a house- 
 hold, of some hard knocks in groping about to find it. 
 Hence it is not surprising that Swift's first stay with 
 Sir William Temple in the capacity rather of an 
 amanuensis than of a secretary was not pleasant and 
 was not long. Having entered Sir William's service 
 at the close of 1689, he quitted it in May of the 
 following year (under the pretext of returning to Ire- 
 land for his health) with such a letter from that 
 superior person as proves that in all these months he
 
 EDUCATION. 23 
 
 never once " was pleased to stoop so low as to look 
 into the mind" of his dependent. In this letter 
 Temple recommends Swift to the Secretary of the Irish 
 Viceroy as a suitable person either as "an amanuensis 
 or as a Fellow of Dublin University," since "he has 
 Latin and Greek, some French, and writes a very good 
 current hand ; is very honest and diligent." Here Sir 
 William, who was nothing if not a diplomatist, takes 
 strategic care to cover all the ground. If cleverness, 
 French, and a good hand could not secure Swift the 
 post of amanuensis, then Latin and Greek ought at least 
 to gain the plucked degree candidate a Fellowship. 
 Honesty and diligence are thrown in as a makeweight 
 for either scale. Yet Swift never obtained even the 
 Fellowship, though there is extant evidence that he 
 did really write a good current hand ; and after a year 
 and a half's sojourn in Dublin and Leicester in vain 
 search for another opening, he returned at the close 
 of 1691 to the Temple household. A year and a 
 half ot rough experience must have taught much ta 
 a man of Swift's age and of his insight, and may 
 have taught even him humility. Only lowliness on 
 Swift's part could invite a personage so exalted as 
 Sir William " to stoop so low as to look into his 
 mind " as Temple certainly did during this second 
 visit. " Growing into some confidence with Sir 
 William," Swift writes of himself, " he was often
 
 24 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 trusted with matters of great importance" of no 
 less importance, indeed, in one instance, than a com- 
 mission to convey his patron's views on the proposed 
 Triennial Bill to King William. Swift seems to have 
 been under the singular impression that his knowledge 
 of history on a purely historical question would suffice 
 to convert to Temple's views such a Philistine as 
 King William, and the failure of his mission, there- 
 fore, was, he says, " the first incident that helped to 
 cure him of vanity." On the other hand, his 
 Majesty repaid Swift's historical lesson by teaching 
 him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion, a favour 
 which I hope made up to Swift for the King's failure 
 to fulfil his promise to him of a prebend of Canterbury 
 or Westminster. For an offer from Sir William 
 Temple to him of a post in the Irish Rolls Office, 
 of the value of ^"120 a year, having overcome 
 Swift's scruple to enter the Church merely for a 
 maintenance, he had at last resolved to take orders. 
 It was with this view that, through Sir William's in- 
 fluence, he had obtained an ad eundem Oxford degree 
 in June, 1692, and a month later had become an M.A. 
 of that University. It was not, however, till 1694 
 that Swift, despairing at last of the promised English 
 prebend, made his mind up to take orders in Ireland. 
 Sir William's remissness (probably due to his sense of 
 the value of Swift's services as secretary) to use his
 
 EDUCATION. 25 
 
 influence to procure the promised preferment was the 
 cause of their parting, for the second time, in cool- 
 ness, if not in anger. If Temple felt aggrieved by the 
 defection, or by its cause, or by its manner, he had a 
 revenge which would have satisfied any roan, however 
 vindictive. The Irish bishops required a certificate of 
 good conduct during the years which had intervened 
 since Swift's graduation in Trinity, and such a certi- 
 ficate could be obtained only from Sir William. The 
 abjectness of Swift's letter of application for it is at 
 once pitiful and piteous ; for how must a white sheet 
 of such penitence have burned a man of Swift's pride 
 like a shirt of Nessus ! Temple's reply, returning the 
 desired testimonial, made way for a reconciliation; 
 and Swift, soon tiring of the savage solitude of Kilroot 
 the little Irish living to which he had been ordained 
 returned for the third time to Moor Park in May, 
 1696. It is from this third residence with Temple 
 that Swift's political activity dates ; but before I pro- 
 ceed to treat of his politics, and of the secret of the 
 aim and of the reach of his poliiical power, I must, 
 in passing, say a word on what has been called, I 
 think unnecessarily, " the mystery of his life."
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 STELLA AND VANESSA. 
 
 1 HEN Swift was about thirty 
 years of age he wrote 
 down a memorandum 
 of resolutions headed : 
 "When I come to be 
 old" which was found 
 in his desk after his death. In his desk after death 
 was found also a scrap of paper enclosing a lock of 
 hair with an inscription which might have been 
 written in " the ruddy drops that visited his sad heart " 
 " Only a Woman's Hair." Is there not the connec- 
 tion between this inscription and the fifth of these 
 old-age resolutions that there is between the epilogue 
 and the prologue of a tragedy ? This fifth resolution 
 runs thus : " Not to be fond of children, or let them 
 come near me hardly." How shortsighted the recoil
 
 STELLA AND VANESSA. 27 
 
 of some of Swift's biographers from this resolution as 
 inhuman ! It is human as Hamlet's wild and whirl- 
 ing indictment of Ophelia for inspiring him with love. 
 All the other resolutions are against weaknesses he 
 felt or feared. Is this the sole exception? Surely 
 he would need to make no resolution against a natural 
 antipathy? I have myself no doubt that this resolu- 
 tion which comes in so incongruously among the rest, 
 was suggested, not indeed by what he feared in the 
 future, but by what he felt in the present the fatal 
 hold Esther Johnson in her childhood and through her 
 childishness had taken on his heart. Esther, the elder 
 of two daughters of the widow of a confidential ser- 
 vant of Sir William Temple's, was eight years of age 
 when Swift first came to reside in the same household 
 with her. Swift undertook her education, and found 
 her an apt, a winning, and an adoring pupil. A proud 
 man's love is always drawn out by the benefits he con. 
 fers rather than by those he receives, and Swift of all 
 men must have found the relief immense at Moor Park 
 to play for some hours daily the part of an adored patron 
 in place of that of a slighted dependent. Again, Swift, 
 the most masterful of men, made always that oriental 
 submissiveness exacted from childhood, a preliminary 
 and indispensable condition with the sex of his 
 friendship. The rules ordaining this and other oriental 
 observances, which he formulated in jest, he insisted
 
 28 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 on seriously, with the result which might be expected 
 the adoration of the sex 
 
 "That seeks to find in those they love, 
 Stern strength and promise of control." 
 
 Now Stella's submissiveness, dating from childhood, 
 was naturally childlike to the close of her life. Her 
 worship of Swift was also childlike in its implicitness, 
 while it ripened with years into a woman's passion ; 
 and this devotion he returned with a love as tender 
 and intense as a man ever felt for a woman. I do not 
 envy the man who is untouched by the infantile prattle 
 of The Journal to Stella written in the intervals of his 
 dictating the policy of England at home and abroad 
 or who is unmoved by the white-hot agony of his 
 anxiety during her illness or of his anguish after her 
 death. Yet he marries her if indeed he married 
 her at all only late in life and then only in form. 
 Why ? This is what is called " the mystery " of 
 his life, which the ingenuity of a host of biographers 
 has been taxed to explain. Some account for 
 it by the suggestion that Swift and Stella were 
 brother and sister illegitimate children of Sir William 
 Temple's by different mothers a suggestion which 
 hardly needed the demonstrative evidence that has 
 been adduced to disprove it ; since the mere marriage 
 form itself seems to me to disprove it. If one must
 
 STELLA AND VANESSA. 29 
 
 needs find a mystery in Swift's life, then there is one 
 infinitely more unaccountable to readers of A Tale of a 
 Tub than his merely formal marriage to Stella the 
 mystery of his sincere and supreme faith in the 
 Church of England. That a man who saw every- 
 thing with so piercing an eye and in so fierce a light 
 as Swift did, could not see that in A Tale of a 
 Tub he had dug the foundations of his Church 
 away, is to me far and away the most inexplicable 
 mystery of his life. However, there is no doubt at all 
 that he did really and entirely believe in his Church ; 
 and to such a believer it would have seemed sacrilege 
 to go through the form of an incestuous marriage. 
 
 But this discredited theory has been displaced in 
 later biographies by another no less unwarrantable 
 Swift's constitutional incapacity of love. But how is 
 this theory reconcilable with his Leicester flirtations 
 in general, and specially that with Miss Betty Jones* 
 which so alarmed his mother, who probably knew 
 something of his temperament ? How is it reconcil- 
 able with the vehement passion of his proposal to 
 Miss Waring (" Varina ") ? Or how even with his 
 original intention to marry Stella the moment he was 
 in a position to maintain a wife? What less than 
 such an intention do these words, coming from a man 
 so scrupulously sincere as Swift, express ? "I beg 
 you to be easy," he writes from London to her, " I
 
 30 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 beg you to be easy till fortune takes her course, and 
 to believe that your felicity is the great goal I aim at 
 in all my pursuits." 
 
 If Swift might have married Betty Jones, would 
 have married " Varina," and meant to marry Stella, I 
 think this second theory can be accepted only in de- 
 fault and in despair of any other adequate expla- 
 nation. 
 
 But surely we have an adequate explanation in the 
 two horrors which haunted Swift's life horror of 
 poverty and dependence in his youth, and horror of 
 impending madness in his manhood ? Over and over 
 again he inveighs against the weakness and wicked- 
 ness of improvident marriages. Here is a Swiftian 
 parable wherewith he poured in oil and wine into 
 the wounds of a hapless curate, who had made 
 such a marriage : " When I was a schoolboy at Kil- 
 kenny, and in the lower form, I longed very much 
 to have a horse of my own to ride on. One day I 
 saw a poor man leading a very mangy, lean horse out 
 of the town to kill him for his skin. I asked the man 
 if he would sell him, which he readily consented to 
 do, upon my offering him somewhat more than the 
 price of his hide, which was all the money I had in 
 the world. I immediately got on him to the great 
 envy of some of my school-fellows, and to the ridicule 
 of others, and rode him about the town. The
 
 STELLA AND VANESSA. 31 
 
 horse soon tired, and lay down. As I had no 
 stable to put him into, nor any money to pay for 
 his sustenance, I began to find out what a foolish bar- 
 gain I had made, and cried heartily for the loss of 
 my cash ; but the horse dying soon after upon the 
 spot, gave me some relief." I ought to add that when 
 the curate with tears admitted that this romantic 
 parable fitted every circumstance of his case, Swift in- 
 terested himself successfully to procure his promotion. 
 When, however, Swift had himself obtained such 
 promotion as would have enabled him to maintain a 
 wife in comfort, he had become haunted with the 
 spectre of a more frightful presentiment. It was not 
 often that Swift disclosed his deepest feelings even to 
 his dearest friends, and it must have been the over- 
 powering pressure of this horror which impelled him 
 to open his heart to its blackest depth one day to 
 Young, the poet, "I shall die at the top, like that 
 tree ! " His uncle, Godwin, had died so, and there 
 must, I think, have been a brooding consciousness in 
 his mind that the nickname of " mad parson " by 
 which he was known both in London and in Ireland 
 in his youth, was not given without ground. But 
 chiefly the increase in the violence of the attacks of 
 the congenital disease, Labyrinthine Vertigo, which 
 caused not only dizziness and deafness, but intolerable 
 agony and those epileptic seizures which did at last
 
 32 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 produce paralysis of the brain, warned Swift of his 
 ever-impending doom. Hence this cry of despair to 
 Young ; hence his setting aside a third of his income 
 to the sympathetic object of founding an asylum after 
 his death; and hence also, I have no doubt at all, 
 his horror of any marriage not purely formal. 
 
 As for the other factitious mystery of his life, his 
 relations to Vanessa, it is precisely as mysterious as 
 Desdemona's love for Othello. If ever there was " a 
 round unvarnished tale delivered " of the whole course 
 of a matter of the kind, it is told in Cadenus and 
 Vanessa ; and this tale, remember, was not only written 
 solely for Vanessa's eye, but was published solely by 
 Vanessa's vindictive wish. Therefore it is as certain 
 as anything well can be that Swift in Cadenus and 
 Vanessa has extenuated nothing against himself, and 
 has set down naught in malice against Vanessa. On 
 the contrary, every line of the poem shows as it 
 naturally and almost necessarily would show since it 
 was written for her sole reading a wish to save 
 her self-respect by explaining or extenuating her 
 passionate advances. She makes these advances 
 because : 
 
 -''Two maxims she could still produce, 
 And sad experience taught their use : 
 That virtue, pleased by being shown, 
 Knows nothing which it dares not own;
 
 STELLA AND VANESSA. 33 
 
 Can make us without fear disclose 
 Our inmost secrets to our foes; 
 That common forms were not designed " 
 Directors to a noble mind." 
 
 On the other hand, she had misread Swift's feel- 
 ings: 
 
 "That innocent delight he took 
 To see the virgin mind her book 
 Was but the master's secret joy 
 In school to hear the finest boy." 
 
 And she had misread his temperament : 
 
 "Her scholar is not apt to learn: 
 Or wants capacity to reach 
 The science she designs to teach : 
 Wherein his genius was below 
 The skill of every common beau, 
 Who, though he cannot spell, is wise 
 Enough to read a lady's eyes, 
 And will each accidental glance 
 Interpret for a kind advance." 
 
 If this account of their relations had been written 
 by Swift for publication, or if it had been posthumously 
 published by his executors, something might be said 
 for the charge that it is inaccurate, or imperfect, or 
 unfair to Vanessa ; but as Vanessa alone was meant 
 to see it, and as she alone was responsible for its pub- 
 lication, it cannot be suspected of vindicating him 
 unchivalrously at her expense. 
 
 D
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE ENGLAND OF SWIFT'S DAY. 
 
 HE gross misrepresentation 
 of Swift's political principle 
 and principles by that bril- 
 liant historical novelist, Mac- 
 aulay, and others compels 
 me to preface what I have 
 to say on this subject by an account of the incoherent 
 condition of post-revolutionary parties. 
 
 Bacon somewhere says that if man had the ordering 
 of the stars he would have arranged them with geo- 
 metrical symmetry, and historians generally, but parti- 
 cularly partisan historians, are given to such a 
 symmetrical grouping and massing of men and motives, 
 as can nowhere be found outside their pages. Least 
 of all must you look for this chess-board arrangement 
 of sharply defined squares, fixed moves and contrasted 
 colours after the earthquake of a revolution has shifted
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFT^S DAY. 35 
 
 not old landmarks only but the very land itself. Yet 
 you will find men to write as though Whig and Tory 
 represented before and after the Revolution, and to- 
 day precisely the same principles respectively ! Did 
 they represent the same principles respectively even 
 at the same time, but in different countries ? To take 
 Swift's political pole-star his Church would not a 
 man who was a churchman before all things be with 
 equal sincerity and even vehemence a Whig in Ireland, 
 where the Revolution meant the supremacy of the 
 Church, and a Tory in Scotland, where the Revolution 
 meant the overthrow of the Church? But leaving 
 Ireland and Scotland out of the question and confin- 
 ing ourselves to England, what a kaleidoscope in the 
 hand of fortune were English politics of that day ! In 
 the first place, men turned sincerely Whig or Tory 
 according to the chances of a Jacobite restoration. 
 According to these chances you see England more than 
 once, like an unballasted ship with her cargo in bulk, 
 heel suddenly and completely over to one side or the 
 other. But, besides, the issues and interests were at 
 times so confusing and even conflicting that Whigism 
 and Toryism were often to be found mixed inextricably 
 together in the same Englishman, and even in the same 
 English minister. In the same cabinet they were yoked 
 together regularly. Let us see how this came to pass. 
 It was not the change of dynasty or of the religion
 
 3 6 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 of the dynasty that essentially constituted the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688, but the Bill of Rights which vested the 
 sole right to tax the nation in the House of Com' 
 mons. This sole right, when supplemented by 
 a resolution of the House to grant supplies to 
 the Crown, only and always annually, made the 
 Commons virtually supreme. Henceforth it was 
 impossible for any English sovereign to oppose or 
 to dispense with the House of Commons for any 
 time, since for that time supplies for the army, 
 for the navy, and for the civil service were obtainable 
 only by the consent of this Chamber. But, on the 
 other hand, the ministers who had the charge and 
 conduct of public business, were the King's servants, 
 appointed by him alone, responsible to him alone, 
 and dismissible only by him. There were indeed two 
 or three indirect means by which the House of 
 Commons could force the King to dismiss a minister ; 
 but there were no means direct or indirect, by which 
 it could force the King to appoint a successor more 
 amenable to its control. Hence, a difficulty like 
 that Ue Quincey humourously describes as embarrass- 
 ing the Emperor of China upon his first ride in a 
 state-coach presented to him by George III. As such 
 an article had never before been seen in the Celestial 
 Empire, a cabinet council was called to decide the per- 
 plexing question, " Where was the Emperor to sit ? "
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFTS DAY. 37 
 
 As the hammer-cloth was unusually gorgeous, and the 
 box was beyond question nearest the moon, it was 
 unanimously decided that here was the imperial throne. 
 Accordingly amid a blare of trumpets and the acclaim 
 of all Pekin, the Emperor solemnly ascended to the box 
 seat, with a Minister of State on either side, to the 
 inexpressible delight of everyone, save the English 
 coachman. " But where am I to sit ? " he persisted 
 in asking vexatiously until the Privy Council, incensed 
 by his disloyalty, opened the coach-door and bundled 
 him inside. It was the most honourable place certainly, 
 and the proper place for the real master, but how 
 drive from thence ? This, also was the difficulty of the 
 House of Commons, with the King and his Ministers 
 on the box-seat, yet unable to drive, while, though en- 
 titled to drive, the Chamber was unable to get at the 
 reins. It was some time before a way out of this 
 impasse was discovered, and the discovery was appro- 
 priately made by an expert in the extrication of himself 
 out of political difficulties. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, 
 had been a minister of that wretched French-kept 
 creature, Charles II., and had retained his post under 
 his successor by apostatising from Protestantism, until 
 he found it to be his interest to sell James to William 
 as he had sold his faith and country to James, To 
 William he did the service of inventing that patent 
 crank-action of the British Constitution which enables
 
 38 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 the House of Commons circuitously to work the wheels 
 of the machine. Choose your ministers, he suggested, 
 exclusively from the members of the majority in the 
 House of Commons, and the problem is solved. Thus 
 the King might choose the driver, but the Commons 
 chose the road. 
 
 It was some time, however, before William had 
 forced home to him the one effective argument in 
 support of the scheme. It might suit the country 
 and the Commons, but would it suit himself and the 
 one object he had at heart, which was certainly 
 not the suiting of the Commons or the country ? 
 Like Charles II. before him and the Georges after him, 
 he regarded England but as the handmaid of a foreign 
 Power, and subordinated her interests, so far as he 
 dared, to this Power's advantage. His heart was in 
 Holland, and in the Grand Alliance of Holland, 
 England, Spain, Austria, and Savoy, against France. 
 His feeling, therefore, towards the two English parties 
 which unsteadied or fettered his foreign policy was 
 " A plague o' both your houses ! " until the Whigs 
 the war party happened to have a majority in the 
 Commons. When, however, the will of the majority 
 of the House happened to coincide with his own, 
 William hailed Sunderland as a " wise Daniel " and 
 adopted his suggestion to choose his Ministry ex- 
 clusively from the party of the majority. Henceforth
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFTS DAT. 39 
 
 the cabinet was homogeneous and the majority in the 
 House, from being a lawless, reckless, mischievous 
 mob, became an organized and disciplined army. But 
 up to this cabinets had represented, not a party, but 
 the nation, being composed of both Whigs and Tories, 
 who owed loyalty neither to each other nor to the 
 House, but only to the sovereign. Here, then, to 
 begin with, is a difference of coherence and of mutual 
 loyalty between the parties of that day and ours, which 
 is left out of account by those who charge Swift with 
 interested and cynical political apostacy. 
 
 But, again, the issues were so intermixed that every 
 Whig had something in him of a Tory and every Tory 
 something in him of a Whig, which a change in the 
 ever-shifting political situation might bring to the top. 
 For instance, the loyalty of the vast majority of the 
 nation to William was of the precise kind O'Connell 
 defined his to the Whig party to be : " I support the 
 Whigs," he said, " for the same reason that the Kerry 
 omedhaun stuck his hat into a broken pane not to let 
 in the light, but to keep out the rain." Similarly the 
 sullen Dutchman, who accepted the English throne as a 
 man marries a rich, but repellent woman for the fortune 
 he needs to carry on a law suit with a neighbour, owed 
 most of such loyalty as he commanded, not to letting 
 in the light, but to keeping out the rain to stand-
 
 4O SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 ing between the country and James. No nurse-maid's 
 bogey was ever more effective to frighten nervous 
 children into obedience than the horror of James's 
 restoration was to cow Englishmen into loyalty to 
 William. Thus a French victory, dread of a French 
 invasion, or the acknowledgment by Louis of the 
 Pretender, made multitudes of Tories sound Whigs 
 for the nonce ; while, on the other hand, when this 
 fear had subsided, like a flood which had driven 
 together to a common refuge creatures usually at 
 war, other motives emerged to make sound, ci-devant 
 Whigs sincerely zealous Tories. The Church in 
 danger, or danger to the landed interest, or the 
 pressure of taxation, or the destruction of English 
 commerce by the privateers of France, would carry 
 the country with a rush over to the Tory side. 
 
 But to come down from these generalities to Swift's 
 attitude towards the particular political personages and 
 parties with which he had to deal, let me put first, 
 not in order only, but also in importance, his idea of 
 party allegiance. In his first political pamphlet, " On 
 the Dissensions at Athens and Rome," he makes a 
 protest against party government which he never lost 
 an opportunity of repeating with even greater emphasis 
 all his life long: " Because Clodius and Curio happen 
 to agree with me in a few singular notions, must I 
 therefore, blindly follow them in all ? . . . Is it
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFTS DAT. 41 
 
 not possible that on some occasion Clodius may be, 
 bold and insolent, borne away by his passion, mali- 
 cious and revengeful ? That Curio may be corrupt, 
 and expose to sale his tongue and his pen. I 
 conceive it far below the dignity of human nature and 
 human reason to be engaged in any party, the most 
 plausible soever, upon such servile conditions." It 
 hardly needed, however, his own repeated protesta- 
 tions to assure us that Swift, nullius addictus jurarc in 
 verba tnagistri, was the last man in the world to bind 
 himself blindly and implicitly to any party. The 
 Whigs represented his State politics, the Tories re- 
 presented his Church policies ; when the State seemed 
 to him secure against Jacobitism, and the Church 
 seemed to him in danger from Whiggery, he main- 
 tained his consistency by changing his side. Let me 
 make this clear by epitomizing the political history of 
 the years between the publication of this Whig 
 pamphlet, " On the Dissensions at Athens and Rome," 
 and Swift's support in The Examiner of the Tories. 
 
 " The Dissensions at Athens and Rome," the first 
 of Swift's political tracts, was written when the 
 extreme unpopularity of William, the death of the 
 sole surviving son of the Princess Anne, and the 
 internecine fury of the struggle between the two 
 Houses of Convocation, the two Houses of Parlia- 
 ment, and the two parties in the House of Commons,
 
 42 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 made a Jacobite restoration probable. It appeared 
 in 1701 when the Tories, being the ascendant party 
 in the country and the House, attacked William and 
 his Whig supporters with a ferocity that presaged 
 civil war. The occasion was an Irish one the report 
 of the commissioners on the forfeited Irish estates, 
 showing that grossly extravagant grants had been 
 made to the King's Dutch favourites. While the 
 Tory majority in the Commons insisted upon the 
 resumption of these grants, the Whig majority in the 
 Lords held out against the Bill, till civil war seemed 
 almost in sight. However, not the Lords only, but 
 William bowed before the storm. The Resumption 
 Bill was passed, the King's friends were dismissed 
 from office, and a Tory Ministry installed in their 
 stead. These concessions, however, were so far from 
 conciliating the party in the House and country 
 which had extorted them that the result of a new 
 election was a Parliament more decidedly and violently 
 Tory than its predecessor. Not conterit with the 
 resumption of the Irish estates, with the dismissal of 
 the Whig Ministry and its replacement by a Tory 
 administration, the victors pressed for the destruction 
 of their defeated foes. They proceeded to impeach 
 William's wisest counsellor the late Lord Chancellor, 
 Somers his dearest friend the Earl of Portland 
 the Earl of Oxford, the stanchest of the Whigs, and
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFTS DAY. 43 
 
 their ablest financier, Lord Halifax. Again the House 
 of Lords made a stand, this time a dogged stand, and 
 only the temporary expedient of a prorogation averted 
 a collision. 
 
 During the prorogation Swift's pamphlet appeared to 
 counsel moderation of party spirit, to deprecate servile 
 party allegiance, and above all, to denounce dominatio 
 plebis, the tyranny of a party, as at least as oppressive 
 and mischievous as the tyranny of a despot. Swift's 
 detractors, who are at such pains to point out that this 
 pamphlet was written in defence, if not of the Whig plat- 
 form, at least of the Whig party, forget to add that it was 
 written when the prospects of that party were hopeless. 
 What brought him into this sinking galley, when he 
 might just as well then, as later, have been taken as pilot 
 aboard the boat that triumphed ? As a matter of 
 fact, this pamphlet, which is the main basis of the 
 charge of political apostacy brought against Swift, is 
 a demonstrative vindication of his disinterestedness. 
 When it was written only a prophet could have fore- 
 seen what only a miracle apparently could have 
 produced the sudden and sweeping revulsion of 
 feeling in favour of the Whigs which swept over 
 England like the wave that follows an earthquake. 
 A king's folly is naturally and fortunately proportioned 
 to his power, since the higher he is up, the more he is 
 out of hearing, sight and touch of the people, and the
 
 44 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 more likely he is to make fatal mistakes ; and few 
 kings for this reason have made graver blunders of 
 this unsympathetic- sort than Le Grand Msnarque. 
 Again and again he played into the hands of his 
 deadliest enemy, William, but never more completely 
 and opportunely than when, on the death of James 
 II. at St. Germain, he recognized the Pretender as 
 King of England. The effect in England of this 
 fatuous recognition was revolutionary. Instantaneously 
 it steadied William's tottering throne, and reversing as 
 with an engine lever the set of political feeling, made 
 the Tories seem the traitors deserving of impeachment, 
 and the Whigs the patriot preservers of their country. 
 The death of James II. and Louis' recognition of the 
 Pretender occurred in September 1701, and in the 
 following November a general election put the Whigs 
 by an overwhelming majority in power. During their 
 brief reign Swift was flattered by the intimacy and by 
 the promises of preferment of their leaders, Somers, 
 Sunderland and Halifax, but William was not long in 
 following James to the grave, and the accession of 
 Anne meant the return to power of the Tories. 
 
 Anne, so far as she was anything at all intel- 
 lectually, was a Churchwoman of a high and 
 narrow type. Theology is the sole science women 
 effect, and the less intelligent the woman the
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFT'd DAY. 45 
 
 more profound invariably is her conversance with 
 this mystery. Anne accordingly was a profound 
 theologian, and her narrow High-Church theology 
 bound her to the Tories by conviction ; but by her 
 infatuated affection for the Duchess of Marlborough 
 she was insensibly and insidiously drawn towards the 
 Whigs. The Duke was all things to all Princes that 
 he might betray all ; and he adopted Anne's prejudices, 
 as he had adopted the cause of James, and as he had 
 adopted the cause of William only till it became more 
 to his advantage to renounce each. He was almost 
 as detached from English parties as William, and for 
 William's reason that his hopes and interests lay 
 abroad and in the war, where he won glory, rank and 
 what he valued more than either more than all 
 wealth. As, therefore, the Whig party was the war 
 party, Marlborough was at heart a Whig. "I re- 
 solved," said his Duchess, " from the very beginning 
 of the Queen's reign to try whether I could not by 
 degrees make impressions on her mind more favourable 
 to the Whigs." It was because of, and not in spite of, 
 this resolve that she and the Duke feigned Toryism 
 at first to make their footing firm. " As soon as Anne 
 was seated on the throne," says the Duchess, "the 
 Tories whom she usually called by the agreeable name 
 of the Church-party, became the distinguished objects 
 of royal favour. ... I am firmly persuaded that,
 
 46 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 notwithstanding her extraordinary affection for me, and 
 the entire devotion which my Lord Marlborough and 
 my Lord Godolphin had for many years shown to her 
 service, they would not have had so great a share of 
 her favour and confidence, if they had not been 
 reckoned in the number of the Tories." It is odd to 
 think that this dull Queen and " the greatest genius 
 of his age," Swift, should have had the same precise 
 political views, and should have stood in the same 
 precise relation to the Whigs. To Swift, also, the 
 Tories meant "the Church-party," and the Whigs 
 were acceptable only so long as in Church matters 
 they were Tory. As it was some time before the 
 Whig leaders dared risk the forfeiture of the Queen's 
 countenance by showing themselves the reverse of 
 Tory in Church matters, it was some time also before 
 Swift broke with them ; but when he did break with 
 them, be it remembered, they were in power. The 
 pamphlet, "On the Dissensions at Athens and 
 Rome," which won him the favour of these leaders, 
 was published when their prospects were desperate ; 
 the pamphlets, " The Sentiments of a Church of Eng- 
 land Man," and the still more vehement and brilliant 
 onslaught on the toleration policy of the Whigs the 
 Letter in support of the Test which cost him the 
 favour of these leaders, were published when they 
 were in power. It took, however, some years and
 
 THE ENGLAND OF SWIFTS DAY. 47 
 
 some of Marlborough's most brilliant victories to put 
 the Whigs in power, and meanwhile the Tories were 
 pressing the advantage which the accession of a 
 High-Church Queen gave them, to attempt the virtual 
 reversal of the Toleration Act of 1689. The Bill 
 "To Prevent Occasional Conformity," which was 
 carried by immense majorities in the House of Com- 
 mons, subjected not holders of office only, but all 
 electors for boroughs also, to the provisions of the 
 Test Act. To enter a dissenting place of worship, 
 after having once taken the sacrament according to 
 the rite of the Church of England, was a crime to be 
 punished, on the first offence, by a heavy fine, on the 
 second, by transportation. As to receive the sacra- 
 ment according to the Church of England rite was to 
 be an indispensable qualification, not for office only, 
 but for the franchise, it will be admitted that the 
 measure was sufficiently reactionary to justify the 
 storm it aroused. As not all the influence of the Court 
 could induce the Lords to pass the Bill, it was re- 
 introduced in the following session into the Commons, 
 promptly passed there by an overwhelming majority, 
 and as promptly, though not as decisively, rejected by 
 the Lords. "I wish," writes Swift, upon this rejec- 
 tion, "you had been here for ten days during the 
 highest and warmest reign of party and faction that I 
 ever knew or read of, upon the Bill against Occasional 
 Conformity, which two days ago was, upon the first
 
 48 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 reading, rejected by the Lords. It was so universal 
 that I observed the dogs in the streets much more 
 contumelious and quarrelsome than usual ; and the 
 very night before the Bill went up, a committee of 
 Whig and Tory cats had a very warm and loud debate 
 upon the roof of our house. But why should we 
 wonder at that, when the very ladies are split asunder 
 into high-church and low, and out of zeal for religion, 
 have hardly time to say their prayers." 
 
 Marlborough used all his influence to counteract 
 in the Lords his own disingenuous vote in favour of 
 the Bill ; but this influence was slight compared with 
 that which he wielded when the Bill was reintroduced 
 in the following session. In the interval, Blenheim 
 had been fought and won, and Marlborough's victory 
 in the field was not more decisive than the political 
 victory it won for him at home. Intoxicated with so 
 brilliant a British triumph, England became of Marl- 
 borough's party, whichever that might be, and so made 
 him strong enough to show his true Whig colours. 
 Even the Tory majority in the Commons contributed 
 to his triumph by the folly with which it rushed to its 
 own destruction. In spite of the defection of its fore- 
 most champion, St. John, and of the now open oppo- 
 sition of the Ministry, it passed again the Bill against 
 Occasional Conformity, and, in order to force it 
 through the Lords, designed to tack it to a Money 
 Bill, to the disgust and alienation of the more mode-
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFT'S DAY- 49 
 
 rate of its own side. This petulant attempt to wreck 
 the constitution to pull down the house if they were 
 not allowed to be the master helped to swell the 
 Whig majority which was returned at the ensuing 
 election, and which, with the help of the victory of 
 Ramillies, kept the Whigs in power for over five years. 
 During these years they passed Swift over again and 
 again for preferment, while persistently turning a deaf 
 ear to his reiterated application for the restoration to 
 the Irish Church of the Irish First-fruits and Tenths, 
 which had been remitted in England by Anne for the 
 augmentation of small livings. This small boon it 
 meant but a little over ;i,ooo a year to the Irish 
 Church was promised at last on the condition that 
 Swift would consent to the repeal of the Test Act in 
 Ireland a safe offer to the man who had written the 
 Letter on the Sacramental Test. 
 
 It maybe said indeed it cannot be gainsaid that 
 the writer of this brilliant and biting plea for the politi- 
 cal extinction of dissenters, was sanguine to hope for 
 favours from a party whose backbone was dissent. For 
 my own part, I admit that nothing more astonishes me 
 than Swift's astonishment at the offence. A Tale 
 of a Tub gave to Christians, and the Letter on the 
 Sacramental Test gave to Whigs. But Swift was 
 one of those egotists who can never get far enough
 
 50 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 away from themselves to see how they look to others, 
 He knew at least this, however, that the fiercest of 
 the fierce fights between Whig and Tory had raged 
 for years about this one question the political dis- 
 abilities of dissenters and that nothing more dis- 
 tinctively or effectively Tory upon this question than 
 his Letter on the Sacramental Test had appeared 
 in all these years. It was published when the Whigs 
 were at the culminating point of their power, as the 
 Whig pamphlet, On the Dissentions at Athens and 
 Rome, was published when the party was at the 
 apogee of power, yet Swift is charged with interested 
 political apostacy ! As a matter of fact, in that age 
 of frenzied political gambling, Swift was one of the 
 few leaders on either side who never counted the cost 
 of declaring uncompromising and unpalatable prin- 
 ciples. That he resented the bill when it came to be 
 paid, I admit. He was enraged at the Whig neglect 
 of himself and of his suit for his Church, and he wel- 
 comed the chance of revenge far more than he wel- 
 comed the chance of promotion which the tum of 
 the wheel in the favour of the Tories gave him. He 
 was a good hater ; to smite the enemy hip and thigh 
 was more to him than to fly upon the spoil ; and that 
 pompous political prig, Godolphin, miscalculated not 
 his time only, but his man, when he ventured to 
 befool Swift about the First-fruits affair at the critical
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFTS DAY. 51 
 
 moment of his Ministry's fortunes. Godolphin's 
 foolishness, indeed, cost his party more than the 
 defection of Swift, since it was he who insisted upon 
 the prosecution of Dr. Sacheverell because the incrimi- 
 nated sermon reflected upon himself. " The impeach- 
 ment of Dr. Sacheverell," writes Swift, " arose from a 
 foolish, passionate pique of the Earl of Godolphin, 
 whom this divine was supposed in a sermon to have 
 reflected on, under the name of 'Volpone,' as my 
 Lord Somers, a few months after confessed to me ; 
 and, at the same time, that he had earnestly and in 
 vain endeavoured to dissuade the Earl from that 
 attempt." I cannot help thinking that too much 
 stress has been laid upon this Sacheverell impeachment 
 on the one side, by Lord Campbell, who thought 
 that but for it the Whigs "would have continued 
 undisturbed in office till their tenure had been con- 
 firmed by the accession of the House of Hanover," 
 and, on the other side, by Edmund Burke, who held 
 that the prosecution was instituted to secure a clear, 
 authentic and recorded declaration of the principles' 
 on which the Revolution was founded. In fact, the 
 condemnation of this foolish sermon of a mountebank 
 preacher was rather the occasion, than the cause of 
 the fall of the Whigs a mere rag, so to say, picked 
 up in the street, soiled and flimsy, but of the proper 
 colour, and used, therefore, as a flag needed by an
 
 5 2 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 army advancing already to the attack. It happened at 
 the moment when the country was sick of the Whigs, 
 and the Queen of the Marlboroughs, whom Harley, by 
 the help of Mrs. Masham, had succeeded in undermin- 
 ing. The helpless Queen, having now lost her husband, 
 who, however feeble and foolish, was her sole disinter- 
 ested friend, and having at last escaped from the insolent 
 control of the Duchess of Marlborough, was, like a 
 hermit-crab, glad of the shelter of a new shell, which 
 she found in Harley's creature, Mrs. Masham. Harley, 
 having thus secured the Queen, proceeded to make 
 good his hold on the country by successful overtures to 
 Swift at the moment of his exasperation with Godolphin 
 a happy moment for the Tories. While Swift's Exa- 
 miner won and kept the country to their side, his 
 personal influence held in harness together their two 
 incongruously-yoked leaders, Harley and St. John, so 
 long as their co-operation was possible. But when 
 the inevitable split came, the end came. A violent 
 rupture between Harley and St. John (now Lords 
 Oxford and Bolingbroke) in the Queen's presence 
 whose immediate result was the dismissal of Oxford, 
 hastened Anne's death, which, five days later, involved 
 Bolingbroke and his party in the ruin of his rival. 
 
 During the four years they held office they did Ire- 
 land one supreme service by the appointment of Swift
 
 THE ENGLAND OP SWIFT'S DAT. $3 
 
 to the Deanery of St. Patrick's a fulcrum for the lever 
 wherewith he moved our country on the course she 
 has followed to her advantage to this day. For the 
 rest, what can be said for their government, or for 
 those which immediately preceded it, or for Walpole's 
 long and foul reign of cancerous corruption which 
 followed it? Admirers of the British Constitution 
 had better not look into the characters and creden- 
 tials of its fathers, unless on the principle which was 
 the secret of the conversion of the Jew, Abraham, in 
 the second story of Boccaccio. Certainly no one can 
 look down the filthy backstairs of one and all of these 
 governments without recalling Burke's description of 
 statecraft: "The very name of a politician and 
 statesman is sure to cause terror and hatred. It has 
 always connected with it the ideas of treachery, 
 cruelty, fraud and tyranny ; and those writers who have 
 unveiled the mysteries of State-Freemasonry have ever 
 been held in general detestation for even knowing so 
 perfectly a theory so detestable." 
 
 In truth, no statesman of his time and of his rank 
 was more consistent and disinterested than Swift, and 
 only those who hold a political party to be as integral, 
 infallible and unchangingas a church quod semper, 
 quod ubique, quod ab omnibus can charge him 
 plausibly with political apostacy.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN POWER. 
 
 early leanings and writings, 
 then, were on the side of the politi- 
 cal party with which he waged 
 such bitter war all his later life ; 
 but that he sold his principles for 
 promotion in the Church, or for power in the State can 
 seem probable only to those who have not been at the 
 trouble to ascertain his principles those of an Irish 
 Tory. The highest Tory in Ireland, as he told King 
 William, would make a tolerable Whig in England ; 
 because in Ireland the Stuart cause was the cause of 
 the Catholics, and the more a man was an adherent of 
 the Church of England, so much the more was he an 
 adherent of the Revolution. Now of Swift it might 
 almost be said that he was a Church of England man 
 and nothing else. While he scorns the Irish Catholic, 
 he hates the Irish Presbyterian. He can afford to hate 
 him he argues, since the impotence of the Irish Catho- 
 lic renders the Church of England independent of a
 
 IN POWER. 55 
 
 Protestant alliance with the Presbyterian. "It is agreed 
 among naturalists," he writes, "that a lion" the Irish 
 Catholics " is a larger, a stronger, and more dangerous 
 enemy than a cat " the Irish Presbyterians " yet if 
 a man were to have his choice, either a lion at his foot 
 fast bound with three or four chains, his teeth drawn 
 out, and his claws pared to the quick, or an angry cat 
 in full liberty at his throat, he would take no long time 
 to determine." 
 
 So far as the State was concerned, then, Swift 
 was a Whig, an adherent of the Revolution, and 
 of all the political principles of the Revolution ; 
 but in everything that concerned the Church he was 
 an extreme Tory. When the Revolution and its 
 principles had taken ineradicable hold and Jacobitism 
 had become little more than a drunken toast, Swift 
 had only his Church to fear for ; and for it he had to 
 fear only the liberalizing tendencies in such shapes 
 as the Repeal or the Relaxation of the Test Act of 
 the Whigs. It was not then, in his own interests, but 
 in the interests of his Church that Swift deserted the 
 Whigs, and he deserted them, moreover, when it was 
 to his own interests to adhere to them as the party in 
 power and at the height of their power. 
 
 When, however, Swift first joined the Whigs as a 
 political recruit under the shifty Sunderland, the ship
 
 $t> SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 was sinking. He had arranged to resign his living to 
 devote himself to this service, when, even before the 
 resignation was completed, Sunderland fell, " and I," 
 writes Swift to his successor in Kilroot, "fell with him." 
 It was not the last of Swift's disappointments. " I 
 remember," he writes years after to Lord Bolingbroke, 
 " when I was a little boy, I felt a great fish at the end 
 of my line, which I drew up almost on the ground, 
 but it dropped in, and the disappointment vexes me 
 to this day, and I believe it was the type of all my 
 future disappointments." He did not, however, repent 
 or retract the proposed resignation, but settled down 
 for the present at Moor Park, and there wrote the 
 Battle of the Books and revised the already written 
 Tale of a Tub. May I say again in passing, that 
 even more astonishing than the genius shown in a 
 Tale of a Tub is Swift's astonishment at the offence 
 it gave, not to Catholics and Presbyterians alone, but 
 to members of his own Church. No man, it seems to 
 me, could unconsciously run such amuck against 
 Christianity, and be quite sane ; yet Swift was really 
 confounded that Christians were scandalised by the 
 scurrilous and indiscriminating ferocity of the satire. 
 How the man who wrote it could remain a minister or 
 member of any Christian Church perplexes the reader ; 
 but Swift was perplexed that it barred his way to a 
 bishopric.
 
 IN POWER. 57 
 
 Hardly had Swift completed this literary work 
 when Sir William Temple's death threw him 
 alone upon the world, with only a Prince's promise 
 to trust to for his future. Having first vainly 
 endeavoured to remind King William through a 
 debauched and discredited favourite of his pro- 
 mise to him of a prebend he tried to recall himself 
 to that Prince's memory by dedicating to him 
 the first volume of Temples Remains. Failing 
 here also, he fell back upon an appointment as 
 chaplain and secretary to Lord Berkeley, who was 
 setting out to Ireland as one of its three Lord Justices. 
 The post of chaplain he had accepted only as a mere 
 and honorary addition to the secretaryship ; yet on 
 his arrival in Dublin he was intrigued out of the 
 secretaryship by a man named Bush, and Swift was 
 fain to content himself with the chaplaincy and Lord 
 Berkeley's promise of the first Irish preferment 
 that happened to fall vacant. But not even in 
 this was faith kept with him. When the wealthiest 
 Deanery in Ireland that of Deny did fall vacant 
 it was put up by Bush to auction, and knocked down 
 to Dr. Theophilus Bolton for the bribe of a thousand 
 guineas, which Swift was neither able nor willing to 
 offer. That this was not an exceptional instance of the 
 manner in which that Church Swift so venerated was 
 officered, may be inferred from his own delightful des-
 
 58 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 cription of how its dignitaries came to discredit it. 
 "Excellent and moral men have been selected on every 
 occasion of a vacancy by the English Prime Minister. 
 But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as 
 these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath on their 
 way to Ireland to take possession of their bishoprics, 
 they have been regularly robbed and murdered by 
 the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seized 
 upon their robes and patents, came over to Ireland, 
 and are consequently bishops in their stead." 
 
 Swift was in some degree indemnified for his disap- 
 pointment of the Deanery of Derry by his presenta- 
 tion to the livings of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeg- 
 gan, worth together something over ^200 a year, 
 and a little later by the gift of the Prebend of Dulavin 
 in St. Patrick's, which made some small addition to 
 this income* He had hardly been instituted into 
 these preferments before he quitted them and Ireland 
 for England and politics ; for the triumph of the 
 Tories involved the recall of Lord Berkeley and his 
 brother Lord Justices, who were superseded by the 
 Earl of Rochester. It was the lack of all moderation 
 in this triumph of the Tories in the House of Com- 
 mons which produced, as I have shown, Swift's first 
 political pamphlet Discourse on the Dissensions 
 in Athens and Rome an attack upon what he 
 called Dominatio Plebis^ upon the tyranny and
 
 IN POWER. 59 
 
 factiousness of the House of Commons, and upon the 
 danger to the Constitution of the consequent dis- 
 turbance of its balance. Compared with Swift's other 
 political writings this pamphlet is fanciful, affected and 
 pedantic wheeling round above its mark rather than 
 swooping down upon it ; but it is vigorously written, 
 pertinent, and above all opportune. Unless you 
 keep in mind that opportuneness is everything in a 
 political pamphlet you will be at a loss to understand 
 the effect of this tract upon the public and upon 
 Swift's political fortunes. The secret of the success 
 of the popular orator as expressed in that happy 
 image : " The orator rolls back upon his audience in 
 a torrent what he received from them in a mist " is 
 the secret also of the success of the political pamph- 
 let ; and Swift happened to hit the taste and the feel- 
 ing and even the event of the moment for Louis 
 XIV.'s recognition of the Pretender on the death of 
 James II., was an object lesson to the English people 
 of where such " Dissensions " might land them. 
 
 Swift now was caressed, flattered and promised 
 great things by the Whig chiefs, only to be disap. 
 pointed utterly and at all points when they came 
 into power. They promoted neither himself nor 
 his mission from his Church about the restoration 
 to it of the First-fruits ; while what seemed to 
 him the very bulwark of his Church the Test
 
 60 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Act was in imminent danger of being repealed 
 by them. Hence Swift's alienation from the Whigs. 
 They befooled him about the First-fruits, and alarmed 
 him by the appointment of a Presbyterian Viceroy 
 with a probable view to the repeal of the Test Act, 
 while they more than once passed him over for pro- 
 motion. In truth, they found that he was not a 
 hearty Whig, or a Whig at all in anything except his 
 Irish-Protestant adhesion to the Revolution. His 
 Sentiments of a Church of England Man, in which 
 Whig principles of toleration were controverted 
 generally, and his pamphlet in the form of a letter 
 from an Irish to an English Member of Parliament, 
 in which the special application of these principles to 
 the repeal of the Test Act was denounced with sur- 
 prising force, spirit and humour, showed the Whig 
 chiefs that in all but his anti-Jacobitism, he was a Tory 
 of the Tories. If he had written to advocate the prin- 
 ciples and the policy he denounced, or even if he had 
 not written at all on the subject, the Whig chiefs would 
 have kept faith with him as regards both his own pro- 
 motion and the promotion of the mission his Church 
 had entrusted to him. As it is, it seems to me, they 
 as little deserved Swift's charge against them of ingra- 
 titude, as Swift deserved their charge against him of 
 apostacy. If Swift's principles were on sale, he would 
 certainly have got more for them from the Whigs than
 
 IN POWER. 6l 
 
 he afterwards got from the Tories j but he never sold 
 his principles, nor even changed them ; and he retired 
 to sulk in his tent when, if he had fought heartily for 
 the Whigs, he must have commanded a bishopric. 
 
 Swift remained sulking in his tent till the prosecution 
 of Sacheverell let out the gathering discontent of the 
 country and the court, and swept the Whigs from 
 power. Upon the Tories coming in he was again 
 commissioned by the Irish bishops to appeal to the 
 Government for the restoration of the First-fruits and 
 Tenths to the Irish Church. Upon reaching London 
 he was, he says, clutched at by the drowning Whigs, 
 whom, however, he shook roughly off, and got intro- 
 duced to Harley " as a discontented person, who was 
 ill-used for not being Whig enough." Harley, whose 
 single but singular gift was discernment of men, 
 clutched at Swift even more eagerly than the drowning 
 Whigs, since, as he afterwards confessed, of all the 
 Whig writers he feared only Swift, and was resolved 
 to have him. He undertook to carry through speedily 
 and successfully the First-fruits affair which he did 
 while Swift repaid him by his masterly conduct of the 
 Tory organ, The Examiner. The style of Swift's 
 " Examiners " is perfect of its kind and for its pur- 
 pose. His own rather bald definition of a good 
 style "proper words in proper places "expresses
 
 62 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 the form of these papers precisely, while their matter, 
 like the lead of a bullet, is calculated nicely, and only 
 to serve a single object to go straight and strong and 
 true to its mark. The admiration Swift's political 
 tracts excites is of the kind excited by a steam-engine 
 admiration of power, precision, and such exquisite 
 adaptation of means to a single end that there is 
 neither waste nor want, friction nor dispersion. 
 
 But the masterly advocacy of the Tory policy of 
 peace in The Examiner was not the sole or the chief 
 service Swift did the Administration. He was admitted 
 to the " Saturday Dinners," a kind of inner Cabinet, 
 consisting of Harley, Harcourt and St. John, and he 
 helped both to form and to formulate the policy of 
 the Ministry at home and abroad. In fact, he reached 
 at a bound such a pinnacle of power as might well 
 have turned any man's head, and which did, perhaps, 
 turn his. The sole evidence of this we have, how- 
 ever, is that of an unfriendly witness, Bishop Kennett, 
 who notes in his diary for 1713 the swagger of Swift 
 at the height of his power : " Swift came into the 
 coffee-house and had a bow from everybody but me. 
 When I came to the antechamber before prayers, Dr. 
 Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and 
 acted as minister of requests. He was soliciting the 
 Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of
 
 IN POWER. 63 
 
 Ormond, to get a chaplain's place established in the 
 garrison of Hull, for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that 
 neighbourhood, who had lately been in jail, and pub- 
 lished sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. 
 Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that 
 according to his petition he should obtain a 
 salary of .200 per annum, as minister of the 
 English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. 
 Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the 
 Queen, and told him aloud he had something to 
 say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked 
 with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and 
 took out his pocket-book and wrote down several 
 things as memoranda to do for him. He turned to 
 the fire, and took out his gold watch, and telling him 
 the time of day, complained it was very late. A 
 gentleman said ' it was too fast.' * How can I help 
 it,' says the Doctor, ' if the courtiers give me a watch 
 that won't go right ? ' Then he instructed a young 
 nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope 
 (a Papist) who had begun a translation of Homer into 
 English verse, for which, he said, he must have them 
 all subscribe. ' For,' says he, ' the author shall not 
 begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.' 
 Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through 
 the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him; both 
 went off just before prayers."
 
 64 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 This is prejudiced evidence, little likely to minimise 
 Swift's swagger or to magnify his influence, or the 
 beneficence and disinterestedness of his use of it. He 
 coined every penny of this influence for the enrich- 
 ment and the advancement of friends and proteges. 
 No doubt he loved power, and loved even the parade 
 of power, but these are not singular weaknesses even 
 in a man of such commanding intellect ; whereas he 
 was more than singular in the truth and strength of 
 his friendships. His most prejudiced enemy cannot 
 but be struck by the contrast between the zeal with 
 which in these days of his power he urged the claims 
 of his Church and of his friends, and the slackness of 
 his pursuit of preferment for himself. He did not 
 press for it ; he hardly expected it ; while he wished 
 for it almost less for its own sake, than for the sake of 
 saving his pride the appearance of failure. In his 
 Journal to Stella, wherein, remember, he writes as a 
 man speaking aloud to himself, he says, " I never got 
 a penny from them, nor expect it. ... Remember, 
 if I am used ill and ungratefully, as I have formerly 
 been, 'tis what I am prepared for, and shall not wonder 
 at it. Yet I am now envied and thought in high 
 favour, and have every day numbers of considerable 
 men teasing me to solicit for them. And the ministry 
 all use me perfectly well, and all that know them say 
 they love me. Yet I count upon nothing, nor will
 
 IX POWER. 65 
 
 but upon your love and kindness. They think me 
 useful ; they pretended they were afraid of none but 
 me ; and that they resolved to have me ; they have 
 often confessed this ; yet all this makes little impres- 
 sion on me. ... To return without some mark of 
 distinction would look extremely little, and I would 
 likewise gladly be somewhat richer than I am." Nor, 
 when the promotion which was to be his at last the 
 Deanery of St. Patrick's was dangled before him, did 
 he show undue or undignified eagerness to snatch at 
 it. This preferment was in the gift of the Duke of 
 Ormond, who disliked the present Dean, Sterne, so 
 much that he objected to his promotion to a bishop- 
 ric, which was necessary in order to create a vacancy 
 for Swift. That Swift did not take particular pains to 
 overcome this objection of the Duke's may be inferred 
 from his own account of the matter to Stella. " I 
 went to-day, by appointment, to the cock-pit to talk 
 with the Duke of Ormond. He repeated the same 
 proposals of any other deanery, &c. ... I desired he 
 would put me out of the case and do as he pleased. 
 Then with great kindness he said he would consent ; 
 but would do it for no man alive but me, &c." Com- 
 pare the zeal with which Swift pressed the suits of 
 others with his haughty reluctance to be importunate 
 for his own promotion, and you will see that his pride 
 vas of nobler stuff than Bishop Kennett's account of
 
 66 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 its vulgar parade would suggest. But there is even 
 better evidence of this, and also of the disinterested 
 loyalty of Swift's friendships, in his adhesion to Harley 
 in his fall. " I have been asked," he writes, " to join 
 with those people now in power, but I will not do it. 
 I told Lord Oxford I would go with him when he was 
 out, and now he begs it of me and I cannot refuse 
 him. I meddle not with his faults, as he was a 
 Minister of State j but you know his personal kindness 
 to me was excessive ; he distinguished and chose me 
 above all other men, while he was great, and his letter to 
 me the other day was the most moving imaginable." 
 
 But even while Swift wrote, Queen Anne was 
 breathing her last, and her death meant the 
 political extinction not alone of "those people now 
 in power," but of the entire Tory party, of Swift's 
 hopes and of all his prospects of promotion. 
 
 The political power which the Tory chiefs lost irre- 
 coverably was at the mercy of a hundred accidents, 
 from that of a prince's fancy or favour to that of his 
 death; whereas Swift's political power was indepen- 
 dent of the life or of the favour of princes, parlia- 
 ments, ministries or people. And in thus contrasting 
 the relative positions and powers of Swift, and of his 
 sovereigns and their ministers in maiking how he 
 towered above them intrinsically as much as to the
 
 IN POWER. 67 
 
 world's eye he ranked below thorn it is well to re- 
 member that this contrast was an ever-present thought 
 and root of bitterness in Swift's own mind. I suppose 
 no man with anything like Swift's powers of observa- 
 tion had ever anything like his opportunities of 
 observing the little wisdom wherewith the world is 
 governed. He had daily for years measured himself 
 against the men who guided the .destinies of England 
 directly, and indirectly those of Europe, and he 
 found and he felt that in all but the little and low 
 arts of the politician he towered above them. And 
 these backstairs and chambermaid arts of the politi- 
 cian intensified the bitterness of his scorn- In a 
 memorandum in Swift's handwriting, found among his 
 papers, he compares politicians with pickpockets, and 
 declares that the qualities needed for success in 
 each, profession are precisely the same, adding, "I 
 have personally known more than half a dozen in 
 their hour esteemed equally to excel in both." 
 
 Such were the ideas of the mental and moral calibre 
 of English statesmanship which Swift took with him 
 into his Irish exile, where its intolerable effects met 
 and moved him at every turn to fell rage. No man 
 had a deeper natural horror of oppression and of in- 
 justice, and nowhere did helpless oppression and in- 
 justice make a more piteous appeal.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE IRELAND OF SWIFT'S DAY. 
 
 N unprejudiced picture of Ireland 
 as it appeared and appealed to 
 Swift in his exile will properly 
 preface an account of his work 
 there. It alone could adequately 
 explain his " fell rage," justify the 
 measures to which it moved him, 
 and account for their success. In this chapter, 
 therefore, I shall present my readers with two pictures 
 of the Ireland of Swift's day, taken from unim- 
 peachable sources, from the weightiest organ of 
 that English party, the Tory, which has ever been 
 least in sympathy with Irish suffering the Quarterly 
 Review ; and from a statement of the Irish case made 
 to Walpole by Swift, under a sense that every word 
 of it would be checked, and if possible challenged, by
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT'S DAY. 69 
 
 Walpole's own creatures the agents of the misgovern- 
 ment it impeached. 
 
 English writers with an admirable magnanimity 
 confess the faults of their fathers. It is true they can 
 afford to confess them since only their fathers are ever 
 in fault ; while nothing makes a Pharisee feel so holy 
 as his full and frank confession of a Publican's sins. 
 I have myself read pages of Macaulay which have 
 moved me in the same way and in the same degree as 
 the triumphant recital by a Salvation Army convert of 
 all the abandoned infamies of his past. The Quarterly 
 also in its picture of the Ireland of Swift's day, wears 
 the white sheet of vicarious repentance with an almost 
 ostentatious grace. 
 
 " Even now," it says, " on recalling these cruel 
 statutes, which completed between 1665 and 1699 the 
 annihilation of Irish trade, it is impossible not to feel 
 something of the indignation which burned in Swift. 
 In 1 660 there was every prospect that in a few years 
 Ireland might become a happy and prosperous 
 country. Her natural advantages were great. In no 
 regions within the compass of the British Isles was 
 the soil more fertile. As pasture land she was to the 
 modern world what Argos was to the ancient. She was 
 not without navigable rivers ; the ports and harbours 
 with which Nature had bountifully provided her were 
 the envy of every maritime nation in Europe ; and her
 
 70 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 geographical position was eminently propitious to 
 commercial enterprise. For the first time in her 
 history she was at peace. The aborigines had at last 
 succumbed to the Englishry. A race of sturdy and 
 industrious colonists were rapidly changing the face of 
 the country. Agriculture was thriving. A remunerative 
 trade in live cattle and in miscellaneous farm produce 
 had been opened with England ; a still more re- 
 munerative trade in manufactured wool was holding 
 out prospects still more promising. There were even 
 hopes of an extensive mercantile connection with the 
 colonies. But the dawn of this fair day was soon 
 overcast. Impelled partly by jealousy and partly by 
 that short-sighted selfishness which was, in former 
 days, so unhappily conspicuous in her commercial 
 relations with subject states, England proceeded to 
 the systematic destruction of Irish commerce and of 
 Irish industrial art. First came the two statutes 
 forbidding the importation of live cattle and farm 
 produce into England, and Ireland was a once de- 
 prived of her chief source of revenue. Then came 
 the statutes which annihilated her colonial trade. 
 Crushing and terrible though these blows were, she 
 stall, however, continued to struggle on, crippled and 
 dispirited, indeed, but not entirely without heart. But 
 in 1699 was enacted the statute which completed her 
 ruin. By this she was prevented from seeking any
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT* S DAT. 7! 
 
 vent for her raw and manufactured wool, except in 
 England and Wales, where the duties imposed on 
 both these commodities were so heavy as virtually to 
 exclude them from the market. The immediate 
 result of this atrocious measure was to turn flourishing 
 villages into deserts, and to throw between twenty and 
 thirty thousand able-bodied and industrious artizans 
 on public charity. The ultimate result of all these 
 measures was the complete paralysis of operative 
 energy, the emigration of the only class who were of 
 benefit to the community, and the commencement of 
 a period of unprecedented wretchedness and degrada- 
 tion. The condition of Ireland between 1700 and 
 1750 was in truth such as no historian, who was not 
 prepared to have his narrative laid aside with disgust 
 and incredulity, would venture to depict. If analogy 
 is to be sought for it, it must be sought in the scenes 
 through which, in the frightful fiction of Monti, the 
 disembodied spirit of Bassville was condemned to 
 roam. In a time of peace the unhappy island suffered 
 all the most terrible calamities which follow in the 
 train of war. Famine succeeding famine decimated 
 the provincial villages, and depopulated whole regions. 
 "Travellers have described how their way has lain 
 through districts strewn like a battle-field with un- 
 buried corpses, which lay some in ditches, some on 
 the roadside, and some on heaps of offal, the prey
 
 72 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 of dogs and carrion birds. Even when there was no 
 actual famine, the food of the rustic vulgar was 
 often such as our domestic animals would reject with 
 disgust. Their ordinary fare was buttermilk and 
 potatoes, and, when these failed, they were at the 
 mercy of fortune. Frequently the pot of the wretched 
 cottier contained nothing but the product of the 
 marsh and the waste-ground- The flesh of a horse 
 which had died in harness, the flesh of sylvan vermin, 
 even when corruption had begun to do its revolting 
 work, were devoured voraciously. Burdy tells us that 
 these famishing savages would surreptitiously bleed 
 the cattle which they had not the courage to steal, 
 and boiling the blood with sorrel, would convert the 
 sickening mixture into food- Epidemic diseases and 
 all the loathsome maladies which were the natural 
 inheritance of men whose food was the food of hops 
 and jackals, whose dwellings were scarcely distin- 
 guishable from dung-hills, and whose personal habits 
 were filthy even to beastliness, raged with a fury 
 rarely witnessed in western latitudes- Not less de- 
 plorable was the spectacle presented by the country 
 itself- ''Whoever took a journey through Ireland," 
 says Swift, ' would be apt to imagine himself travelling 
 in Lapland or Iceland-" In the south, in the east, 
 and in the west, stretched vast tracts of land untilled 
 and unpeopled, mere waste and solitude-"
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT S DAT. 73 
 
 How insane would such a description by an 
 Englishman of English misgovernment sound to the 
 English contemporaries of Swift ! It seems a pity 
 for Ireland that light should travel so slowly to 
 English eyes that they can see things as they are to-day 
 in Ireland only a century hence. Nor do they always 
 perceive that in the Ireland of a century since (which 
 alone they can clearly see) lie the roots of the Ireland 
 of to-day. Take, for instance, the landlord and tenant 
 quarrel, which any writer in to-day's Quarterly would 
 think adequately explained by the epigram, "Tenant 
 right is landlord wrong." Yet to-day's Quarterly can 
 give the following description of the relations of 
 landlord and tenant in Swift's day without a misgiving 
 that he is grubbing among the roots of the upas 
 tree. 
 
 " The principal landlords resided in England, 
 leaving as their lieutenants a class of men known 
 in Irish history as middlemen. It may be doubted 
 whether since the days of the Roman Publicani 
 oppression and rapacity had ever assumed a shape so 
 odious as they assumed in these men. The middle- 
 man was, as a rule, entirely destitute of education ; 
 his tastes were low, his habits debauched and reck- 
 lessly extravagant. Long familiarity with such scenes 
 as we have described had rendered him not merely in- 
 different to human sufferings but ruthless and brutal.
 
 74 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 All the tenancies held under him were at rack-rent, 
 and with the extraction of that rent, or what was, in 
 kind, equivalent to that rent, began and ended his 
 relations with the tenants. As many of these tenants 
 were impecunious serfs, often insolvent, and always in 
 arrears, it was only by keeping a wary eye upon their 
 movements, and by pouncing with seasonable avidity 
 on anything of which they might happen to become 
 possessed, either by the labour of their hands, or by 
 some accident of fortune, that he could turn them to 
 account. Sometimes the produce of the potato-plot 
 became his prey, sometimes their agricultural tools 
 not unfrequently he would seize everything which 
 belonged to them, and driving them with their wives 
 and children, often under circumstances of revolting 
 cruelty, out of their cabins, send them to perish of cold 
 and hunger in the open country. Nor were the Irish 
 provincial gentry in any way superior to the middle 
 men. Swift, indeed, regarded them with still greater 
 detestation. As public men, they were chiefly remark- 
 able for their savage oppression of the clergy, for the 
 mercilessness with which they exacted their rack-rents 
 from the tenantry, and for the mean ingenuity with 
 which they contrived to make capital out of the miseries 
 of their country. In private life they were dissolute, 
 litigious, and arrogant", and their vices would compre- 
 hend some of the v;orst vices incident to man 
 inhuman cruelty, tyranny in its most repulsive aspects,
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFTS DAY. 75 
 
 brutal appetites forcibly gratified, or gratified under 
 circumstances scarcely less atrocious, and an ostenta- 
 tious lawlessness which revelled unchecked either by 
 civil authority or by religion." 
 
 The picture would be incomplete without an account 
 of the efforts of Church and State to remedy all this 
 wrong and robbery. 
 
 "We have already alluded to the statutes which 
 annihilated the trade and prostrated the industrial 
 energy of the country. Equally iniquitous and 
 oppressive was the alienation of revenue. On that 
 revenue had been quartered the parasites and 
 mistresses of succeeding generations of English kings. 
 Almost all the most remunerative public posts were 
 sinecures in the possession of men who resided in 
 England. Indeed, some of these sinecurists had never 
 set foot on Irish earth. But nothing was more deroga- 
 tory to England than the scandalous condition of the 
 Protestant hierarchy. On that body depended not 
 only the spiritual welfare, but the education of the 
 multitude, and their responsibility was the greater in 
 consequence of the inhibitions which had beenjaid by 
 the Legislature on the Catholic priesthood. But the 
 Protestant clergy were, as a class, a scandal to Christen- 
 dom. Many of the bishops would have disgraced the 
 hierarchy of Henry III. Their ignorance, their apathy, 
 their nepotism, their sensuality, passed into proverbs.
 
 7 6 SWIFT IN IRELAND- 
 
 It was not uncommon for them to abandon even the 
 semblance of their sacred character, and to live the 
 life of jovial country squires, their palaces ringing 
 with revelry, their dioceses with anarchy. If their 
 sees were not to their taste, they resided elsewhere. 
 The Bishop of Down, for example, resided at Hammer 
 smith, where he lived for twenty years without having 
 once during the whole of that time set foot in his 
 diocese. That there were a few noble exceptions must 
 in justice be admitted. No Churchman could pro- 
 nounce the names of Berkeley, King and Synge, with- 
 out reverence. But the virtues of these illustrious pre- 
 lates had little influence either on their degenerate 
 peers or on the inferior clergy. Of this body it would 
 not be too much to say that no section of the demora- 
 lized society, of which they formed a part, were more 
 demoralized or so completely despicable." 
 
 I hope the moral weight of this Tory testimony will 
 be held to counterbalance the elephantine weight of the 
 style in which it is couched. Queen's evidence need 
 not be expressed in Queen's English to be of value 
 And such an unimpeachable description of the country 
 as it appeared and appealed to Swift is of indispensable 
 value to those who wish to understand the motives, 
 means, objects and results of his Irish crusade. Swift's 
 own statement of the Irish case to Walpole, which I
 
 THE IRELAND OF SWIFT' S DAT. 77 
 
 shall now proceed to give, is of so much less value as 
 it covers so much less of the ground. Southey some, 
 where says that letters often tell more of the character 
 of the man they are addressed to, than of the character 
 of the writer ; and Swift of all men was least likely 
 to take his eye for a moment off the person he 
 was addressing. His letter to Walpole, then, was 
 an argumentum ad hominem, a bald recital of such 
 facts and arguments only as would appeal to that 
 sordid cynic, whose single principle of government was 
 that of the " Unjust Steward." Since this Minister 
 regarded Ireland as a Japanese host regards the live 
 fish from which he cuts slices with a deft avoidance 
 of a vital part. Swift aimed chiefly to convince Walpole 
 that he was cutting too much and too deeply if he 
 wished the creature to live a little longer. 
 
 " The first and greatest shock our trade received," 
 he writes in this state paper, " was from an Act passed 
 in the reign of King William, in the Parliament of 
 England, prohibiting the exportation of wool manufac- 
 tured in Ireland ; an Act, as the event plainly shows, 
 fuller of greediness than good policy; an Act as 
 beneficial to France and Spain as it has been destruc- 
 tive to Ireland. At the passing of this fatal Act, the 
 condition of our trade was glorious and flourishing, 
 though in no* way interfering with the English. We 
 made no broad-cloths above 6s. per yard; coarse
 
 7 8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 druggets, bays shalloons, worsted damasks, strong 
 draught-works, slight half-works, and gaudy stuffs, 
 were the only products of our looms. These were 
 partly consumed by the meanest of our people, and 
 partly sent to the northern nations, from whom we 
 had in exchange timber, hemp, flax, pitch, tar, and 
 hard dollars. At the time the current money of 
 Ireland was foreign silver, a man could hardly receive 
 ;100, without finding the com of all the northern 
 powers, and of every prince of the empire among it. 
 This money was returned into> England for fine cloths, 
 silks, etc., for our own wear, for rent, for coals, for 
 hardware, and all other English manufactures, and in 
 a great measure supplied the London merchants with 
 foreign silver for exportation. The repeated clamours 
 of the English weavers produced this Act, so de- 
 structive to themselves and us. They looked with 
 envious eyes upon our prosperity, and complained of 
 being undersold by us in those commodities which 
 they themselves did not deal in- At their instances 
 the Act was passed, and we lost our profitable 
 northern trade. Have they got it? No; surely you 
 have found out they have ever since declined in the 
 trade they so happily possessed ? You shall find (if 
 I am rightly informed) towns without one loom in 
 them which entirely subsisted upon the woollen 
 manufactory before the passing of this unhappy Bill ;
 
 THE IRELAND OF SWIFTS DAT. 79 
 
 and I will try, if I can, to give the true reason for 
 the decay of their trade and our calamities. Three 
 parts in four of that district of the town where I 
 dwell were English manufacturers, whom either mis- 
 fortunes in trade, little petty debts contracted 
 through idleness, or the pressures of numerous 
 families, had driven into our cheap country. These 
 were employed in working up our coarse wool, while 
 the finest was sent to England. Several of these 
 had taken children of the native Irish apprentices 
 to them, who*, 'being humbled by the forfeiture of 
 upwar.ds of three millions by the Revolution, were 
 obliged to' stoop to mechanic industry. Upon the pass- 
 ing of this Bill we were obliged to dismiss thousands of 
 these people from our service. Those who* had settled 
 their affairs returned home and over-stocked England 
 with workmen. Those whose debts were unsatisfied 
 went to France, Spain, the Netherlands, where they 
 met with good encouragement, whereby the natives 
 of these countries, having got a firm footing in the 
 trade, being acute fellows, soon became as good 
 workmen as any we have, and supply the foreign 
 manufactories with a constant recruit of artizans 
 our Island lying much more under pasture than any in 
 Europe. The foreigners (notwithstanding all the re- 
 strictions the English parliament has bound us up 
 with) are furnished with the greatest quantity of
 
 So SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 our choicest wool. I need not tell you, sir, that a 
 custom-house oath is held as little sacred here as in 
 England; or that it is common for masters of 
 vessels to swear themselves bound for one of the 
 English wool-ports an,d unload in France or Spain. 
 By this means the trade in those ports is, in a 
 great measure destroyed ; and we were obliged to try 
 our hands at finer works, having only our own con- 
 sumption to depend on. And I can assure you 
 we have, in several kinds of narrow goods, even 
 exceeded the English, and, I believe, we shall in a 
 few years more, be able to equal them in broad- 
 cloths. But this you may .depend upon, that scarce 
 the tenth part of English goods are now imported 
 of what used to be before the famous Act. The 
 only manufactured wares we are allowed to export 
 are linen cloth and linen yarn which are marketable 
 only in England. The rest of our commodities are 
 wool restrained to England and raw hides, skins, 
 tallow, 'beef and butter. Now these are things for 
 which the northern nations have no occasion; we 
 are obliged therefore, instead of carrying woollen 
 goods to their markets and bringing home money, to 
 purchase their commodities. In France, Spain, and 
 Portugal, our wares are more valuable, though it 
 must be owned, our fraudulent trade in wool is the 
 best branch of our commerce. From hence we get
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT'S DAT. 8 1 
 
 wines, brandy, and fruit, very cheap and in great 
 perfection ; so that though England has constrained 
 us to be poor, they have given us leave to be 
 merry. From these countries we bring home moi- 
 dores, pistoles, and louisdores, without which we 
 should scarce have a penny to turn upon. 
 
 " To England we are allowed to send nothing but 
 linen cloth, yarn, raw hides, skins, tallow and wool- 
 From thence we have coals, for which we always 
 pay ready money, Indian goods, English woollen, 
 and silks, tobacco, hardware, earthenware, salt and 
 several other commodities. Our exportations to Eng- 
 land are very much over-balanced by our importa- 
 tion^ so that the course of exchange is generally 
 too high, and people choose rather to make their 
 remittances to England in specie, than by a bill, 
 and our nation is perpetually drained of its little 
 running cash." 
 
 Here are statements which, if they had appeared in 
 a popular pamphlet in a Drapier's Letter might 
 well be suspected of inaccuracy or exaggeration. But 
 only bald facts would weigh with such a man as 
 Walpole, who, moreover, had every means, and also 
 every motive for detecting exaggeration or inaccuracy. 
 As, therefore^ no one ever calculated more nicely 
 his range, his target, and the weight and sort of 
 mettle needed to strike true than Swift, it may
 
 82 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 certainly be assumed that the strange statements in 
 this letter were accurately and ascertainably true. 
 
 But surely they are strange, and even in some re- 
 spects startling. To begin with, let us look at the 
 extensiveness both of the manufacture and of the 
 export of Irish woollens, broadcloths, druggets, bays 
 and shalloons, worsted damasks, strong draught- 
 works, sight half-works and gaudy stuffs, exported 
 so extensively abroad that the current contemporary 
 money of Ireland was foreign silver- All this in- 
 dustry and commerce were extirpated at one stroke 
 out of shere English envy, and nothing else. " They 
 looked with envious eyes upon our prosperity, and 
 complained of being undersold by us in those com- 
 modities which themselves did not deal in." 
 They were not our competitors, nor were they even the 
 beneficiaries of our bankruptcy. The trade eradicated 
 here was transplanted, not to England, but to 
 France, Spain, and the Netherlands, whither the 
 exiled artizans carried the secret of the manufacture, 
 and whither the Irish merchants smuggled its staple. 
 Out of mere envy they robbed us of what not en- 
 riched therm, but rather indirectly and considerably 
 impoverished them. The extirpation of our trade 
 cost England the loss of nine-tenths of her Irish 
 customers. " You shall find English towns without
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT* S DAT. $3 
 
 one loom in them, which subsisted entirely upon 
 the woollen manufactory before the passing of this 
 unhappy Bill. . . . Scarce the tenth part of English 
 goods are now imported into Ireland of what used 
 to be before the famous Act." 
 
 But, again, whose was this fine trade that was 
 extirpated to the sole advantage of France, Spain, 
 and the Netherlands? It was English and Scotch, 
 and not Irish at all in any true sense. It was not 
 the native Irish, but the English and Scotch 
 settlers who were sacrificed with such wanton reck- 
 lessness to the mere envy of their British brethren. 
 The native Irish, politically degraded by the Penal 
 Laws to the level of the cattle they were allowed to 
 tend, had neither rights, property, nor freedom to 
 be robbed of. No, it was at their masters, who had 
 in their hands almost all the land and trade and 
 commerce and manufactures of the country, that the 
 successive measures for the extirpation of the indus- 
 tries of Ireland were aimed. To speak of these 
 desolating measures as Irish grievances in the sense in 
 which the Penal Laws were Irish grievances, is absurd. 
 They were as fratricidal measures of Englishmen 
 against Englishmen as the taxation which provoked 
 the American Revolution. It was only indirectly 
 that they affected the native Irish, and it is only in- 
 directly and incidentally that Swift champions their
 
 84 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 cause. The robbery and oppression of the ascend- 
 ency by England led to worse robbery and oppression 
 of their tenantry by the ascendency. The landlords 
 bullied and beggared, revenged themselves by bullying 
 and beggaring their tenants, "as I," writes Swift, 
 " when my betters give me a kick, am apt to revenge 
 it with six kicks to my footman." This frightful 
 oppression of the peasantry also, as we shall see, 
 moved Swift to rage and remonstrance ; but politically 
 and commercially he fought only the battle of the 
 Irish ascendency against the ascendency of England ; 
 and the sole ground of the quarrel was that Ireland 
 was governed by and for Englishmen living in 
 England, instead of by and for Englishmen living in 
 Ireland- That the Scotch in the north of Ireland 
 should have a voice in its government, Swift con- 
 sidered iniquitous, while he never considered at all, 
 politically, the native Irish. Politically they were a 
 negligeable quantity "as inconsiderable," to use his 
 own words, "as their womenj and children." No 
 doubt, that they became a political factor eventually 
 was due as much to Swift as to any single man ; but 
 this was not in all his thoughts and most certainly not 
 in all his wishes. 
 
 Thus the trade destroyed by England to the 
 advantage of foreigners was substantially English, 
 as, indeed, Swift insisted in an interview with
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT'S DAY. 85 
 
 VValpole which remains on record in a letter to 
 Lord Peterborough. The principal points he pressed 
 in this interview were : That almost every Irish trade 
 and industry had been extirpated by England deliber- 
 ately ; That every Irish post of profit or importance 
 was given to an Englishman ; That the " Colonists," 
 as he calls them, were thus robbed of their rights and 
 property, which should have been respected as the 
 rights and property of Englishmen whom emigration 
 to Ireland had not denaturalized; That these im- 
 poverished and oppressed English colonists oppressed 
 and impoverished in turn their tenants till, "the 
 whole country, except the Scotch plantation in the 
 North, was a scene of misery and desolation hardly to 
 be matched on this side of Lapland ;" That the result 
 was such utter ruin to* the country as must defeat the 
 greed which caused it, since Ireland would soon be 
 unable to yield to England the million a year tribute 
 now extorted from it in one form or another. To this 
 killing of the goose that laid the golden eggs point he 
 returns in the letter as the one which alone was likely 
 to weigh with Walpole. The country was being bled 
 white and to death, he writes, and, if you do not re- 
 gret the crime, you may yet have to regret the blunder 
 you are committing. He then proceeds to point out 
 through what various veins Ireland is being drained 
 a system of arterial drainage so perfect as to seem deli-
 
 86 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 berately designed for her exhaustion. Significantly, how- 
 ever, he omits in the letter one channel of depletion 
 which he dwelt on in the interview that through which 
 Walpole himself was draining the country's resources. 
 As Walpole gave every office of profit to an English- 
 man, and as every Englishman who could, appointed a 
 deputy at starvation wage to do his work, while he 
 himself lived and spent the rest of his salary in Eng- 
 land, the country did not get the advantage even of 
 the money paid for its misgovernment. It was not 
 uncommon for these incumbents, who had to take the 
 oaths and the sacrament in Ireland upon their appoint- 
 ment to an Irish post, to make a visit their first and 
 tlieir last to this country of two clear days. Having 
 landed on Saturday night at Ringsend, they took the 
 sacrament on Sunday at the nearest church, the oaths 
 in the courts on Monday morning, and in the after- 
 noon of the same day re-embarked for England. Lastly, 
 there was the Irish, Pension List a buck-basket into 
 which every job too foul for exposure was flung an 
 infamous means for rewarding infamy. Of this foul 
 pension-list and of these official absentees Swift says 
 nothing in his letter to Walpole, because the abolition 
 of such abuses could not be shown to be to the dis- 
 advantage of England- He could hope for the re- 
 dress of such Irish grievances only as promised direct 
 or indirect injury to England, Nevertheless he does
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT'S DAT. 87 
 
 refer in the letter to the evils of absenteeism, which at 
 first sight might be supposed to bring to England the 
 unmixed benefit of the expenditure in that country of 
 a third of the total rental of Ireland- But up to the 
 Revolution it had been the prudent and continuous 
 policy of England to discourage Irish absenteeism* in 
 the interest of England herself. The Plantagenets, 
 Tudors, and Stuarts alike imposed penalties of more 
 or less severity upon Irish absentees, as upon the sol- 
 diers of a garrison who had deserted their post. By a 
 statute of Richard II. two-thirds of the estate of an 
 Irish absentee was forfeited to the Crown; while 
 Henry VIII. resumed the whole of the estates of an 
 habitual Irish absentee. As, however, Ireland, 
 crushed tc the earth, needed now no garrison, absen- 
 teeism, sirce it injured apparently only herself, had 
 ceased to be penal. But did it injure, or promise to 
 injure, herself alone? It was to this point Swift 
 addressed himself, as to: the sole consideration of 
 weight with Walpole. By bleeding the wretched 
 beast of bu:den you are overloading, he suggests, you 
 may break ii down till it is fit only for the knacker. It 
 was in the iope of influencing Walpole by this con- 
 sideration tlat Swift drew the following picture of the 
 utter exhaustion of the country : 
 
 " Another cause of the decay of trade, scarcity of 
 money, and swelling of the exchange, is that universal
 
 88 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 affectation of our gentry to reside in and about 
 London. Their rents are remitted to them and spent 
 there. The countryman wants employment from 
 them ; the country shop-keeper wants their custom. 
 For this reason he can't pay his Dublin correspondent 
 readily, nor take off a great quantity of his wares. 
 Therefore the Dublin merchant can't employ the 
 artizani, nor keep up his credit in foreign markets. . . . 
 Another great calamity is the exorbitant raising of the 
 rent of lands. Upon the determination of all leases 
 made before the year 1690, a gentleman thinks he 
 has but indifferently improved his estate if he has 
 only doubled his rent-roll. Farms are screwed up to 
 a rack-rent; leases granted but for a smal term of 
 years ; tenants tied down to hard conditions, and dis- 
 couraged from cultivating the lands they occupy to the 
 best advantage, by the certainty they have of their 
 rent being raised on the expiration of their lease pro- 
 portionately to the improvements they siall make. 
 Thus is honest industry restrained; the firmer is a 
 slave to his landlord ; 'tis well if he can cover his 
 family with a coarse home-spun frieze- The artizan 
 has little dealings with him, yet he is obliged to take 
 his provisions from him at an extravagant price, other- 
 wise the farmer cannot pay his rent. The proprietors 
 of lands keep great part of them in their own hands 
 for sheep pasture ; and there are thousands of poor
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT*S DAT. 89 
 
 wretches who think themselves blessed if they can 
 obtain a hut worse than the squire's dog-kennel, and 
 an acre of ground for a potato plantation, on condition 
 of being as very a slave as any in America. What can 
 be more deplorable than to behold wretches starving 
 in the midst of plenty ? We are apt to charge the Irish 
 with laziness, because we seldom find them employed, 
 but then we don't consider they have nothing to do." 
 Let us take together this letter and the interview 
 recorded in that to Lord Peterborough, and what do 
 we find? First, that Swift speaks principally as a 
 "colonist" as an Englishman living in Ireland, as the 
 champion, politically of what I may call the Church- 
 of-England Ireland, to the exclusion of the Presby- 
 terians, whom he detested, and of the Catholics, 
 wham he scorned. Secondly, that it was not the 
 trade of the native Irish, but that of the English and 
 Scotch settlers, which was extirpated by their British 
 brethren, and extirpated out of mere envy. Thirdly 
 that the extirpation of this trade was so far from 
 profiting, that it injured the English traders who in- 
 stigated it, by the loss to them of nine-tenths of their 
 Irish market. Fourthly, that to heap burdens upon 
 Ireland with one hand, while, with the other, Walpole 
 drained her life away, was as shortsighted as the Arab's 
 drinking the blood of the camel upon whose endur- 
 ance he depended to bear him to water,
 
 9O SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 But to all this Walpole turned a deaf ear, no doubt 
 thinking what the bookseller in " Boswell " said of the 
 hapless hack-writer, womi out in his beggarly service : 
 " There's flesh on his bones yet !" 
 
 "One part of the Empire," says Macaulay, in his 
 essay on Milton, " One part of the Empire," he sadly 
 sighs, " was so unhappily circumstanced that at that 
 time its misery was necessary to our happiness; 
 its slavery to our freedom." It would be absurd, if 
 it would not be even profane, for this part of the 
 Empire, Ireland, to regret so slight a sacrifice in a 
 cause so noble. " \Ve Irish," writes Swift, " are ready 
 to exclaim in the words of Cowley to his mistress, 
 
 'Forbid it, Heaven, my life should be 
 Weighed with her least convenience ! " 
 
 As we are ready to give our vitals to poultice a scratch 
 on your finger, we must needs contribute? even by our 
 ruin, to the advantage, ever so trifling, of our 
 superiors." But in Walpole's day we had not even 
 the gratification of the sheep led to the slaughter of 
 knowing that our sacrifice ministered to the happiness 
 of a higher being. England did not benefit, and did 
 not even seek her benefit, in our misery ; she inflicted 
 it in mere envy, and prolonged it in mere tyranny. 
 Dr. Hugh Boulter, the Archbishop of Armagh, Wai- 
 pole's virtual viceroy of Ireland for nineteen years,
 
 THE IRELAND OP SWIFT'S DAY. 9! 
 
 thanks the English Council for the rejection of a Bill 
 aimed to promote an, Irish manufacture, because " the 
 rejection was not 'based solely on disregard of Ireland, 
 but also to some extent on the notion that the rejec- 
 tion would benefit England." Disregard of the wishes 
 and interests of Ireland, he admits, would alone be 
 an adequate motive for the rejection by the Council 
 of any Bill to her advantage; and the consideration 
 of the Council in adding another motive for its rejec- 
 tion showed a graciousness that called for special 
 acknowledgment ! Has Swift in irony ever said any- 
 thing more biting of the spirit of the English govern- 
 ment of Ireland than what is suggested by the grati- 
 tude of Dr. Hugh Boulter? 
 
 Little wonder that Swift's appeal, though made by a 
 colonist, for the: colonists, to the mother "country, 
 was hopeless. He found what every Irishman who 
 has ever won anything before or since for Ireland has 
 found, that we must depend upon ourselves alone as 
 the lever, and upon fear of revolt alone as the fulcrum 
 for the moving of England for the redress of injustice. 
 This lever and fulcrum Swift used in the tracts ad- 
 dressed to the Irish people, which I now proceed to 
 consider.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. 
 
 was the government of Ireland in this 
 spirit of gratuitous disregard of the in- 
 terests and of the wishes of its Parliament 
 or of its people, which roused Swift from 
 the political apathy of years. His Irish 
 exile began in 1714, and till 1720 he 
 devoted himself exclusively to the dis- 
 cipline of his Deanery. Spartam nactus 
 es ; hanc exorna. But all these years, however, 
 " his heart was hot within him, and at last he spake 
 with his tongue," and to some purpose. He tried in 
 the year 1720 to rouse the Irish Parliament and people 
 to make the only reprisal in their power against 
 England by his tract, " A Proposal for the Universal 
 Use of Trish Manufacture in Clothes and Furniture of 
 Houses : Utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Every- 
 thing Wearable that comes from England." In this 
 masterly paper, Swift tells us the truth of all and to
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. 93 
 
 &11 with a graphic vigour, which within less than a 
 dozen pages, sets clearly before you what the state of 
 Ireland was and who were responsible for its wretched, 
 ness and its ruin. The main, but far from the whole, 
 responsibility rested on England : 
 
 " The fable in Ovid of Arachne and Pallas is to 
 this purpose : The goddess had heard of one Arachne, 
 a young virgin, very famous for spinning and weaving. 
 They both met upon a trial of skill ; and Pallas, 
 finding herself almost equalled in her own art, stung 
 with rage and envy, knocked her rival down and 
 turned her into a spider ; enjoining her to spin and 
 weave for ever out of her own bowels, and in a very 
 narrow compass. I confess that from a boy I always 
 pitied poor Arachne, and could never heartily love 
 the goddess, on account of so cruel and unjust a 
 sentence; which, however, is fully executed upon 
 us by England, with farther additions of rigour 
 and severity, for the greatest part of our bowels 
 and vitals is extracted, without allowing us the 
 liberty of spinning and weaving them. The Scripture 
 tells us that " oppression makes a wise man mad ;" 
 therefore, consequently speaking, the reason why 
 some men are not mad is because they are not 
 wise. However, it were to be wished that oppression 
 would in time teach a little wisdom to fools. I was
 
 94 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 much delighted with a parson who has a great estate 
 in this kingdom, upon his complaints to me, how 
 grievously poor England suffers by impositions from 
 Ireland : that we convey our own wool to France, in 
 spite of all the harpies at the Custom-house ; that Mr. 
 Shuttleworth and others on the Cheshire coasts, are 
 such fools to sell us their bark at a good price for tan- 
 ning our own hides into leather ; with other enormities 
 of the like weight and kind- To which I will venture 
 to add more : that the mayoralty of this city is always 
 executed by an inhabitant, and often by a native, 
 which, might as well be done by a deputy with a mode- 
 rate salary whereby poor England loses at least one 
 thousand pounds a year upon the balance: that the 
 government of this kingdom costs the Lord Lieutenant 
 ^3,600 a year, so much net loss to poor England ; 
 that the people of Ireland presume to dig for coals on 
 their own grounds ; that the farmers in the counties of 
 Wicklow send their turf to the very market of Dublin, 
 to the great discouragement of the coal trade of 
 Mostyn and Whitehaven." 
 
 Sam Johnson once overheard a fishmonger cursing 
 an eel he was skinning alive for attempting to wriggle 
 away from the process ; but Ireland, in attempting 
 to establish a tanning trade, was even more incon- 
 siderate, since, after being skinned alive, she was 
 trying to grow a new skin.
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. 95 
 
 But how was her Parliament helping her in the 
 effort? Her Parliament, be it remembered, re- 
 presented only a small minority of her people 
 only members of the Church of England. The 
 Presbyterians of the north were as utter political 
 outcasts as the Catholics of the South and West. This 
 Parliament of a small and intolerant minority stood be- 
 tween England and Ireland precisely in the position in 
 which a cringing and bullying agent stands between 
 a rack-renting absentee landlord and his helpless and 
 hopeless tenantry. Insolent towards Catholic and 
 Presbyterian Ireland, towards England its attitude was 
 abject 
 
 " Nothing has humbled me SO' much, or shown a 
 greater disposition to a contemptuous treatment of 
 Ireland in some chief Governors than that high style 
 of several speeches from the throne, delivered as usual, 
 after the royal assentj, in some periods of the two last 
 reigns. Such exaggerations of the prodigious condes- 
 censions in the prince to pass those good laws would 
 have but an odd sound at Westminster ; neither do I 
 apprehend how any good law can pass, wherein the 
 King's interest is not as much concerned as that of 
 the people. I remember after a speech on the like 
 occasion delivered by my Lord Wharton '(I think it 
 was his last), he desired Mr. Addison to ask my 
 opinion on it My answer was: 'That his Excel-
 
 96 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 lency had very honestly forfeited his head on account 
 of one paragraph, wherein he asserted by plain con- 
 sequence, a .dispensing power in the Queen." His 
 Lordship owned it was true ; 'but swore '* The words 
 were put into his mouth by direct orders from Court." 
 Whence it was clear that some ministers in those times 
 were apt, from their high elevation, to look down 
 upon this kingdom' as if it had been one of their 
 colonies -of outcasts in America.'' 
 
 Passing from the Parliament to those it represented, 
 in them also, and naturally, tyranny and servility went 
 together, like the obverse and reverse of a coin. 
 
 "I would now expostulate a little with our 
 country landlords, who, by unmeasurable screw- 
 ing and racking their tenants all over the kingdom, 
 have already reduced the people to a worse con- 
 dition than the peasants of France, or the vassals 
 in Germany and Poland ; so that the whole species 
 of what we call substantial farmers, will, in a 
 very few years, be utterly at an end- It was pleasant 
 to observe these gentlemen labouring with all their 
 might for preventing the bishops from letting their 
 revenues at a moderate half value (whereby the whole 
 order would, in an age, have been reduced to manifest 
 beggary), at the very instant when they were every-
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. 97 
 
 where canting* their own land upon short leases, and 
 sacrificing their oldest tenants for a penny an acre 
 advance. I know not how it comes to pass (and 
 yet, perhaps, I know well enough), that slaves 
 have a natural disposition to be tyrants; and that 
 when my betters give me a kick I am apt 
 to revenge it with six upon my footman, although, 
 perhaps, he may be an honest and diligent 
 fellow. I have heard great divines affirm that nothing 
 is so likely to call down a universal judgment upon a 
 nation as universal oppression, and whether this be 
 not verified in part, their worships, the landlords, are 
 now at full leisure to consider. Whoever travels this 
 country and observes the face of nature, or the faces 
 and habits and dwellings of the natives, will hardly 
 think himself in a land where law, religion, or 
 common humanity is professed." 
 
 But, if the Irish Parliament and the Irish landlords 
 had to share with England the responsibility for the 
 extinction^of Irish industries, so also in some degree 
 had the people themselves and the shop-keepers. 
 
 "It is wonderful to observe the bias among our people 
 in favour of things, persons, and wares of all kinds that 
 come from England. The printer tells his hawkers 
 
 *" Canting," i.e., auctioning, from French "quant," repre- 
 senting Latin "quantum." 
 
 H
 
 90 STVIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 that he has got an excellent new song, just brought 
 from London. I have somewhat of a tendency that 
 way myself, and upon hearing a coxcomb from thence 
 displaying himself, with great volubility upon the 
 park, the play-house, the opera, the gaming ordinaries, 
 it was apt to beget in me a kind of reverence for his 
 parts and accomplishments. It is not many years since 
 I remember a person, who by his style and literature, 
 seems to have been the corrector of a hedge-press in 
 some blind-alley about Little Britain, proceed gradu- 
 ally to be an author, at least a translator of lower rate, 
 although somewhat of a larger bulk, than any that now 
 flourishes in Grubb Street ; and upon the strength of 
 this foundation, come over here, erect himself into 
 an orator and politician, and lead a kingdom after 
 him." 
 
 This Irish prejudice against Irish products lies 
 deep down in the roots of our distracted history 
 and seems to be ineradicable- What Swift says in 
 another paper is as true to-day as when he wrote it : 
 
 "Both sexes, but especially the women, despise and 
 abhor to wear any of their own manufactures, even 
 those which are better made than in other countries ; 
 particularly a sort of silk plaid, through which the 
 workmen are forced to run. a kind of gold thread, that
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. 99 
 
 it may pass for Indian. Even ale and potatoes are 
 imported from England, as well as corn." In another 
 Paper he enlarges upon a complaint he makes in this 
 "Proposal for Use of Irish Manufacture" against 
 the shop-keepers of " exacting and imposing upon the 
 nobility and gentry, either as to the prices or the 
 goodness of their wares."' 
 
 " The mortal danger is, that if these dealers could 
 prevail by the goodness and cheapness of their cloths 
 and stuffs to give a turn to the principal people of 
 Ireland) 1 in favour of their goods, they would relapse 
 into the knavish practice, peculiar to this kingdom, 
 which is apt to run through all trades, even so low as 
 a common ale seller, who 1 , as soon as he gets a vogue 
 for his liquor and outsells his neighbour, thinks his 
 credit will put off the worst he can buy till his custo- 
 mers will come no more." 
 
 Perhaps this short-sighted policy also persists 
 among us to this day. A large employer of Irish labour 
 said to me once, " An Irishman seems to me to regard 
 the job in hand as the last he will ever get in this 
 world, and to resolve to make all he can out of it 
 without a thought of to-morrow." " We practise like 
 peddlers," says Swift, " and sacrifice all honesty to the 
 present urging advantage.'' A similar short-sighted- 
 ness had something to do with an evil at least as pre- 
 valent in our day as it was in Swift's the depopulation
 
 100 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 of the country through the substitution of pasturage 
 for tillage. 
 
 "It is the peculiar felicity and prudence of the 
 people of this kingdom," he says sarcastically at the 
 opening of this 'Proposal,' "that whatever com- 
 modities and productions lie under the greatest dis- 
 couragements from Englandi, those are what they 
 are sure to be most industrious in cultivating 
 and spreading. Agriculture, which has been 
 the principal care of all wise nations, and 
 for the encouragement whereof there are so many 
 statute laws in England, we countenance so well, that 
 the landlords are everywhere by penal clauses abso- 
 lutely prohibiting their tenants from ploughing not 
 satisfied to confine them within certain limitations, as 
 is the practise of the English One effect of which is 
 already seen in the prodigious dearness of corn, and 
 the importation of it from London, as the cheaper 
 market. And because people are the riches of a 
 country, and that our neighbours have done, and are 
 doing, all that in them lies to make our wool a drug 
 to us, and a monopoly to them ; therefore the politic 
 gentlemen of Ireland have depopulated vast tracts of 
 the best land in Ireland for the feeding of sheep." 
 
 In another Paper " Answer to a Memorial " he
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST IRISH PAMPHLET. IOI 
 
 writes with as much wit as wisdom^ " Ajax was mad 
 when he mistook a flock of sheep for his enemies ; 
 but. we shall never be sober, until we have the same 
 way of thinking." 
 
 But distracted and demoralized as the country was, 
 she had a common enemy and common interests, and 
 one hope of the recovery of her extinguished trade ; 
 and this was the inspiration of Swift's vigorous appeal : 
 
 "I could wish the Parliament had thought fit 
 to have suspended their regulation of Church 
 matters, and enlargements of the prerogative, until 
 a more convenient time, because they did not 
 appear very pressing, at least to the persons prin- 
 cipally concerned; and, instead of these great re- 
 finements in politics and divinity, had amused them- 
 selves and their committees a little with the state of 
 the nation. For example: What if the House of 
 Commons had thought fit to make a resolution, 
 nemine contradicente, against wearing any cloth or 
 stuff in their families, which were not of the growth 
 and manufacture of this kingdom? What if they 
 had extended it so far as utterly to exclude all silks, 
 velvets, callicoes, and the whole lexicon of female 
 fopperies, and declared that whoever acted otherwise 
 should be deemed arid reputed an enemy to the
 
 102 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 nation ? What if they had sent up such a resolution 
 to be agreed to by the House of Lords, and by their 
 own practise and encouragement spread the execution 
 of it in their several countries? What if we should 
 agree to/ make burying in woollen a fashion, as our 
 neighbours have made it a law ? What if the ladies 
 would be content with Irish stuffs for the furniture of 
 their houses, for gowns and petticoats for themselves 
 and their daughters? Upon the whole, and to crown 
 all the rest, let a firm resolution be taken by male and 
 female never to appear with one single shred that 
 comes from England 1 , and let all the people say, 
 ' AMEN ! ' I hope and believe nothing could please 
 his Majesty better than to hear that his loyal subjects 
 of both sexes in the kingdom celebrated his birthday 
 (now approaching) universally clad in their own manu- 
 facture. Is there virtue enough left in this deluded 
 people to save them from the brink of ruin ? If men's 
 opinions may be taken^ the ladies will look as hand- 
 some in stuffs as in brocades ; and, since all will be 
 equal, there may be room enough to employ their wit 
 and fancy in choosing and matching patterns and 
 colours. I heard the late Archbishop of Tuam men- 
 tion a pleasant observation of somebody's ' that 
 Ireland would never be happy till a law were made 
 for burning everything that came from England, ex- 
 cept their people and their coals,' I must confess
 
 SWIFT'S FIRST HII&H PAMPHLET. 103 
 
 that, as to the former, I should not be sorry if they 
 would stay at home ; and, for the latter, I hope in 
 a little time we shall have no occasion for them : 
 
 ' Non tanti mitra est, non tanti judicis ostrum.' 
 But I should rejoice to see a staylace from England be 
 thought scandalous and become a topic of censure at 
 visits and tea-tables." 
 
 Here then is the famous tract, word for word, and 
 almost every word not on the face of it, you would 
 say, " a seditious, factious, and virulent libel " Never- 
 theless it was held to be so, not by the English Govern- 
 ment only, and not only by their usual Irish instrument 
 of tyranny, a Lord Chief Justice, but even by two Irish 
 Grand Juries ! That Chief Justice Whitshed should 
 have strained very nerve and every point to secure a 
 conviction was natural in Ireland. The usual step- 
 ping-stone to the Irish Bench is the trampled body 
 of Justice, and a lawyer who owes his promotion to 
 unscrupulous political partizanship, cannot change, 
 but only cover 1 , the skin of the Ethiopian with the 
 ermine of the judge. But that the Grand Juries both 
 of the city and of the county of Dublin should bring in 
 a True Bill present Swift's tract as "a seditious, 
 factious, and virulent libel " is much to the credit of 
 his fellow "colonists." The petty Jury was not so 
 timid, or so complaisant ; since it was only after 
 Whitshed had detained it eleven hours, and had sent
 
 104 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 it -back nine times to reconsider its acquittal, that 
 it was worried and wearied into bringing in 
 a special verdict which, would allow the case to be 
 retried. But "the person in great office" who had 
 intimated to Whitshed that he must procure a con- 
 viction at all costs, andl the Chief Justice who had 
 tried to procure it at the cost of a judicial scandal so 
 gross as to shodk even the Government ring, had over- 
 shot the mark. The public conscience was so re- 
 volted that the re-trial was postponed from term to 
 term, until the coming of the Duke of Grafton as 
 Viceroy gave Whitshed and his accomplice, Judge 
 Boate, the opportunity of a discreet retreat under 
 cover of a nolle prosequi- 
 
 Nothing proves the need of this tract better than 
 the prosecution of its printer. Swift in it aimed 
 as much at the revival of the spirit of the country as 
 at the revival of its trade; and the needl of the re- 
 vival of the spirit of the country may be measured by 
 the servility of these juries under the crack of the 
 whip of this English Pacha, Whitshed.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FIRST "DRAPIER'S LETTER." 
 
 .WIFT'S " Proposal for the Universal 
 Use of Irish Manufacture " aimed 
 to revive, not the extinguished 
 trade only, but the extinguished 
 spirit also, of the "colonists." The 
 presentation of it by two Grand Juries as a " seditious, 
 factious and virulent libel " is some measure of the 
 need of such an appeal ; the dogged evasion of a con- 
 viction by a Petty Jury is some measure of its success. 
 Both juries were composed exclusively of those 
 " colonists " in whose exclusive interests the appeal 
 was made ; for what trade there was, or had been, 
 in the country was almost wholly in their hands. Yet 
 this appeal made specially to them and for them was 
 answered in one case by a neutral, and in the other 
 two cases by a damnatory verdict. The most deadly 
 consequence of slavery is the servility it breeds, till
 
 106 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 backs long bowed beneath its load cannot be straigh- 
 tened. That is a fine comparison of Campanella's of 
 a people habituated to servitude to an animal habitu- 
 ated to domestication ; and the truth with which it 
 closes that such a people on a summons to shake off 
 the yoke, turns to rend, not the oppressor, but the 
 liberator is exemplified in every history, and by the 
 lives of many liberators from Moses to Swift : 
 
 " The people is a beast of muddy brain 
 That knows not its own strength, and therefore stands 
 Loaded with wood and stone ; the powerless hands 
 Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein ; 
 One kick would be enough to break the chain ; 
 But the beast fears, and what the child demands 
 It does ; nor its own terror understands, 
 Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. 
 Moat wonderful ! With its own hand it ties 
 And gags itself gives itself death and war 
 For pence doled out by kings from its own store. 
 Its own are all things between earth and heaven ; 
 But this it knows not ; and, if one arise 
 To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven." 
 
 But the most abject and inveterate servility is bred, 
 not of slavery alone, but of tyranny and slavery wedded 
 together; for at heart there is no such cringeing 
 slave as a slave-driver. Hence, in Ireland the class 
 represented by the Grand Juries of the city and 
 of the county of Dublin, was as abject towards 
 England as it was arrogant at home a dog that
 
 FIRST " DRAPIER'S LETTER." 107 
 
 licked its master's hand with a tongue red with the 
 blood of the hunt. The eagerness, therefore, of these 
 two Grand Juries to turn and rend their benefactor at 
 the bidding of England was really less surprising than 
 the hesitation of the Petty Jury to pronounce his 
 patriotism a crime. Swift had to appeal to a wider 
 and less spaniel-spirited constituency, and to appeal to 
 it in the trumpet tones of the The Drapier's Letters, 
 before he could rouse the country from its apathy of 
 despair. But, meanwhile, he developed an attack he 
 had begun at the close of his " Proposal for the Uni- 
 versal Use of Irish Manufacture," upon a project then 
 pressed on the Parliament for the establishment of a 
 National Bank. 
 
 "I cannot forbear," he writes, at the close of this 
 tract, " saying one word upon a thing they call a bank, 
 which, I fear, is .proj ecting in this town. What I wish 
 for at present, is only a sufficient provision of hemp and 
 caps and bells, to distribute according to the several 
 degrees of honesty and prudence in some persons. I 
 hear only of a monstrous sum already named ; and, if 
 others do not hear of it soon, and hear with a vengeance, 
 then I am a gentleman of less sagacity than myself, and 
 very few beside myself, take me to be. And the jest 
 will be still the better if it be true, as judicious persons 
 have assured me, that one half of this money will be 
 real, and the other half imaginary. The matter will be 
 likewise much mended, if the merchants continue to 
 carry off our gold, and our goldsmiths to melt down our 
 heavy silver."
 
 IO8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Here he opens the lines of an assault which he 
 followed up in other tracts with such spirit and success 
 that Parliament rejected the project. 
 
 There are, I understand, even to-day some who 
 doubt if the Irish banks, which are mere reservoirs for 
 the irrigation of foreign enterprises and industries with 
 Irish money, are an unmixed benefit ; but in Swift's 
 day such a doubt was even more defensible. The 
 projected bank was but one of a hundred wild schemes 
 then afloat, of which I may cite as a specimen that 
 for the introduction of a breed of asses probably an 
 indispensable preparatory provision for the success of 
 subsequent speculations of the kind. The promoters 
 of this bank were, in fact, a few stock-brokers of no 
 commercial standing, fore-runners of those modern 
 wreckers, the company promoters. The extinction of 
 this project by pouring upon it perhaps disproportionate 
 ridicule was the only work of importance Swift did for 
 Ireland between the issue in 1720 of the "Proposal 
 for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture " and the 
 first of the epoch-making Drapier's Letters, which 
 appeared in 1724. 
 
 The Drapier's Letters are epoch-making in that 
 they first taught Ireland the policy and the power of 
 union, of dogged inert resistance, and of strategically 
 organized and directed agitation. Their effect was, in 
 fact, commensurate with their power, and their power
 
 FIRST DRAPIERS LETTER. 109 
 
 of its kind was supreme. It is the power of a deft, 
 vigorous, intent and unerring-eyed wielder of a hammer, 
 who hits each nail on the head and home without one 
 single feint, or flourish, or one single short, or wide, or 
 weak, or wasted stroke. Swift's consummate mastery 
 of the art which conceals art was never shown to such 
 perfection as in these Letters, whose naked simplicity 
 is so like naked truth as to be confounded with it. 
 Yet there was about as much naked truth in them as 
 in Gulliver's Travels! More singular than the power, 
 or even than the effect of these unique Letters is their 
 disingenuousness. It is inconceivable to me that 
 Swift's admirers can credit their own contention that 
 he objected to Wood's Halfpence on the grounds 
 assigned by the Drapier; or even that he thought these 
 grounds of objection valid. One of the most urgent 
 wants of Ireland at this time as Swift admits was a 
 lack of small change. This lack Wood would have 
 supplied with a copper coinage of absolutely twice the 
 intrinsic value of the bronze coinage current in the 
 country to-day. As there is no such economical 
 heresy as tri-mettalism, Swift must have known that 
 the copper coinage of any country are as mere counters 
 as bank-paper ; and if he did not know it, he had the 
 re-assurance of Wood's patent itself, that no one need 
 take in any one payment more than five-pence half- 
 penny of his coin. This, of course, meant that any
 
 110 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 sum of the value of the silver or the gold currency 
 should be paid in silver or gold, and only sums below 
 the level of this currency were legally payable in Wood's 
 halfpence. It is not for a moment supposable that 
 Swift believed copper was henceforth in Ireland alone 
 of the countries in the world to be made as legal 
 tender as gold for sums to any amount. Yet he pro- 
 ceeds altogether and with circumstantial and telling 
 detail upon this really preposterous assumption : 
 
 "The common weight of these halfpence is between 
 four and five to an ounce suppose five ; then, three 
 shillings and four pence will weigh a pound, and 
 consequently twenty shillings will weigh six pounds 
 butter weight. Now, there are many hundred farmers 
 who pay two hundred pounds a year rent; therefore, 
 when one of these farmers comes with his half year's 
 rent which is one hundred pounds it will be at least 
 six hundred pounds' weight, which is three horses' load. 
 If a squire has a mind to come to town to buy clothes 
 and wine and spices for himself and family, or perhaps 
 to pass the winter here, he must bring with him five or 
 six horses, well loaden with sacks, as the farmers bring 
 their corn ; and when his lady comes in her coach 
 to our shops, it must be followed by a car loaded with 
 Mr. Wood's money. And I hope we shall have the 
 grace to take it for no more than it is worth. They say 
 Squire Connolly " Speaker of the Irish House of Com- 
 mons " has sixteen thousand pounds a year ; now, if 
 he sends for his rent to town, as it is likely he does, he 
 must have two hundred and fifty horses to bring up his 
 half-year's rent, and two or three great cellars in his house
 
 FIRST " DRAPIER'S LETTER." 1 1 1 
 
 for stowage. But what the bankers will do, I cannot 
 tell ; for I am assured that some great bankers keep by 
 them forty thousand pounds in ready cash, to answer all 
 payments which sum, in Mr. Wood's money would 
 require twelve hundred horses to carry it." 
 
 The only adequate parallel to this elaborate calcula- 
 tion is that made with, no doubt, equal seriousness, in 
 Gulliver's Travels, of the number, size, and weight of 
 the chains and padlocks designed by the Emperor of 
 Lilliput for the perpetual bondage of Gulliver. 
 
 But in the second Drapier's Letter Swift is forced 
 to face this provision in the patent that no one need 
 take in any one payment more than five-pence half- 
 penny of Wood's coin. How does he face it ? By 
 assuming that no one need take more than five-pence 
 halfpenny of this coin in any single payment, means 
 that everyone must take as much in every single 
 payment. He faces it, that is, by the assumption, 
 that the coin was intended, not as change, but as a tax 
 of five-pence halfpenny on each transaction, small and 
 great for the enrichment of Mr. Wood; and that in some 
 mysterious way both parties in each transaction the 
 payer no less than the payee would be losers to the 
 extent of seventeen shillings in the pound ! 
 
 " His proposals conclude with perfect high treason. 
 He promises that no person shall be obliged to receive 
 more than five-pence halfpenny of his coin in one pay-
 
 112 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 ment. By which it is plain that he pretends to oblige 
 every subject in this kingdom to take so much in every 
 payment if it be offered ; whereas his patent obliges no 
 man, nor can the prerogative, by law, claim such a 
 power, as I have often observed. So that here Mr. 
 Wood takes upon him the entire legislature, and an 
 absolute dominion over the properties of the whole 
 nation. Good God ! Who are this wretch's advisers ? 
 Who are his supporters, abettors, encouragers, or 
 sharers? Mr. Wood will oblige me to take five-pence 
 halfpenny of his brass in every payment; and I will 
 shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like 
 highwaymen or housebreakers, if they dare to force one 
 farthing of their coin on me in the payment of a hundred 
 pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion ; 
 but who with the figure of a man, can think with patience 
 of being devoured alive by a rat? He has laid a tax 
 upon the people of Ireland of seventeen shillings, at 
 least, in the pound a tax, I say, not only on lands, but 
 interest-money, goods, manufactures, the hire of handi- 
 craftsmen, labourers, and servants. Shopkeepers, look 
 to yourselves ! Wood will oblige and force you to take 
 five-pence halfpenny of his trash in every payment ; and 
 many of yon receive twenty, thirty, forty payments in 
 one day, or else you can hardly find bread. And pray, 
 consider how much that will amount to in a year. 
 Twenty times five-pence halfpenny is nine shillings and 
 two pence, which is above a hundred and sixty pounds a 
 year ; wherein you will be losers of at least one hundred 
 and forty pounds by taking your payments in his money. 
 If any of you be content to deal with Mr. Wood on such 
 conditions you may. But, for my own particular, let 
 his money perish with him. If the famous Mr. Hamp- 
 den rather chose to go to prison than pay a few shillings 
 to King Charles I. without authority of Parliament, I
 
 FIRST "DRAPIEKS LETTEB." 113 
 
 will rather chose to be hanged than have all my sub- 
 stance taxed at seventeen shillings in the pound, at the 
 arbitrary will and pleasure of the venerable Mr. Wood." 
 
 That the shop-keepers, handicraftsmen, labourers, 
 and servants should believe that the currency of 
 Wood's coin would mean a tax levied by this iron- 
 monger of five-pence halfpenny on every transaction, 
 and of seventeen shillings in every pound, is suffi- 
 ciently astonishing, though sufficiently established. 
 No man ever calculated more nicely his charge, his 
 distance, and his target, than Swift, and that he 
 should overshoot his audience's credulity in this in- 
 stance, is antecedently improbable ; while it is 
 historically certain that his shot told as never shot of 
 the kind had told before. Therefore, we cannot doubt 
 that Swift's elaborate and preposterous perversions of 
 the intention and of the operation of Wood's scheme 
 really were swallowed by his intelligent audience. 
 But that they imposed on Swift himself is not incred- 
 ible only, but inconceivable. Why, then, did the 
 sincerest and least histrionic of men resort to this 
 disingenuous clap-trap ? In part, it must be admitted, 
 but only in small part, because he was playing to the 
 gallery making to the people within and without 
 the Pale the only appeal that would heat and fuse 
 them together. But chiefly he made this adcaptandum 
 vulgus appeal because it was the only one possible
 
 M4 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 to make with impunity. If he had opposed and 
 exposed the real iniquity of this scandalous and insolent 
 project, his printer if he could have found a printer 
 would have been punished by something worse than 
 imprisonment. 
 
 " About four years ago," he writes, in the first 
 DRAPIER'S LETTER, " a little book was written to advise 
 all people to wear the manufacture of this our own dear 
 country. It had no other design ; said nothing against 
 the King or Parliament, or any persons whatever ; yet 
 the poor printer was prosecuted two years with the 
 utmost violence, and even some weavers themselves (for 
 whose sake it was written) being upon the jury, found 
 him guilty. This would be enough to discourage any 
 man from endeavouring to do you good, when you will 
 either neglect him, or fly in his face for his pains, and 
 when he must expect only danger to himself, and to be 
 fined and imprisoned, perhaps to his ruin." 
 
 If the " Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish 
 Manufacture," whose political inoffensiveness is here 
 fairly denned, narrowly escaped conviction of being 
 "a seditious, factious and virulent libel," what would 
 have been the fate of a tract which opened, let us 
 say, by quoting a Charter dating from Richard III. : 
 " Hibernia habet parliamentum et faciunt leges : et 
 nostra statuta non ligant eos, quia non mittunt milites 
 ad parliamentum;" which proceeded then to show 
 that for thirty years Ireland had been governed as a 
 conquered province by the Parliament of England
 
 FIRST " DRAPIBB'S LETTER." 115 
 
 with insolent disregard to every petition and protest 
 of her own Parliament ; and which concluded with 
 the secret history of the culminating instance of this 
 insolent tyranny Wood's patent ? 
 
 What was that history? "The lean dog is all 
 fleas," says a Spanish proverb ; and in these days 
 exhausted Ireland was bled white by a swarm of 
 parasites pensioned upon her establishment. Among 
 the rest figured the honoured name of the King's 
 German mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, whose 
 services to the country were gratefully acknowledged 
 by pensions upon the Irish establishment to the 
 amount of ^3,000 a year. Thinking the acknow- 
 ledgment inadequate she demanded and received 
 this patent for the supply of copper coinage to 
 Ireland, and sold it to one William Wood, a hard- 
 ware man for ^10,000. The assent of the Irish 
 Houses of Parliament is not asked, their dissent is dis- 
 regarded. The two Irish Houses of Parliament, the 
 Privy-council, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of Dublin, 
 and of other Corporations, the Grand Juries and the 
 principal gentlemen of every county in Ireland pro- 
 tested and petitioned in vain. The courteous reply was, 
 in the words of one of the English Ministers, " we will 
 cram the brass down their throats." Why? The 
 answer is the answer also to the question, why Eng-
 
 Il6 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 land has failed in Ireland. The coin was needed, was 
 good, and was imposed by England, and there was 
 no more to be said. As to the origin of the patent 
 non olet; as to the manner of its imposition non uti 
 libet, sed uti licet. National sensibility and sensitive- 
 ness were negligeable, or unintelligible rather, charac- 
 teristics and considerations. " Ireland," says Carlyle, 
 "is a gentleman thrown into the workhouse," and 
 Bumble, the beadle, is at once perplexed and enraged 
 by his squeamishness. " What have you to complain 
 of? Have you not a roof over you, and a bed under 
 you, and warm workhouse frieze and flannel to clothe 
 you, and " gruel thick, and slab " to feed you ? I 
 
 can't understand ." " Ah, that is what I 
 
 have to complain of," sighs the decayed gentleman, 
 " You cannot understand." The foul origin of the 
 patent, or the brutal cramming of the brass down the 
 nation's throat were inconsiderable sentimentalities 
 compared with the convenience, the goodness and the 
 lawfulness of the coinage. But this standpoint of the 
 unimaginative, unsympathetic and overbearing Bumble, 
 is not the standpoint of the decayed gentleman whom 
 fortune has flung under his feet. Hence the continual 
 friction of " incompatibility," to use Mathew Arnold's 
 phrase for our ill-assorted union, and hence much, if 
 not most, of the eternal Irish difficulty. A single, 
 but a convincing instance of this narrow, hard and
 
 FIRST " DRAPIER'S LETTER." 117 
 
 rasping English handling of the matter may suffice. 
 The latest of Swift's biographers, the most cultivated 
 and liberal of Englishmen, thus comments upon the 
 compensation of 24,000 made to Wood for the 
 withdrawal of the patent, when dread of a rebellion 
 at last compelled its withdrawal. " The conclusion 
 is in one respect rather absurd. The Irish succeeded 
 in rejecting a real benefit at the cost of paying Wood 
 the profit which he would have made, had he been 
 allowed to confer it." Absurd to tear down the flag 
 of an invader, if you have afterwards to pay the cost 
 of the bunting ! It is only fair to quote also the 
 subsequent admission of this biographer that "the 
 very essence of the case was that the Irish people 
 were to be plundered by the German mistress." But 
 even this view is narrow and shortsighted and over- 
 looks what, indeed, is almost always overlooked in 
 taking account of the extent and of the success of a 
 popular agitation that it is not the match or the 
 kindling which makes a conflagration, but the long- 
 accumulated fuel. The Drapier's Letters was the 
 match, the foulness of the origin and the insolence of 
 the imposition of Wood's halfpence was the inflam- 
 mable kindling, but thirty years of oppression and 
 plunder, of the sacrifice of every Irish interest and 
 industry, of the ostracism of every Irishman from 
 every Irish preferment, of gratuitous disregard of
 
 Il8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 every Irish wish and want, solely, to quote again from 
 Archbishop Boulter, because it was Irish, this was the 
 long-accumulated fuel. Hence the success of the 
 DrapieSs Letters. That the minting of the coin 
 of a kingdom an imperial privilege should be sold 
 to an ironmonger by a German concubine, who re- 
 ceived it as a supplement to wages of her infamy 
 already paid by Ireland was but the culminating 
 insult of a series without a break, and without the 
 prospect of a break. It would not, gross as it was, 
 alone account for the intense, though flameless, glow 
 of the Drafter's Letters, nor for their effect in 
 firing Ireland from end to end instantaneously and 
 irresistibly. White-hot with the exasperation of a 
 thousand national insults and injuries, they were thrust 
 into fuel which years had heaped high. We must 
 keep this continually in mind, if we would adequately 
 estimate the spirit which inspired these Letters and 
 the spirit which they roused. And we must also re- 
 member that in rousing this spirit Swift had to walk 
 and work warily. If, as he himself says, the " Pro- 
 posal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture" 
 was held treasonous, what would be the penalty ex- 
 acted for a trumpet call to Ireland to form in solid 
 square of inert resistance ? 
 
 At first, therefore, and until he had felt the pulse
 
 FIRST " DRAPIEE'S LETTER." 119 
 
 of his public and found that it beat as high as his 
 own, Swift had to pretend the quarrel was with 
 Wood and not with England, and about the quality 
 and the conditions of the coinage, and not about 
 the baseness of its origin and the tyranny of its 
 imposition. In the later Letters, as we shall see, he 
 was emboldened by the backing of a solid Ireland, 
 to base his case more broadly and soundly, though 
 even in these he never ventured to expose the 
 terrima belli causa. But, then, of this there was no 
 need, since the scandal, being of the swiftest-winged 
 kind of all, had already reached the remotest corner 
 of Ireland.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIER'S LETTER." 
 
 .HE Statesman who take 
 the occasion of an inter- 
 national quarrel for its 
 cause, is as common and 
 as shallow an empiric as the 
 quack who takes an erup- 
 tive symptom for the long and deep-seated disease 
 which it indicates. This mistake English statesmen 
 are continually making in Ireland, in part, through 
 arrogance, in part, through unimaginativeness, and, in 
 part through the hand-to-mouth exigencies of party 
 government. In the case of the universal rejection 
 by Ireland of Wood's coinage, it was chiefly arrogance 
 which blinded the English Ministers to the real 
 reasons for a stand so dogged and solid. In the very 
 wording of the Report of the Committee of the Eng-
 
 FOUKTH DRAPIER S LETTER. 121 
 
 lish Privy Council upon Wood's halfpence, this 
 arrogance parades itself. In that report, the opposi- 
 tion to the coinage of the Irish Privy Council and 
 Parliament of the two Houses of Lords and Commons, 
 of the Municipalities, Grand Juries, of all the repre- 
 sentatives of the Nation, and of the Nation itself, is 
 styled " a clamour." 
 
 "The addresses of the Lords and Commons of Ire- 
 land against a ruinous destructive project of an obscure 
 single undertaker," writes Swift in his third DEAPIER'S 
 LETTER, " is called a ' clamour ! ' I desire to know how 
 such a style would be resented in England from a com- 
 mittee of the Privy Council there to a Parliament ; and 
 how many impeachments would follow upon it ? " 
 
 In truth, this Committee of the English Privy 
 Council no more concerned itself with the rights, 
 reasons, or feelings of the Irish or their representatives, 
 than Mrs. Squeers regarded those of the boys she 
 dosed with brimstone and treacle. If the brimstone 
 and treacle were good, and good for them, then it 
 mattered nothing whether they liked it, or liked the 
 manner in which it was thrust down their throats by 
 an odious harpy, in a common and a filthy spoon. The 
 need of the coinage was urgent, and its quality was 
 fair, and these were the sole considerations of moment. 
 That it should be thrust down the throat of Ireland by 
 the King's mistress, and through this low ironmonger 
 Wood, were negligeable considerations ; and neglige-
 
 122 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 able also was the consideration that the circumstances 
 of the imposition of the coinage, and the imposition 
 itself, were in keeping with the " Do-the-boys Hall " 
 misgovernment of Ireland for a generation. In fact, 
 " the clamour " of Ireland against the coinage, and the 
 English contempt of that clamour, sprang from the 
 same source thirty years of high-handed tyranny 
 which had encouraged English arrogance, and ex- 
 hausted Irish endurance. It never now occurred to 
 an English Minister to consult Ireland, even as to the 
 sauce wherein she was to be cooked, upon which, at 
 least, the doomed chickens in the French apologue 
 were allowed to venture an opinion. 
 
 Wood's halfpence, then, were rather the occasion 
 than the cause of a volcanic outburst of long-pent 
 discontent, and were less resented and resisted as in 
 themselves an intolerable grievance than as a symbol 
 and a sample of a long series of intolerable grievances. 
 In the third Drapier's Letter, Swift suggests this by 
 supposing Ireland's case to be England's own : 
 
 " Put the case that the two houses of Lords and Com- 
 mons of England and the Privy Council there should 
 address his Majesty to recall a patent, from whence they 
 apprehended the most ruinous consequences to the whole 
 kingdom ; and, to make it stronger, if possible, that the 
 whole nation almost to a man, should thereupon dis- 
 cover ' the most dismal apprehensions,' as Mr. Wood 
 styles them ; would his Majesty debate half an hour what
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIBR'S LETTER." 123 
 
 he had to do 1 Would any Minister dare to advise him 
 against recalling such a patent? Or would the matter 
 be referred to the Privy Council, or to Westminster Hall 
 the two Houses of Parliament, plaintiffs, and William 
 Wood, defendant ! And is there even the smallest 
 difference between the two cases ? Were not the people 
 of Ireland born as free as those in England ? How have 
 they forfeited their freedom? Is not their Parliament 
 as fair a representative of the people as that of England ? 
 And has not their Privy Council as great, or greater 
 share in the administration of public affairs? Are not 
 they subjects of the same king? Does not the same sun 
 shine upon them? And have they not the same God 
 for their protector? Am I a freeman in England, and 
 do I become a slave in six hours in crossing the channel ?" 
 
 But it was in the fourth Drafter's Letter that 
 Swift, with the courage of a watch-dog, who sees at 
 last at his back the master he had succeeded in 
 rousing, lifts up and plants the question upon its 
 proper national plane : 
 
 " This gives me the opportunity of explaining to those 
 who are ignorant, another point which has often swelled 
 in my breast. Those who come over hither to us from 
 England, and some weak people among ourselves, when- 
 ever in discourses we make mention of liberty and pro- 
 perty, shake their heads, and tell us that Ireland is a 
 depending kingdom, as if they would seem by this phrase 
 to intend that the people of Ireland are in some state of 
 slavery or dependence different from those of England ; 
 whereas a depending kingdom is a modern term of art, 
 unknown, as I have heard, to all ancient civillians and 
 writers upon government ; and Ireland is, on the con-
 
 124 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 trary, called in some statutes, ' an imperial crown,' as 
 held only from God, which is as high a style as any 
 kingdom is capable of receiving. Therefore, by the ex- 
 pression, ' a depending kingdom,' there is no more to 
 be understood than that, by a statute made here in the 
 thirty-third year of Henry VEX, the king and his 
 successors are to be kings imperial of this realm, as 
 united and knit to the imperial crown of England. I 
 have looked over all English and Irish statutes without 
 finding any law that makes Ireland depend upon Eng- 
 land, any more than England does upon Ireland. We 
 have, indeed, obliged ourselves to have the same king 
 with them, and consequently they are obliged to have 
 the same king with us. For the law was made by our 
 own Parliament, and our ancestors then were not such 
 fools (whatever they were in the preceding reign) to 
 bring themselves under I know not what dependence, 
 which is now talked of, without any ground of law, 
 reason, or common senie. Let whoever thinks other- 
 wise, I, M. B. Drapier, desire to be excepted ; for I 
 declare, next under God, I depend only on the king, 
 my sovereign, and on the laws of my own country. 
 And I am so far from depending upon the people of 
 England, that if ever they should rebel against my 
 sovereign (which God forbid !) I would be ready, at the 
 first command from his majesty, to take arms against 
 them, as some of my countrymen did against theirs at 
 Preston. And if such a rebellion should prove so suc- 
 cessful as to fix the Pretender on the throne of England, 
 I would venture to transgress that statute so far as to 
 lose every drop of my blood to hinder him from being 
 King of Ireland.'* 
 
 May I intervene here to say that this passage, 
 which was specially relied upon afterwards to secure the
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIER'S LETTER." 125 
 
 conviction of the printer of the paper, was evidently 
 and ingeniously meant rather to be defensive than 
 defiant. Swift, be it always remembered, wrote as the 
 representative of that narrow Church-of-England 
 Ireland, bounded on one side by the Penal Laws 
 from the Catholics, and, on the other side, by the 
 Test Act from the Presbyterians. " Is not our Parlia- 
 ment," he asks in the third ' Letter,' " as fair a repre- 
 sentative of the people as that of England ? " That 
 is, it as fairly represented the Church of England in 
 one country as in the other ; but while the bulk of the 
 people in England, was thereby represented, the 
 Irish Parliament represented only a minute fraction, 
 of the Irish nation. Now, the English press, in order 
 to discredit the agitation against the coinage in the 
 most effective way conceivable, declared it to be of 
 exclusively Catholic origin and propagation. This 
 misrepresentation, Swift, in the opening of the fourth 
 " Letter," indignantly denies, and his denial is worth 
 quoting as defining the Protestant limit of his patriotism 
 sufficiently sharply : 
 
 "Wood prescribes to the newsmongers in London 
 what they are to write. In one of their papers, pub- 
 lished here by some obscure printer, and certainly with 
 a bad design, we are told, ' That the Papists in Ireland 
 have entered into an association against his coin,' 
 although it be notoriously known that they never once 
 offered to stir in the matter ; so that the two Houses of
 
 126 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Parliament, the Privy Council, the great number of 
 Corporations, the Lord Mayor, and aldermen of Dublin, 
 the Grand Juries and principal gentlemen of several 
 counties are stigmatized in a lump under the name of 
 ' Papists.' " 
 
 In his declaration, then, that " he would lose every 
 drop of his blood to hinder the Pretender from being 
 King of Ireland," Swift was not only repudiating the 
 charge of Jacobitism, but protesting that on this point 
 he was a stauncher Whig than the Whigs themselves 
 as he was. But he was a Whig in this, and only in 
 this, and only because, to use his own intolerant 
 illustration, though the Whigs might let loose at his 
 Church " an angry cat," i.e., the Presbyterians, they 
 kept the Catholics at her foot like " a lion fast bound 
 with three or four chains, his teeth drawn out and his 
 claws pared to the quick." Nevertheless, the Irish 
 Catholics, knowing that Swift fought and beat their 
 common enemy, stood staunchly by him when his 
 own set and side deserted him. Fifteen years later he 
 writes to Pope that "as he walks the streets he 
 has a thousand hats and blessings upon old scores 
 which those we call the gentry have forgot." And 
 well he deserved this recognition, for he was the pioneer 
 of a mode of warfare to which the Catholics owe what 
 they have, and look to what they hope for, of religious 
 and political freedom. It was Swift taught them to
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIER'S LETTER.'* 127 
 
 return upon England the only argument England has 
 ever stooped either to address to Ireland, or to attend 
 to in appeals addressed by Ireland to her. This 
 argument Swift describes in the next paragraph of the 
 " Letter" : 
 
 "It is true, indeed, that within the memory of man, 
 the Parliaments of England have sometimes assumed the 
 power of binding this kingdom by laws enacted there ; 
 wherein they were at first openly opposed (as far as 
 truth, reason, and justice are capable of opposing) by 
 the famous Mr. Molineus, an English gentleman born 
 here, as well as by several of the greatest patriots and 
 best Whigs in England; but the love and torrent of 
 power prevailed. Indeed, the arguments on both sides 
 were invincible. For, in reason, all government with- 
 out the consent of the governed is the very definition of 
 slavery ; but, in fact, eleven men, well armed will cer- 
 tainly subdue one single man in his shirt." 
 
 Ireland, it is true, has always had the advantage in 
 armour of England, poetically : 
 
 "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just," 
 
 But the power which is on the side of the big batta- 
 lions, laughs at this air-woven armour of poetry. 
 Accordingly the eleven men well-armed would hold 
 down for ever the single man in his shirt, in spite of 
 the armour wherewith the poets like the rascally 
 tailors in "The Emperor's New Clothes" have 
 equipped him, but for two things. First, the distrac-
 
 128 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 tion of foreign English quarrels, and, secondly, the 
 distraction of internal English divisions, which render 
 either the neutrality or the alliance of the single man 
 in his shirt worth purchase by England at the price of 
 some concession, which Justice had asked for, and 
 would for ever have asked for in vain. 
 
 But there is something besides this distraction 
 at home or abroad of the eleven armed men needed to 
 gain for the man in his shirt this concession the spirit 
 to press for it determinedly and this spirit Swift, in 
 the next paragraph, proceeds to rouse : 
 
 " And as we are apt to sink too much under unreason- 
 able fears, so we are too soon inclined to be raised by 
 groundless hopes, according to the nature of all con- 
 sumptive bodies like ours. Thus, it has been given 
 about for several days past, that somebody in England 
 had empowered a second somebody to write to a third 
 somebody here, to assure us that we should no more be 
 troubled with these halfpence. And this is reported 
 to have been done by the same person who is said to 
 have sworn some months ago, 'that he would ram them 
 down our throats,' though I doubt they would stick in 
 our stomachs. But whichever of these reports be true 
 or false is no concern of ours. For, in this point we 
 have nothing to do with English ministers, and I should 
 be sorry to leave it in their power to redress this griev- 
 ance, or to enforce it ; for the report of the Committee 
 has given me a surfeit. The remedy is wholly in your 
 own hands, and therefore I have digressed a little, in
 
 FOURTH DRAPIERS LETTER. I2Q 
 
 order to refresh and continue that spirit so seasonably 
 raised among you, and to let you see that by the laws of 
 
 GOD, of NATURE, of NATIONS, and of your COUN- 
 TRY, you AEE, and OUGHT to be as F3EE a people 
 as,>our brethren in England.' 1 
 
 The capitals are in the original and indicate me- 
 chanically what in Swift's own view was the real point 
 in dispute in the " Letters " and between the countries 
 the freedom of the little Ireland of " colonists " 
 from English oppression. This spirited fourth 
 " Letter " forced the Irish agents of this oppression to 
 recognize it also as the real casus belli, and they there- 
 fore issued a proclamation offering a reward of ^300 
 for the discovery of the author of the "Drapier's Fourth 
 Letter," and describing it as 
 
 " A wicked and malicious pamphlet, containing several 
 seditious and scandalous passages, highly reflecting upon 
 his majesty and his ministers, and tending to alienate 
 the affections of his good subjects in England and Ireland 
 from each other.'' 
 
 Hard upon the issue of the proclamation followed 
 the imprisonment of the printer of the "Letter," 
 Harding, the forgotten martyr of the quarrel an act 
 of petty persecution Swift resented so openly as to leave 
 no one in doubt as to the authorship of the " Letter." 
 At the levee next day he elbowed his way up to the
 
 130 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Lord Lieutenant Lord Carteret, a personal friend 
 and thundered : 
 
 " So my Lord, this is a glorious exploit you performed 
 yesterday in suffering a proclamation against a poor shop- 
 keeper, whose only crime is an honest endeavour to save 
 his country from ruin. I suppose your lordship will ex- 
 pect a statue in copper for your services to Mr. Wood ?" 
 
 To which Lord Carteret, who had but just assumed 
 office, made the good-tempered reply of an apt quota- 
 tion from Virgil : 
 
 " Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt 
 Moliri." 
 
 A rejoinder so happy as to seem to everyone 
 except, perhaps, tp Harding to make up for the 
 harshness of the measure it extenuated. 
 
 Again, in a letter written upon the issue of the 
 proclamation to its issuer, Lord Chancellor Midleton, 
 Swift virtually acknowledges himself the incriminated 
 " Drapier " ; but legal proof he was careful not to give. 
 He employed his butler, Robert Blakeley, to copy the 
 "Letters" and to convey them to the printer, and he 
 summarily dismissed him on his absenting himself from 
 the Deanery one evening without leave. He was not 
 going, he said, to keep a servant who was emboldened 
 to neglect his duties by the consciousness of having 
 his master in his power. " Strip off your livery,
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIERS LETTER. 131 
 
 begone from the Deanery instantly, and do the 
 worst to revenge yourself that you dare to do ! " 
 The man, more hurt by the suspicion which 
 caused his dismissal than by the harshness of 
 the dismissal itself, revenged himself by an inviolable 
 secrecy as to the reason of his discharge. When the 
 danger had blown over Swift sent for Blakeley, and sum- 
 moned at the same time all the other Deanery servants 
 to whom he thus re-introduced his late butler : " This 
 is no longer your fellow-servant, Robert, the butler, 
 but Mr. Blakeley, verger of St. Patrick's, a post which 
 his integrity has obtained him." 
 
 There is a magnanimity about this dismissal of 
 Blakeley which to me seems inconsistent with Swift's 
 supposed meanness in allowing Harding to lie in jail. 
 Swift has been charged with acting somewhat in the 
 spirit he satirises in the delightfully humorous story of 
 the Madrid Jew. 
 
 " I was, in a manner," he writes in another ' Drapier's 
 Letter/ " left alone to stand the battle ; while others, 
 who had ten thousand times better talents than a 
 Drapier, were so prudent as to lie still ; and perhaps 
 thought it no unpleasant amusement to look on with 
 safety, while another was giving them diversion at the 
 hazard of his liberty and fortune, and thought they 
 made sufficient recompense by a little applause. Like 
 the Jew at Madrid, who, being condemned to the fire 
 on account of his religion, a crowd of school-boys follow- 
 ing him to the stake, and apprejiending that they might
 
 132 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 lose their sport if he should happen to recant, would 
 often clap him on the back and cry ' Sta firme, Moyse ; ' 
 4 Moses, continue steadfast ! ' " 
 
 But, in the first place, is it certain that, had Swift 
 surrendered himself, Harding, who was charged with 
 another offence altogether, would be released ? The 
 certainty is all the other way ; and Swift by surrender- 
 ing himself, would have helped his printer no better 
 than Sheridan helped the drunkard who appealed to 
 him to lift him out of the gutter : " I can't do that," 
 hiccoughed Sheridan, himself far gone in his cups, 
 " but I'll tell you what I'll do for you : I'll lie down 
 beside you." 
 
 And, in the second place, as Swift reminds Harding 
 in " Directions to the Printer " affixed to the " Letter 
 to Lord Molesworth," the Dean had repeatedly 
 cautioned the publisher to get before publishing as 
 Harding did the assurance of the best legal advice 
 that there was nothing incriminating in the " Letters." 
 
 But the lawyers, who advised Harding to this effect 
 reckoned without Chief Justice Whitshed, whom Swift 
 certainly had in his mind in this very " Letter to Lord 
 Molesworth," when he recalls the judge " who, upon 
 the criminal's appeal to the dreadful Day of Judgment, 
 told him that he had incurred a premunire by appealing 
 to a foreign jurisdiction." It appears to me that Swift
 
 FOURTH " DRAPIER'S LETTER." 133 
 
 did all that he could for Harding and, indeed, all that 
 could be done for him by fortifping the Grand Jury 
 against his Whitshed's browbeating. In a letter ad- 
 dressed to this Grand Jury, written, like the rest, with 
 a kind of electric-light coldness, clearness, and pene- 
 trating intensity, Swift shows that the cause advocated 
 in the incriminated Letter, was the cause of Ireland in 
 general, and of the members of the Grand Jury Irish 
 merchants and shopkeepers in particular, and winds 
 up with a fable whose moral is never out of date in 
 this country : 
 
 "I will conclude all with a fable ascribed to Demos- 
 thenes. He had served the people of Athens with great 
 fidelity in the station of an orator, when upon a certain 
 occasion, apprehending to be delivered over to his 
 enemies, he told the Athenians, his countrymen, the 
 following story : ' Once upon a time the wolves desired 
 a league with the sheep, upon this condition, that the 
 cause of strife might be taken away, which was the 
 shepherds and mastiffs. This being granted, the wolves 
 without all fear, made havoc of the sheep." 
 
 This letter told, and told even more triumphantly 
 than Swift could have expected. Not only did this 
 Grand Jury resist Whitshed's browbeating so doggedly 
 that the exasperated Chief Justice actually and 
 arrogantly dissolved them ; but its successor carried 
 the war into the camp of the foe by making a present- 
 ment against the halfpence !
 
 134 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Swift triumphed, the halfpence were withdrawn, but 
 it was, or at least it seemed, a Cadmean victory. The 
 only lesson the " Drapier " controversy taught Walpole 
 was to make Ireland a more absolutely and abjectly 
 "dependent kingdom" than ever. Swift, says Sheridan, 
 upon hearing that a great crowd had assembled to 
 witness an eclipse, sent out a bellman to proclaim that 
 " The eclipse had been postponed by the Dean's 
 orders;" whereupon the crowd resignedly dispersed. 
 The total eclipse of Irish freedom under the reign of 
 Archbishop Hugh Boulter was quite as much out of the 
 range and reach of the Dean's proclamations. Walpole 
 had but loosened his hold for a moment of Ireland in 
 order to get a better purchase and a tighter grip, and 
 the hand which he used sheathed in the glove of the 
 viceroy of the day was that of this Protestant Primate. 
 Archbishop Hugh Boulter was a perfect impersonation 
 of English Government, hard, strong, unsympathetic, 
 arrogant, and, to borrow an image from Johnson, 
 "narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet." Such 
 government is either selfish, or shortsighted either 
 that of a statesman who foresees that he is damming 
 up an inevitable flood, but is concerned only to post- 
 pone it Aprh nous le deluge ; or that of a quack who 
 really believes that to drive in a disease is to cure it. 
 But whether a crime or a blunder, government of this 
 kind necessarily defeats itself in the long run, and has
 
 FOURTH "DRAPIERS LETTER." 135 
 
 soon or late to pay compound interest both in difficulties 
 and in concessions. Yet through some defects in the 
 National character probably of sympathy and of 
 magnanimity England has never once in all our 
 history made to Ireland an inevitable concession 
 either seasonably or graciously.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 ; A MODEST PROPOSAL.' 
 
 HE outcry raised by the 
 " colonists " against oppres- 
 sion of a kind immeasurably 
 lighter than that they were 
 themselves inflicting upon 
 the native Irish, reminds 
 one of Fag's complaining of an unprovoked push from 
 young Absolute while himself severely belabouring the 
 unoffending page. But the outcry itself was amply 
 justified. Archbishop Boulter's idea, which he for- 
 mulated explicitly and rigidly carried out, was to 
 govern Ireland, not only for England and from 
 England, but by and through Englishmen exclusively. 
 His ideal was like that Swift attributes to Lord 
 Sunderland : " That all who have had the misfortune 
 to be born in Ireland should be rendered incapable of 
 holding any employment whatsoever above the degree
 
 A MODEST PROPOSAL." 137 
 
 of constable." " All the great places must be filled 
 by Englishmen," writes Boulter, " if we are to have 
 quiet here." Accordingly every post of profit or 
 importance is given to an Englishman untainted by 
 any love, or care, or knowledge of Ireland, till Boulter 
 can write, in 1729, "For five years the Government 
 has been in English hands." Yet are the Irish-born 
 English unconscionably discontented ! " Many of our 
 own original," he exclaims in perplexity at their 
 perversity, " esteem us Englishmen as intruders ! " I 
 do not know how it is that in every country England 
 has annexed and exploited natives will be found to 
 regard them almost as much in the light of intruders 
 as though they had been Russians, French, or Germans. 
 But in this case, where the men cuckooed out of the 
 nest were themselves of English origin, there is, I 
 think, some explanation, or extenuation, at least, of 
 the dissatisfaction which so perplexed Archbishop 
 Boulter. 
 
 " Besides," writes Swift in his seventh ' Drapier's 
 Letter,' "the prodigious profit which England receives 
 by the transmittal thither of two-thirds of the revenues 
 of this old kingdom, it has another mighty advantage, by 
 making our country a receptacle wherein to disburden 
 themselves of their supernumerary pretenders to office. 
 Persons of second-rate merit in their own country, who, 
 like birds of passage, most of them thrive and fatten 
 here, and fly off when their credit and employments are
 
 138 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 it an end. So that Ireland may justly say, what Luther 
 said of himself, ' POOR Ireland makes many rich ! ' " 
 
 One of the consequences of this wholesale importa- 
 tion of Englishmen was a yet more wholesale exporta- 
 tion almost the only export trade allowed to us of 
 Irishmen to England. As the extinction of trade 
 drove from the country such of the poor as could 
 afford to get away from it, so the official boycotting of 
 the upper class sent them also in shoals to England. 
 In Ireland their Irish birth disqualified them for office 
 only ; but, for the rest, mattered as little as Hamlet's 
 madness would have mattered in England, since 
 "there the men were as mad as he." In England, 
 however, the social discredit of their Irish birth could 
 be made up for only by a lavish display of wealth, and 
 this wealth was extorted from rack-rented tenants. 
 Thus it came about that the Irish absentee landlord 
 drew most from the country to which he returned 
 least. Seeing, too, nothing of the frightful misery 
 he caused, he had no remorse and was moved 
 to no mitigation of it. Another of the conse- 
 quences of fastening all these needy Englishmen on 
 the body of Ireland as the wealthy Buddhist transfers 
 to the body of a poorer brother all the vermin which 
 his creed forbids him to kill upon his own was, that 
 not only the whole of the bloated Irish Pension List,
 
 "A MODEST PROPOSAL. 139 
 
 but the bulk of the official salaries of these English 
 blood-suckers was spent in England. What argu- 
 ments, asks Swift with biting sarcasm, can an Irish 
 viceroy address now to an Irish Parliament, since not 
 only all the offices, but all the reversions of the offices 
 in his gift, have been made over to Englishmen who 
 for the most part spend their emoluments in England ? 
 
 " All considerable offices for life are here possessed by 
 those to whom reversions were granted ; and these have 
 been generally followers of the chief governors, or per- 
 sons who had interest in the Court of England. So the 
 Lord Berkeley of Stratton holds that great office of 
 Master of the Rolls ; the Lord Palmerston is first 
 Remembrancer, worth near 2,000 per annum. One 
 Doddington, secretary to the Earl of Pembroke, begged 
 the reversion of Clerk of the Pells, worth 2,500 a year, 
 which he now enjoys by the death of Lord Newtown. 
 Mr. Southwell is Secretary of State, and the Earl of Bur- 
 lington Lord High Treasurer of Ireland by inheritance. 
 These are only a few among many others which I have 
 been told of, but cannot remember. Nay, the reversion 
 of several employments, during pleasure, is granted the 
 same way. This, among many others, is a circumstance 
 whereby the kingdom of Ireland is distinguished from 
 all other nations upon earth, and makes it so difficult 
 an affair to get into a civil employ, that Mr. Addison was 
 forced to purchase an old obscure place, called Keeper 
 of the Records in Bermingham's Tower, of 10 a year, 
 and to get a salary of 400 annexed to it, though all the 
 records there are not worth half-a-crown either for 
 curiosity or use. And we lately saw a favourite Secre- 
 tary descend to be Master of the Revels, which by his
 
 MO SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 credit and extortion he has made pretty considerable. 
 I say nothing of the Under-Treasurership, worth about 
 9,000 a year, nor of the commissioners of the revenue, 
 four of whom generally live in England, for I think none 
 of these are granted in reversion. But the jest is, that 
 I have known, upon occasion, some of these absent 
 officers as keen against the interest of Ireland, as if they 
 had never been indebted to her for a single groat." 
 
 The country, being bled thus at every vein, with 
 nothing to restore its strength, resembled one of those 
 tillage farms to which Swift frequently refers, cropped 
 by each succeeding short-leased tenant, whose interest 
 it was to extract everything and return nothing to the 
 exhausted soil. 
 
 It is the poor of a country so crushed to earth that, 
 being at the bottom, have the accumulated load of its 
 misery to bear ; and the sufferings of the Irish poor at 
 this period were frightful. Swift did what he could at 
 much risk, as we have seen, and with some effect, in 
 his " Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manu- 
 facture," to provide the starving Irish artizans with 
 bread, in place of that which mere English envy had 
 snatched from them. Indeed, he never lost sight of 
 this object, or allowed his friends or dependents to 
 lose sight of it. Giving a guinea to a friend's maid- 
 servant, he charged her to buy with it a gown of Irish 
 stuff. Finding her, however, on his next visit still in 
 her old gown, he took her to task for misapplying his
 
 "A MODEST PROPOSAL." 14! 
 
 vail. She hurried from the room without a word, to 
 return presently with her apron filled with books. 
 " Here, please your reverence, is the Irish stuff I have 
 bought with your guinea, and better was never manu- 
 factured ! " They were Swift's works. It would be 
 hard to say whether the compliment or the guinea was 
 better deserved. The story illustrates Swift's zeal in 
 the cause of Irish trade, its appreciation, and its effect. 
 Ireland's staple industry agriculture however was, 
 and might well be, his despair. Not the taxation of 
 the country alone, and its numberless sinecure salaries 
 and pensions were spent in England, but also the 
 bulk of its rack-rents. Through these and other 
 causes the agricultural districts of the country were 
 reduced chronically almost to the condition to which 
 they were brought temporarily in the year of the great 
 famine. 
 
 "At least five children in six who are born," writes 
 Swift in his ' Maxims Controlled in Ireland,' " lie a dead 
 weight upon us for want of employment. And a very 
 skilful computer assured me that above one half of the 
 souls in this kingdom supported themselves by begging 
 and thievery ; two-thirds whereof would be able to get 
 their bread in any other country upon earth. Trade is 
 the only incitement to labour ; where that fails, the 
 poorer native must either beg, steal, or starve, or be 
 forced to quit his country. ... I confess myself to be 
 touched with very sensible pleasure, when I hear of a 
 mortality in any country parish or village, where the
 
 142 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin, and two 
 ridges of potatoes, treble their worth; brought up to 
 steal or beg for want of work ; to whom death would be 
 the best thing to be wished for on account both of them- 
 selves and of the public." 
 
 According to all contemporary accounts, the bulk 
 of the population were degraded to the level of the 
 beasts of the field in every particular but this that 
 it was no one's interest to feed, herd, or tend them. 
 Having to beg, steal, or starve, they did one or other 
 of the three, according to circumstances, and were, 
 as Swift, suggests, happiest when their lot was the 
 last. Their moral degradation, too, was as deep as 
 their physical so deep that even the virtue of chastity, 
 which, to-day, seems an ineradicable Irish instinct, was 
 uprooted. Girls allowed themselves to be debauched 
 solely in order that they might excite compassion by 
 posing as widows with babes at the breast ; while, herd- 
 ing as they did like brutes together, incest and adultery 
 were as common among these organized bands of 
 beggars as they are uncommon, I might almost 
 say unknown, among the Irish peasants of to-day. 
 
 Such was the frightful state of the country which 
 provoked that terrible paper the most terrible, I 
 suppose, that ever was written "A Modest Propo- 
 sal," "Guardati da aceto divin dolce" says the Italian
 
 "A MODEST PROPOSAL." 143 
 
 proverb, and the death cold and white ferocity of 
 the "Modest Proposal" was a characteristically 
 Swiftian expression of pity in despair. The paper, 
 in truth, is the literary analogue of the kind of des< 
 pairing pity which makes a mother, mad with misery, 
 drown her child to save it from a life of horror. 
 Those who can see in the act of such a mother 
 insane hate, and not insane love, of her child, are 
 as wise and sympathetic as those who can see in 
 " A Modest Proposal " callous insensibility to the 
 suffering of which it shows a maddened and des- 
 pairing sensitiveness. 
 
 The keynote of the paper is, in fact, that pass- 
 age towards its close, in which Swift protests that 
 he makes this proposal only because all the other 
 remedies for the maddening miseries of the country 
 which he has been urging and urging for years, 
 have been pressed upon it and its rulers in vain : 
 
 " I can think of no one objection that will possibly be 
 raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged that 
 the number of the people will be thereby much lessened 
 in the kingdom. This I freely own, and it was, indeed, 
 one principal design in offering it to the world. I 
 desire the reader will observe that I calculate my remedy 
 for this one individual kingdom of Ireland, and for no 
 other that ever was, is, or, I think, ever can be upon 
 earth. Therefore let no man talk to me of other ex- 
 pedients of taxing our absentees at five shillings a 
 pound of using neither clothes, nor household furni-
 
 144 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 ture, except what is our own growth and manufacture 
 of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that 
 promote foreign luxury of curing the expensiveness of 
 pride, vanity, idleness and gaming in our women of in- 
 troducing a vein of parsimony, prudence, and temperance 
 of learning to love our country, in the want of which we 
 differ even from Laplanders and the inhabitants of Top- 
 inambo of quitting our animosities and factions, nor 
 acting any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one 
 another at the very moment their city was taken of 
 being a little cautious not to sell our country and con- 
 science for nothing of teaching landlords to have at 
 least one degree of mercy towards their tenants lastly, 
 of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, and skill into 
 our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken 
 to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite 
 to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure and 
 the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one 
 fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly 
 invited to it. Therefore, I repeat, let no man talk to 
 me of these and the like expedients, till he has at least 
 some glimpse of hope that there will be ever some hearty 
 and sincere attempt to put them in practice. But as to 
 myself, having been wearied out for years with offering 
 vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly 
 despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this pro- 
 posal ; which, as it is wholly new, so it has something 
 solid and real 1 , of no expense and little trouble, full in 
 our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger of 
 disobliging England." 
 
 England would not put her usual veto upon the 
 scheme (to use up for food the superfluous chil- 
 dren of the poor) for two reasons; first, because
 
 "A MODEST PROPOSAL/' 145 
 
 there would be no interference with her markets, 
 and, secondly, because she would herself willingly 
 eat up the entire Irish nation without salt. 
 
 " For the kind of commodity will not bear exporta- 
 tion, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit 
 a long continuance in salt ; although, perhaps, I could 
 name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole 
 nation without it." 
 
 The paper, then, was the sardonic expression of 
 a frenzy of despair at the failure of all his efforts to 
 move England to help Ireland, or Ireland to help 
 herself. It was written at the same date and in the 
 same spirit of that letter to Bolingbroke, in which Swift 
 groans that he sees nothing before him but to "die 
 here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole." 
 The yoke that he had a little lightened and loosened 
 was pressed down again more remorselessly than 
 ever by Walpole and Boulter upon the necks of 
 the people till the last state of the country was 
 worse than the first. How anyone can read the 
 "Modest Proposal," and doubt that pity, and not 
 pitilessness, was its inspiration, I cannot imagine. 
 What an intensity of pity, soured by despair inspires 
 the irony of such passages as this ? 
 
 " Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great 
 concern about that vast number of poor people who are 
 aged, diseased, and maimed, and I have been desired to 
 
 L
 
 146 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 employ my thoughts what course may be taken to ease 
 the nation of so grievous an incumbrance. But I am 
 not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very 
 well known that they are every day dying and rotting 
 by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can 
 be reasonably expected. And, as to the young labourers, 
 they are now in almost as hopeful a condition. They 
 cannot get work, and consequently pine away for want 
 of nourishment to a degree that if at any time they are 
 accidentally hired to common labour, they have not 
 strength to perform it ; and thus the country and them- 
 selves are happily delivered from the evil to come." 
 
 On the other hand, it must be admitted that all 
 the details of the horrid project are described with 
 the zest and minuteness of a dissecting-room demon- 
 strator, to whom the mangled corpse on the table 
 is only as a figure in Euclid. As, however, in some 
 diseases, everything turns to acid in the system, so every- 
 thing in Swift turned to that sava indignatio, which, 
 like the vulture of Prometheus, tore for ever at his 
 heart. He had, besides, a morbid, and, as it seems 
 to me, an insane taste for the horrible or the nasty 
 details of any subject of his scorn. His revolting 
 picture of human nature, for instance, in his 
 "Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," reminds you of 
 nothing so much as a guide in Paris, who showed 
 you only the sewers. The sewers, no doubt, are 
 there, and are an essential feature of the city, but 
 they are not Paris. The details of his ghoulish
 
 "A MODEST PROPOSAL." 147 
 
 "Modest Proposal" have a similar fascination 
 for him, but the project itself, like the picture of 
 human nature in the " Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," 
 was inspired by sceva indignatio, by an insupportable 
 sense of the miseries of the poor Irish taking the 
 usual turn in such a nature as Swift's of fell hate and 
 scorn of their oppressors. For the " Modest Propo- 
 sal " is and was meant to be, the most terrible arraign- 
 ment of a Government that ever was penned.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 U ON DOING GOOD." 
 
 E associate a divine with a 
 pulpit, and a dean with 
 a theological treatise, but 
 Swift's Rabelaisian theolo- 
 gical treatise, A Tale of a 
 
 Tub, characteristically associates the pulpit with the 
 stroller's stage and the gallows "three wooden 
 machines for the use of those orators who desire to 
 talk much without interruption." Neither this associa- 
 tion, nor the treatise in which it occurs, would lead 
 you to look for effective pulpit oratory from the Dean 
 of St. Patrick's ; yet he preached at least one sermon 
 which we have high authority for considering the best 
 of its kind ever delivered. 
 
 " Swift's pieces relating to Ireland, 1 ' 
 Burke, " are those of a public nature, in 
 
 says Edmund 
 which the Dean
 
 "ON DOING GOOD." 149 
 
 appears, as usual, in the best light, because they do 
 honour to his heart as well as his head, furnishing some 
 additional proofs, that, though he was very free in his 
 abuse of the inhabitants of that country, as well natives 
 as foreigners, he had their interest sincerely at heart, 
 and perfectly understood it. His sermon on doing good, 
 though peculiarly adapted to Ireland, and Wood's design 
 upon it, contains perhaps the best motives to patriotism 
 that was ever delivered within so small a compass." 
 
 It is certainly an excellent specimen of an eighteenth 
 century Anglican sermon a prosaic species. The 
 Anglican divines of this century seemed to regard God 
 as a kind of almighty Walpole, and man at his best as 
 of the sordid sort of stuff of which small shopkeepers 
 are supposed to be made amenable only to the fear of 
 loss and punishment, or to the hope of gain and reward. 
 Perhaps it was a more practical religion than most of 
 the high-pressure piety of to-day, which seems to let 
 all the steam off through the safety-valve or the whistle 
 till there is none to turn on to the wheels ; but it was 
 so little spiritual as to remind you of the benighted 
 disciples at Ephesus who " had not so much as heard 
 whether there be any Holy Ghost." 
 
 To this species of moral essay belongs Swift's dis- 
 course " On Doing Good," preached from the text, " As 
 we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto 
 all men." As it contains ; according to Burke, " the
 
 150 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 best motives to patriotism that was ever delivered 
 within so small a compass," and as the kind of 
 practical patriotism it preaches is not that most in 
 vogue or in action to-day in our country, I shall 
 proceed to quote from it extensively. In opening 
 it, I think Swift must have had in his mind Bacon's 
 distinction : 
 
 "Beware how in making the portraiture, thou breakest 
 the pattern ; for Divinity maketh the love of ourselves 
 the pattern, the love of our neighbours the portraiture.'' 
 
 Swift starts with the same distinction : 
 
 " Nature directs every one of us, and God permits us, 
 to consult our own private good before the private good 
 of any other person whatsoever. We are, indeed, 
 commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves, but 
 not as well as ourselves. The love we have for 
 ourselves is to be the pattern of that love we 
 ought to have toward our neighbour; but as the 
 copy doth not equal the original, so my neighbour can- 
 not think it hard if I prefer myself, who am the original, 
 before him, who is only the copy. Thus, if any matter 
 equally concern the life, the reputation, the profit of my 
 neighbour and my own, the law of nature, which is the 
 law of God obligeth me to take care of myself first, 
 and afterward of him. And this I need not be at much 
 pains in persuading you, for the want of self-love with 
 regard to things of this world, is not among the faults of 
 mankind. But then, on the other side, if, by a small 
 hurt and loss to myself, I can procure a great good to 
 my neighbour, in that case his interest is to be preferred,
 
 "ON DOING GOOD.' 15! 
 
 For example, if I can be sure of saving his life without 
 great danger to my own ; if I can preserve him from 
 being undone without ruining myself ; or recover his 
 reputation without blasting mine all this I am obliged 
 to do, and, if I sincerely perform it, I do then obey the 
 command of God in loving my neighbour as myself. 
 But, besides this love we owe to every man in his parti- 
 cular capacity, under the title of our neighbour, there is 
 yet a duty of a more large extensive nature incumbent on 
 us our love to our neighbour in his public capacity, as 
 he is a member of that great body, the Commonwealth, 
 under the same Government with ourselves and this is 
 usually called love of the public, and is a duty to which 
 we are more strictly obliged than even that of loving 
 ourselves, because therein ourselves are also contained 
 as well as all our neighbours in one great body. The 
 love of the public, or of the Commonwealth, or love of 
 our country, was in ancient times properly known by 
 the name of virtue, because it was the greatest of all 
 virtues, and was supposed to contain all virtues in it ; 
 and many great examples of this virtue are left us on 
 record, scarcely to be believed, or even conceived, in such 
 a base, corrupted, wicked age as this we live in. In those 
 times it was common for men to sacrifice their lives for 
 the good of their country, although they had neither 
 hope nor belief of future rewards ; whereas, in our days, 
 very few make the least scruple of sacrificing a whole 
 nation, as well as their own souls, for a little present 
 gain which often hath been known to end in their own 
 ruin in this world, as it certainly must in that to come. 
 Have we not seen men for the sake of some petty employ- 
 ment give up the very natural rights and liberties of 
 their country, and of mankind, in the ruin of which 
 themselves must at last be involved? Are not these 
 corruptions gotten among the meanest of our people,
 
 152 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 who for a piece of money will give their votes at a ven- 
 ture for the disposal of their own lives and fortunes, 
 without considering whether it be to those who are most 
 likely to betray or defend them ? But, if I were to pro- 
 duce only one instance of a hundred wherein we fail in this 
 duty of loving our country it would be an endless 
 labour, and therefore I shall not attempt it." 
 
 Swift then, addressing, of course, only his co-colonists 
 and co-religionists in St. Patrick's Cathedral, proceeds 
 to distinguish between loyalty and patriotism, as 
 though there was a possibility of their being confounded 
 in Ireland. To us to-day in Ireland the two senti- 
 ments seem nearly related only in Lady Teazle's sense 
 " So near a kin that they can never be united " for 
 Irish loyalty and Irish patriotism are almost invariably 
 found to be in inverse proportion to each other. 
 
 "But here I would not be misunderstood. By the 
 love of our country, I do not mean loyalty to our king, 
 for that is a duty of another nature, and a man may be 
 very loyal, in the common sense of the word, without 
 one grain of public good in his heart. Witness this 
 very kingdom we live in. I verily believe, that since 
 the beginning of the world, no nation upon earth ever 
 showed (all circumstances considered) such high con- 
 stant marks of loyalty in all their actions and behaviour 
 as we have done ; and, at the same time, no people ever 
 appeared more utterly void of what is called public 
 spirit. When I say the people, I mean the bulk or mass 
 of the people, for I have nothing to do with those in 
 power. Therefore, I shall think my time not ill-spent if
 
 "ON DOING GOOD." 1 53 
 
 I can persuade most or all of you who hear me, to show 
 the love you have for your country by endeavouring in 
 your several situations to do all the public good you 
 can. For I am certainly persuaded that all our misfor- 
 tunes arise from no other original cause than that general 
 disregard among us to the public welfare.'' 
 
 It must, however, be remembered that the excess of 
 loyalty and defect in public spirit of this class then 
 were incomparably more despicable and inexcusable 
 than they are now. Now the Queen is to this class 
 the symbol of ascendency, and loyalty is but its 
 protest against a claim (become formidable) of the bulk 
 of the people to political equality or even supremacy. 
 But in Swift's day the bulk of the people were, in his 
 own words, " as inconsiderable in point of power as 
 the women and children;" while the oppression 
 against which he was protesting crushed the colonists 
 specially. To them, therefore, loyalty meant, not the 
 acknowledgment of a dog of the support of his master 
 at his back while worrying its prey, but a spaniel-like 
 licking of the foot of the master that spurned it. 
 Again, while to-day patriotism and public spirit might 
 plausibly be denounced by the ascendency party as 
 meaning the consideration exclusively of the interests 
 of the bulk of the people ; in Swift's day they meant 
 consideration of its own interests exclusively. Yet he 
 says, and says truly, that since the beginning of the
 
 154 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 world no nation ever showed such an excess of 
 loyalty and such a lack of public spirit and patriotism, 
 In the hope of supplying this lack Swift proceeds to 
 show three things : First, that there are few people 
 so weak or obscure as not to have it sometimes in 
 their power to be useful to the public. Secondly, 
 that it is often in the power of the most obscure and 
 weak of mankind to do mischief to the public. And, 
 lastly, that all wilful injuries done to the public are 
 aggravated sins in the sight of God. Having given 
 historical instances of the great good or great ill that 
 can be done to the public by the weak or the obscure 
 he passes on to urge that patriotism should ever be on 
 the alert. 
 
 "Hence it clearly follows how necessary the love of 
 our country, or a public spirit is in every particular man, 
 since the wicked have so many opportunities of doing 
 public mischief. Every man is upon his guard for his pri- 
 vate advantage ; but where the public is concerned, he is 
 apt to be negligent, considering himself as only one among 
 two or three millions, among whom the loss is equally 
 shared, and thus, he thinks, he can be no great sufferer. 
 Meanwhile the trader, the farmer, and the shop-keeper 
 complain of the hardness and deadness of the times, and 
 wonder whence it comes, while it is in a great measure 
 owing to their own folly, for want of that love of their 
 country, and public spirit and firm union among them- 
 selves, which are so necessary to the prosperity of every 
 nation. . . . Thus, we see the public is many times, as 
 it were, at the mercy of the meanest instrument who
 
 "ON DOING GOOD." 155 
 
 can be wicked enough to watch opportunities of doing it 
 mischief upon the principles of avarice or malice, which 
 I am afraid are deeply rooted in too many breasts, and 
 against which there can be no defence but a firm resolu- 
 tion in all honest men to be closely united and active in 
 showing their love to their country, by preferring the 
 public interest to their private advantage. If a pas- 
 senger in a great storm at sea should hide his goods that 
 they might not be thrown overboard to lighten the ship, 
 what would be the consequence ? The ship is cast away, 
 and he loses his life and goods together." 
 
 Finally Swift urges arguments appropriate to the 
 sacred place and day and service that government is 
 from God, confusion from the devil, and that the man 
 who would take the government out of God's hands to 
 put it into those of the devil to the great injury of 
 the Commonwealth commits a greater crime than 
 any, how heinous soever, committed against a private 
 person. Besides, it is a kind of impiety in itself to 
 be unpatriotic. 
 
 "All offences against our country have this aggrava- 
 tion that they are ungrateful and unnatural. It is to 
 our country we owe those laws which protect us in our 
 lives, liberties, our properties, and our religion. Our 
 country produced us into the world, and continues to 
 nourish us, so that it is usually called our mother, and 
 there have been examples of great magistrates who have 
 put their own children to death for endeavouring to 
 betray their country, as if they had attempted the life of 
 their natural parent,"
 
 I$6 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 This sermon, I allow, reads a little like the pro- 
 spectus of a company which offers clear and even 
 substantial profit to bona fide investors. There is a 
 balance-sheet of profit and loss, and a calculation as 
 clear and cold and logical as that of a rule-of-three 
 sum, which makes as little of an appeal to the feelings 
 as any such arithmetical demonstration. This, 
 however, was the style of the Anglican sermons of 
 the day, and Swift's discourse is, if low in its flight, 
 at least direct, and strong, and, above all, well aimed. 
 As he never drew a bow at a venture, he made, we 
 may be sure, the kind of appeal which would weigh 
 most with his audience. From the character of this 
 appeal alone it would be safe to infer the character of 
 the congregation to whom it was addressed not to 
 the Presbyterians of the North, who would need more 
 pious unction, nor to the Catholics and Celts, who 
 would need more sentiment and rhetoric but to the 
 cold and matter-of-fact Anglicans, to whom "dry 
 light is best." And these few thousand Anglicans 
 were to Swift "the nation," whose battle alone 
 politically he was roused to fight.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 "THE STORY OF THE INJURED LADY. 
 
 HE author of GulliveSs 
 Travels was not likely to 
 leave untried as an instru- 
 ment of political instruction 
 the parable naturally the 
 most primitive, popular and 
 telling of all appeals to the unsophisticated under- 
 standing. 
 
 "Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
 
 There truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 
 " Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
 Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
 And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
 
 In roarings round the coral reef." 
 
 Such parables of the wrongs of Ireland and of their
 
 IS** SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 remedies Swift gives us in "The Story of the Injured 
 Lady," and in the "Answer to the Injured Lady," 
 from which an eminent living statesman assures us he 
 derived no little instruction in his youth. The injured 
 Lady is Ireland; her rival, is Scotland; the false lover, 
 who has as grossly ill-used her as he has favoured her 
 rival, is England Such an ill-used lady in life would 
 feel infinitely more furious with the rival, for whom she 
 was neglected, than with the faithless swain who neg- 
 lected her, and here Swift rejoices in being true to life. 
 His detestation of the Scotch, which finds such fero- 
 cious expression in his annotations of Burnet. " Most 
 damnable Scots," " Scotch hell-hounds," etc. had a 
 more personal origin than his theological horror of 
 Presbyterianism. Probably, indeed, his theological 
 horror of Presbyterianism arose originally from his 
 personal grudge against the sect and side which caused 
 in the Civil War the ruin of his family and the exile to 
 Ireland of his father. Whatever may have been its 
 origin, the intense bitterness of his prejudice against 
 the Scotch and their creed so jaundiced his politics as 
 to affect his career at its chief crisis ; since his alienation 
 from the Whigs was quite as much due to their desire 
 and design of abolishing the Test Act in Ireland, as to 
 their neglect of his Church's interests and of his own. 
 The Injured Lady, therefore, reviles her rival with 
 a lifelike virrulence before proceeding to instance all
 
 "THE STORY OP THE INJURED LADY." 159 
 
 the acts of cruelty and oppression committed by her 
 estranged lover. I need not say that the Ireland re- 
 presented by the Injured Lady is the little Church-of- 
 England colony in that country to the exclusion of 
 both Catholics and Presbyterians, who figure in the 
 parable as " ignorant, illiterate " dependents ; that the 
 steward is the king, and the under-steward the vice- 
 roy: 
 
 " Some years ago this gentleman, taking a fancy either 
 to my person or fortune, made his addresses to me, 
 which, being then young and foolish, I readily admitted. 
 When he had once got possession, be began to play the 
 usual part of a too fortunate lover, affecting on all occa- 
 sions to show his authority, and to act like a conquerer. 
 First, he found fault with the government of my family, 
 which, I grant was none of the best, consisting of 
 ignorant, illiterate persons, for at that time I knew but 
 little of the world. In compliance to him, therefore, I 
 agreed to fall into his ways and methods of living ; I 
 have liberty to employ an under-steward who should re- 
 ceive his directions. My lover proceeded farther, turned 
 away several old servants and tenants, and supplying me 
 with others from his own house. These grew so domi- 
 neering and unreasonable that there was no quiet, and I 
 heard of nothing but perpetual quarrels, which, although 
 I could not possibly help, yet my lover laid all the 
 blame and punishment upon me, and upon every falling 
 out still turned away more of my people, and supplied 
 me in their stead with a number of fellows and depen- 
 dents of his own, whom he had no other way to provide 
 for. Overcome by love and to avoid noise and conten- 
 tion, I yielded to all his usurpations, and, finding it in
 
 l6o SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 vain to resist, I thought it my best policy to make my 
 court to my new servants, and draw them to my in- 
 terests ; I fed them from my own table with the best I 
 had, put my new tenants on the best parts of my land, 
 and treated them all so kindly that they began to love 
 me as well as their master. In process of time, all my 
 old servants were gone, and I had not a creature about 
 me, nor above one or two tenants, but what were of his 
 choosing ; yet I had the good luck by gentle usage to 
 bring over the greatest part of them to my side. When 
 my lover observed this, he began to alter his language, 
 and to those who enquired about me he would answer 
 that I was an old dependent of his family, whom he had 
 placed on some concerns of his own, and he began to use 
 me accordingly, neglecting by degrees all common civility 
 in his behaviour. I shall never forget the speech he 
 made me one morning which he delivered with all the 
 gravity in the world. He put me in mind of the vast 
 obligations I lay under to him in sending me so many of 
 his people for my own good, and to teach me manners ; 
 that it had cost him ten times more than I was worth to 
 maintain me ; that it had been much better for him if I 
 had been burnt, or sunk to the bottom of the sea ; that 
 it was reasonable I should strain myself as far as I was 
 able to reimburse him some of his charges; that from 
 henceforward he expected his word should be law to me 
 in all things ; that I must maintain a parish watch against 
 thieves and robbers, and give salaries to an overseer, 
 a constable, and others of his own choosing, whom he 
 would send from time to time to be spies upon me ; that 
 to enable me the better in supporting these expenses, my 
 tenants should be obliged to carry all their goods across 
 the river to his own town-market, and pay toll on both 
 sides, and then sell them at half value. But because we 
 were a nasty sort of people, and that he could not endure
 
 "THE STORY OP THE INJURED LADY." 161 
 
 to touch anything we had a hand in, and, likewise, 
 because he wanted work to employ his own folks, there- 
 fore we must send all our goods to his market just in 
 their naturals the milk immediately from the cow, with- 
 out making into cheese or butter ; the corn in the ear, 
 the grass as it was mowed, the wool as it comes from the 
 sheep's back, and bring the fruit upon the branch, that 
 he might not be obliged to eat it out of our filthy hands. 
 That, if a tenant carried but a piece of bread and cheese 
 to eat by the way, or an inch of worsted to mend his 
 stockings, he should forfeit his whole parcel. And be- 
 cause a parcel of rogues usually plied on the river be- 
 tween us, who often robbed my tenants of their goods 
 and boats, he ordered a waterman of his own to guard 
 them, whose manner was to be out of the way till the 
 poor wretches were plundered, then to overtake the 
 thieves and sieze all as lawful prize to his master and 
 himself. It would be endless to repeat a hundred other 
 hardships he has put upon me, but it is a general rule 
 that whenever he imagines the smallest advantage will 
 redound to one of his footboys by any new oppression of 
 me and my whole family and estate, he never disputeth 
 it a moment. All this has rendered me so very in- 
 significant and contemptible at home, that some servants 
 to whom I pay the greatest wages and many tenants, who 
 have the most beneficial leases, are gone over to live 
 with him, yet I am bound to continue their wages and 
 to pay their rents, by which means one-third of my income 
 is spent on his estate, and above another third by his 
 tolls and markets, and my poor tenants are so sunk and 
 impoverished that, instead of maintaining me suitably to 
 my quality, they can hardly find me clothes to keep me 
 warm, or provide the common necessaries of life for 
 themselves. . . . I am sure I never sought this alliance, 
 and you can bear me witness that I might have had other
 
 162 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 matches ; nay, if I were lightly disposed, I could still, 
 perhaps, have offers that some who hold their heads 
 higher would be glad to accept. But, alas ! I never had 
 any such wicked thought. All I now desire is only to 
 enjoy a little quiet, to be free from the persecutions of 
 this unreasonable man, and that he will let me manage 
 my own little fortune, to the best advantage, for which I 
 will undertake to pay him a considerable pension every 
 year much more considerable than what he now gets 
 from his oppressions ; for he must needs find himself a 
 loser at last, when he has drained me and my tenants so 
 dry, that we shall not have a penny for him or ourselves. 
 There is one imposition of his I had almost forgot, which 
 I think insufferable, and will appeal to you or any 
 reasonable person whether it is or not. I told you be- 
 fore that by an old compact we agreed to have the same 
 steward, at which time I consented likewise to regulate 
 my family and estate by the same methods with him, 
 which he then showed me written down in form, and I 
 approved of. Now, the turn he thinks fit to give this 
 compact of ours is very extraordinary, for he pretends 
 that whatever orders he shall think fit to prescribe for 
 the future in his family, he may, if he will, compel mine 
 to observe them without asking my advice or hearing my 
 reasons. So that I must not make a lease without his 
 consent, or give any directions for the well-governing of 
 my family but what he countermands whenever he 
 pleases. This leaves me at such confusion and uncer- 
 tainty that my servants know not when to obey me, and 
 my tenants, although many of them be very well in- 
 clined, seem quite at a loss. But I am too tedious upon 
 this melancholy subject, which, however, I hope you 
 will forgive, since the happiness of my whole life depends 
 upon it. I desire you will think awhile, and give your 
 best advice what measures I shall take with prudence,
 
 "THE STORY OF THE INJURED LADY." 163 
 
 justice, courage and honour, to protect my liberty and 
 fortune against the hardships and severities I lie under 
 from that unkind, inconstant man." 
 
 Here is the letter with the omission of the tart 
 references to Scotland, and it fairly summarises Swift's 
 idea, not only of the relations of Ireland to England, 
 but of the mutual relations of the different races and 
 religions in Ireland. The English colony was the 
 Injured Lady; the Government officials were her 
 servants ; the landlords, her tenants ; the tenants and 
 labourers her dependents. 
 
 What position is more unhappy, helpless and hope- 
 less than that of a woman wholly in the power of a man 
 to whom she has surrendered everything, and who is 
 scorned by him for that very surrender ? He hates her, 
 because he has injured her ; despises her for her abject 
 submission to his injuries ; mortifies her for the mere 
 pleasure of mortifying her, and opposes her wishes 
 only because they are her's. 
 
 Such precisely was the bearing of England towards 
 the Ireland of that day which was of any political 
 account. Why? Because the Ireland then of any 
 political account was weak as a woman. The 
 Church-of- England garrison, a mere handful compared 
 with the Presbyterian Scotch of the North and the 
 Irish Catholics of the South and West, had to look to 
 England from moment to moment for the maintenance
 
 1 64 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 of their exclusive privileges and their supreme position; 
 and England exacted from their helpless dependence 
 the uttermost farthing in payment of this indispensable 
 support. 
 
 The sixth-form schoolboy, if he bullies his fag 
 infernally, backs up the wretched creature in his bully- 
 ing in turn the boys of his own form, and by making 
 him a tyrant rewards him for being a slave. The 
 tyranny of the ascendency, as Swift elsewhere con- 
 tended, was the direct product of the tyranny of 
 England, while it in turn produced a third the most 
 degrading and grinding of all the tyranny of the 
 agent. 
 
 " All this has rendered me so very insignificant and 
 contemptible at home," complains the Injured Lady, 
 " that some servants to whom I pay the greatest wages, 
 and many tenants who have the most beneficial leases, 
 are gone over to live with him, yet I am bound to 
 continue their wages and to pay their rents ; by which 
 means one-third of my income is spent on his estate, 
 and above another third by his tolls and markets." 
 
 The landlords and Government officials fled the 
 ruined country, precipitating its ruin by their flight, and 
 the deputies they appointed whipped the people with 
 scorpions. The smaller the tyrant, the greater th'e 
 tyranny naturally, since a man's sole claim to import-
 
 "THE STORY OP THE INJURED LADY." 165 
 
 ance must be kept by him always in evidence for his 
 own and others' assurance of his consequence. Thus 
 there was no tyranny so galling and continual as that 
 of these deputy tyrants, who, like the cur-dog in "King 
 Lear," denied the poor even an approach and appeal 
 to their masters. 
 
 Drained dry through these three tyrannies by 
 pensions, duties, rents and taxes the country had 
 nearly come to the pass of bankruptcy : 
 
 " He must needs find himself a loser at last, when he 
 has drained me and my tenants so dry that we shall not 
 have a penny for him or ourselves." 
 
 At this point the lover becomes the injured person, 
 and upbraids the lady he had beggared with her 
 beggary : 
 
 " I shall never forget the speech he made me one morn- 
 ing, which he delivered with all the gravity in the world. 
 He put me in mind of the vast obligations I lay under 
 to him in sending me so many of his people for my own 
 good, and to teach me manners ; that it had cost him ten 
 times more than I was worth to maintain me ; that it 
 had been much better for him if I had been burnt, or 
 sunk to the bottom of the sea ; that it was reasonable I 
 should strain myself as far as I was able to reimburse 
 him of some of his charges." 
 
 The wish, which we have since heard so often that
 
 1 66 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Ireland were sunk in the Atlantic must have been 
 then more fervent and frequent, since the instinct of a 
 pirate is to scuttle the ship he has plundered. As, 
 however, Ireland was not to be so disposed of, she 
 was towed helplessly in the track of her captor, a 
 dismantled hulk. 
 
 " There is one imposition of his I had almost forgot, 
 which I think insufferable, and will appeal to you or to 
 any reasonable person whether it be so or not. I told 
 you before that by an old compact we agreed to have 
 the same steward, at which time I consented likewise to 
 regulate my family and estate by the same method with 
 him, which he then showed me written down in form, 
 and I approved of. Now, the turn he thinks fit to give 
 this compact of ours is very extraordinary ; for he pre- 
 tends that whatever orders he shall think fit to prescribe 
 for the future in his family, he may, if he will, compel 
 mine to observe them without asking my advice, or hear- 
 ing my reasons." 
 
 Such was the case put by the Injured Lady to her 
 friend, who replies (omitting again the biting references 
 to Scotland, which take up two-thirds of the brief 
 letter) with the following sound advice : 
 
 "I know the matters of fact as you relate them are 
 true, and fairly represented. My advice, therefore, is 
 this : Get your tenants together as soon as you con- 
 veniently can, and make them agree to the following 
 resolutions :
 
 "THE STORY OP THE INJURED LADY." 167 
 
 " First, that your family and servants have no depen- 
 dence upon the said gentlemen farther than by the old 
 agreement, which obliges you to have the same steward, 
 and to regulate your households by such methods as you 
 should both agree to. 
 
 " Secondly, that you will not carry your gpods to the 
 market of his town, unless you please, nor be hindered 
 from carrying them anywhere else. 
 
 "Thirdly, that the servants you pay wages to shall 
 live at home, or forfeit their places. 
 
 " Fourthly, that whatever lease you make to a tenant, 
 it shall not be in his power to break it. 
 
 " If he will agree to these articles, I advise you to 
 contribute as largely as you can to all charges of parish 
 and county. I can assure you several of the gentlemen's 
 ablest tenants and servants are against his severe 
 usage of you, and would be glad of an occasion to con- 
 vince the rest of their error, if you will not be wanting 
 to yourself." 
 
 " If you will not be wanting to yourself." It all 
 lies, and will always lie in that. " Every country," 
 says Montesquieu, "gets the government it deserves," 
 and to complain continually of slavery is to confess 
 continual unworthiness of freedom. It would be 
 hardly too much to say that once at least in each 
 generation the opportunity of freedom is given, and 
 the nation that refuses the great offer deserves the fate 
 assigned by Dante to the refusal Che fece per viltate 
 gran rifiuto. The people which sits supinely waiting
 
 1 68 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 to be set free may be set free, but cannot be made 
 freemen, or long retain freedom, because freedom 
 is not a dole to be accepted, but a challenge-shield to 
 be won and to be held against all comers. Ireland, 
 however, has had against her not only the odds, to 
 use Swift's figure, of " eleven men armed against a 
 single man in his shirt," and of a kingdom divided 
 against itself, but also, as I shall now proceed to show, 
 of centuries of such sharp slavery as pierced to the 
 soul.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. 
 
 O far I have tried to give adequate 
 specimens of Swift's protests 
 against the oppression, political, 
 commercial and agricultural, of 
 the Ireland of his day; but of 
 another protest he made with equal force and 
 frequency, and perhaps equal effect, I have said little. 
 He saw, as we can see still to-day, that the deadliest 
 effects of continued oppression are not material, but 
 moral the impoverishment of the spirit of a people, 
 and not the mere impoverishment of their resources. 
 The hackneyed quotation : 
 " Who steals my purse steals trash ; 'tis something, 
 
 nothing, 
 
 Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; 
 But he that filches from me my good name 
 Robs me of that which not enriches him, 
 And makes me poor, indeed," 
 
 extravagantly overrates "the bubble reputation;" since
 
 170 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 a man can be made poor indeed only by the loss, not of 
 his purse or of his good name, but of his self-respect 
 Of this long continued oppression robs a people, and 
 its loss outweighs and also outlasts all the other effects 
 of tyranny. Upon the uplifting of such oppression a 
 people does not spring up erect at once, like grass 
 from under a fairy foot-fall, but lies, as I have some- 
 times seen a fallen horse lie, even after not only its 
 crushing load, but its very harness has been lifted off 
 it. Its vain efforts to gain its feet under the load, 
 have so cowed its spirit that it cannot for some time 
 after its removal be persuaded to renew them. No 
 one will say that Ireland has even yet recovered the 
 spring of its spirit which centuries of oppression and 
 repression have bowed. It would, in truth, be sur- 
 prising if some of the characteristics Swift notes as 
 those of a long-enslaved people did not linger still 
 amongst us to-day ; and if, therefore, his reproofs and 
 exhortations had for us only an historic interest. 
 
 What, then, were these moral results of oppression 
 noted by Swift ? I think all, or almost all, might be 
 classed under the general head of childishness a 
 childish lack of initiative, of staying power and per- 
 severance, and of foresight, forethought and provi- 
 dence. But the kind of childishness which first and 
 most of all strikes Swift is that of a cowed and cowering 
 schoolboy.
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. I?! 
 
 " My Lord," he writes in a letter to Archbishop King, 
 concerning the weavers, " the Corporation of weavers 
 in the woollen manufacture, who have so often attended 
 your Grace and called upon me with their schemes and 
 proposals, were with me on Thursday last, when he who 
 spoke for the rest and in the name of his absent brethren, 
 said: 'It was the opinion of the whole body that if 
 somewhat was written at this time by an able hand to 
 persuade the people of this kingdom to wear their own 
 woollen manufactures, it might be of good use to the 
 nation in general, and preserve many hundreds of the 
 trade from starving.' To which I answered : ' That it was 
 hard for any man of common spirit to turn his thoughts 
 to such speculations without discovering a resentment 
 which people are too delicate to bear.' For I will not 
 deny to your Grace that I cannot reflect on the singular 
 condition of this country, different from all others upon 
 the face of the earth, without some emotion, and without 
 often examining as I pass the streets whether those 
 animals which come in my way with two legs and human 
 faces, clad and erect, be of the same species with what I 
 have seen very like in England as to the outward shape, 
 but differing in their notions, natures, and intellectuals, 
 more than any two kinds of brutes in the forest ; which 
 any man of common prudence would immediately discover 
 by persuading them to define what they meant by law, 
 liberty, property, courage, reason, loyalty or religion. 
 One thing, my lord, I am very confident of that if God 
 Almighty for our sins would most justly send us a pesti- 
 lence, whoever should dare to discover his grief in public 
 for such a visitation, would certainly be censured for 
 disaffection to the Government. For I solemnly profess 
 that I do not know one calamity we have undergone these 
 many years, which any man whose opinions were not in 
 fashion, dared to lament, without being openly charged
 
 172 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 with that imputation. And this is the harder because, 
 though a mother when she has corrected her child, 
 may sometimes force it to kiss the rod, yet she will 
 never give that power to the foot-boy or the scullion." 
 
 " A people long used to hardships," he writes else- 
 where, " lose by degrees the very notions of liberty. 
 They look upon themselves as creatures at mercy, and 
 that all impositions laid on them by a stronger hand are, 
 in the phrase of the report, legal and obligatory. Hence 
 proceed that poverty and lowness of spirit to which a 
 kingdom may be subject as well as a particular person. 
 And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point 
 to die, it is no wonder that he sold his birthright for a 
 mess of pottage." 
 
 Poverty of spirit, like poverty of blood, comes from 
 long keeping on low diet ; and poverty, whether of 
 spirit or of blood, in its turn produces other disorders. 
 The vice of lying, for instance, comes of abjectness of 
 spirit. " Montaigne prettily saith," writes Bacon, for- 
 getting, by the way, that Montaigne was but quoting 
 from Lysander, "Montaigne prettily saith, when he 
 enquired the reason why the word of the ' lie ' should be 
 such a disgrace, and such an odious charge ? " Saith 
 he, " If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth is 
 as much as to say that he is brave toward God and a 
 coward towards men. For a lie faces God, but 
 shrinks from man." 
 
 Thieving, again, which with lying, is frequently 
 denounced by Swift as distinctively and ineradicably
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. 173 
 
 the vice of the Irish poor, is the natural outcome of 
 poverty both of condition and of spirit. Who, again, 
 could severely blame the Irish farmer for the childish 
 and even savage short-sightedness of his improvidence. 
 
 "It was, indeed," writes Swift, "the shameful prac- 
 tice of too many Irish farmers to wear out their ground 
 with ploughing ; while, either through poverty, laziness, 
 or ignorance, they neither took care to measure it as 
 they ought, nor gave time to any part of the land to 
 recover itself. And, when their leases were near expir- 
 ing, being assured that their landlords would not renew, 
 they ploughed even the meadows, and made such havoc 
 that their landlords were considerable sufferers by it. 
 This gave rise to that abominable race of graziers, who, 
 upon expiration of the farmers' leases, were ready to 
 engross great quantities of land, and the gentlemen, hav- 
 ing been often before ill paid, and their land worn 
 out of heart, were too easily tempted, when a rich grazier 
 made an offer to take all their land, and give them 
 security for payment. Thus a vast tract of land, where 
 twenty or thirty farmers lived, together with their cot- 
 tagers and labourers in their several cabins, became all 
 desolate and easily managed by one or two herdsmen and 
 their boys ; whereby the master grazier with little 
 trouble seized to himself the livelihood of a hundred 
 people. It must be confessed that the farmers were 
 justly punished for their knavery, brutality and folly. 
 But neither are the squires and landlords to be excused, 
 for to them is owing the depopulating of the country, 
 the vast numbers of beggars, and the ruin of those few 
 sorry improvements we had." 
 
 Elsewhere, however, Swift suggests other reasons
 
 174 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 than " knavery, brutality and folly " for this improvi- 
 dence of the farmer : 
 
 " The case in Ireland Is yet somewhat worse ; for the 
 absentees of great estates, who, if they lived at home, 
 would have many rich retainers in their neighbourhoods, 
 have learned to rack their lands and shorten their leases, 
 as much as any residing squire." 
 
 Why should farmers not in any country a 
 magnanimous race sacrifice a present advantage 
 to themselves to the future advantage of exterminating 
 landlords ? A like childish lack of initiative, of provi- 
 dence and of perseverance in the Irish artizan 
 shopkeeper, and even manufacturer and merchant 
 might fairly be traced to a like uncertainty of the 
 tenure of their trade. 
 
 " The corporation of weavers in woollen and silk, who 
 have so frequently offered proposals both to your Grace 
 and to me, are the hottest and coldest generation of men 
 that I have known. About a month ago they attended 
 your Grace when I had the honour to be with you, and 
 designed me the same favour. They desired you would 
 recommend to your clergy to wear gowns of Irish stuffs 
 which might probably spread the example among all their 
 brethren in the kingdom, and perhaps among the lawyers 
 and gentlemen of the University, and among the citizens 
 of those corporations who appear in gowns on solemn 
 occasions. I then mentioned a kind of stuff, not above 
 eightpence a yard, which I heard had been contrived 
 by some of the trade and was very convenient, I de- 
 sired they would prepare some of that, or any sort of
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. 175 
 
 black stuff, on a certain day, when your Grace would 
 appoint as many clergymen as could readily be found to 
 meet at your palace, and there give their opinions ; and 
 that, your Grace's visitation approaching, you could then 
 have the best opportunity of seeing what could be done 
 in a matter of such consequence, as they seemed to 
 think, to the woollen manufacture. But, instead of 
 attending, as was expected, they came to me a fort- 
 night after with a new proposal, that something should 
 be written by an acceptable and able hand, to promote 
 in general the wearing of home manufactures, and their 
 civilities would fix that work upon me. I asked if they 
 had prepared the stuffs, as they had promised, and your 
 Grace expected ; but they had not made the least step in 
 the matter, nor as it appears, thought of it more." 
 
 I am not sure if we have even yet learned that the 
 handling of a single rope to hoist a sail is more to the 
 purpose of progress than any amount of whistling for 
 a wind. Even if, however, the manufacturers had 
 come into a plan suggested some years before by Swift 
 to bind themselves " to sell the several sorts of stuffs, 
 cloths and silks, made to the best perfection they were 
 able for certain fixed prices, and in such a manner that, 
 if a child were sent to any of their shops, the buyer 
 might be secure of the value and goodness and 
 measure of the ware," even then the venture ran the 
 risk of wreck on many rocks. In the first place, it 
 was as difficult then as it is now to persuade an Irish 
 shop-keeper to sell, or an Irish customer to buy, native 
 manufacture.
 
 176 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 "I am convinced," writes Swift, in the same paper, 
 " that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the 
 moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear noth- 
 ing but what came directly from thence." 
 
 But, supposing Irish men, and even Irish women, 
 resolved to wear only Irish stuffs, the very resolution 
 bred a new danger that the manufacturer, being thus 
 secured in a monopoly, would with childish short- 
 sightedness kill the goose that laid golden eggs. 
 
 " The mortal danger is that if these dealers could pre- 
 vail by the goodness and cheapness of their cloths and 
 stuffs to give a turn to the principal people of Ireland in 
 favour of their goods, they -would relapse into the 
 knavish practice, peculiar to this kingdom, which is apt 
 to run through all trades adulteration and extortion." 
 
 It was such a crime and blunder that cost the 
 country its lucrative linen trade with Spain. 
 
 "We have seen what a destructive loss the kingdom 
 received by the detestable fraud of the merchants or 
 northern linen weavers, or both notwithstanding all the 
 cares of the Governor of that Board, when we had an 
 offer of commerce with the Spaniards for our linens to 
 the value, as I am told, of 30,000 a year." 
 
 This tendency to discount the future for a small pre- 
 sent advantage and 
 
 " To borrow joy at usury of pain," 
 which is the tap-root of savagery, of much crime, and
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. 177 
 
 of most vice is a necessary product of insecurity. We 
 naturally, then, find it prevail most of all among those 
 whose living was most precarious of all the farmers. 
 
 " Sic vos, non vobis, fertis aratra boves ; 
 Sic vos, non vobis, vellera fertis oves," 
 
 because the oxen and sheep are, not higher, but lower, 
 creatures than the farmer who works and fleeces them. 
 The farmer whom a rack-renting landlord would simi- 
 larly work and fleece, would deserve to be classed with 
 these creatures, if he toiled only and incessantly and 
 willingly for his griping master. But with the Irish 
 tenant it was Hobson's choice. As there was 
 nothing but the land to live by, the landlord, like 
 the regrater of bread in a siege, could extort his 
 own price ; and his price was all that could be 
 ground out of the soil less the few potatoes necessary 
 to keep the tenant alive, and but alive. Even these few 
 potatoes could often be procured in Swift's day only 
 by begging and thieving, as in our own day, only by 
 harvest labour in England. In a sermon on "The 
 causes of the wretched condition of Ireland " Swift says : 
 
 "A great cause of this nation's misery is that Egyp- 
 tian bondage of cruel, oppressing, covetous landlords, 
 expecting that all who live under them should make 
 bricks without straw ; who grieve and envy when they 
 See a tenant of their own in a whole coat, or able to 
 
 N
 
 178 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 afford one comfortable meal in a month ; by which the 
 spirits of the people are broken and made fit for slavery. 
 The farmers and cottagers almost through the whole 
 kingdom being, to all intents and purposes, as real 
 beggars as any of those to whom we give our charity in 
 our streets. And these cruel landlords are every day 
 unpeopling the kingdom by forbidding their miserable 
 tenants to till the earth, against common reason and 
 justice, and contrary to the practice and prudence of all 
 other nations, by which numberless families have been 
 forced either to leave the kingdom, or stroll about and 
 increase the number of our thieves and beggars.'' 
 
 Such a system would demoralize any people ; and 
 any people so demoralized for centuries can no more 
 be regenerated in a moment by the charter of an 
 Act of Parliament, than land so exhausted for centuries 
 can in a moment be put into heart by the grant of a 
 lease. 
 
 Let me give one more picture from Swift of this 
 misery, tyranny and consequent demoralization. In 
 a letter to the Dean of Emly he thus describes the state 
 to which landlordism had reduced Tipperary. 
 
 " It is like the rest of the whole kingdom a bare face 
 of nature, without houses or plantations, filthy cabins, 
 miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in 
 human shape. One ignorant, insolent, oppressive squire 
 to be found in twenty miles' riding ; a parish church to 
 be found only in a summer day's journey, in comparison 
 of which an English farmer's barn is a cathedral ; a bog of
 
 MORAL EFFECTS OF OPPRESSION. 179 
 
 fifteen miles around ; every meadow a slough, and every 
 hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh ; and every 
 male and female, from the farmer inclusive to the day- 
 labourer, infallibly a thief, and consequently a beggar, 
 which in this island are terms convertible." 
 
 Further on in the same letter he writes : 
 
 "There is not an acre in Ireland turned to half its 
 advantage, yet it is better improved than the people ; 
 and all these evils are the effects of English tyranny so 
 your sons and grand children will find to their sorrow.'' 
 
 Now during the whole of this stress of oppression 
 and up even to to-day the English race and rulers 
 and the Anglo-Irish landlords have taunted the Irish 
 peasant with the very vices which English and landlord 
 tyranny must have bred in angels. Oliver reproaching 
 Orlando with being fit for nothing after he has done all 
 he could to unfit him for anything ! Since, however, 
 the Irish peasant, like Orlando, has plucked up the 
 spirit " to mutiny against this servitude," his moral ad- 
 vance in all the self-respecting virtues has been no- 
 thing less than astonishing, and Swift was the first to 
 prescribe and to administer the tonic which has re 
 stored him his morale.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. 
 
 P RELAND is my debtor," said Swift, 
 and she acknowledged the debt with 
 ungrudging gratitude during his life. But 
 since ? Since, I fear, we have drawn 
 from poisoned sources our impressions 
 of our great benefactor. The writers 
 from whom the popular impression of 
 Swift has been derived, are uniformly and grossly 
 unjust to him Johnson, Jeffrey, Macaulay and 
 Thackeray. But, it may be said, this unanimity, on 
 one point, of men like Johnson and Macaulay, Jeffrey 
 and Thackeray, who differ in all other points, is 
 overpowering presumptive evidence against Swift. 
 Not so, if all drew their impression from a single 
 source, from the man who has given Swift the least 
 deserving, and deserved, character of all Swift 
 himself. All misjudgments of Swift, other than those
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. l8l 
 
 due to political prejudice, come from confounding 
 the writer with the man. In every other case in 
 literary history, perhaps, to look for an author's char- 
 acter in his works, as in a mirror, would be to find 
 a far too flattering reflection ; but in Swift's works, as 
 in troubled water, we see a distorted image of the 
 man. His case, in fact, was the precise converse of 
 the proverbial one of Sterne's, whose practical hu- 
 manity was in inverse proportion to his sentimental pro- 
 fession of philanthropy. "To love is to be lovely,' 
 says Cowper, but the converse, " to hate is to be 
 hateful," is not necessarily true, and was certainly not 
 true in Swift's case ; yet it is upon the assumption of 
 its truth that his detractors have based their estimate 
 of his character. So far, however, is this assumption 
 from being true, that few men have been more love- 
 able or more loved than Swift. Let us take up, for 
 instance, Thackeray's foolish challenge, which, yet, is 
 not the most foolish of all the spiteful things he says 
 of Swift. " Would we have liked to live with him ? " 
 he asks in his lecture on Swift surely an ill-judged 
 challenge. The world never saw, says Thackeray 
 himself, so brilliant a circle of wits as met together 
 in that day, and of this circle Swift was the centre in 
 right not only of his ability, but also of his sociability. 
 And, he was supreme, remember, not only as a wit 
 among wits, but as a statesman among statesmen.
 
 1 82 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Oxford, and the most brilliant of all the statesmen of 
 that age, Bolingbroke, looked up to him for counsel 
 as respectfully as Addison, Arbuthnot, Prior, Gay 
 and Pope. But to be respected is not necessarily 
 to be loved ; nor, again, do sociability and amiability 
 go together always. Swift, however, was loved, as he 
 loved, tenderly and intensely ; and those loved him 
 most who lived most with him Pope, Sheridan, 
 Delany, and others. But the spirit in which 
 Thackeray approached the subject of this lecture 
 may be judged from the well-nigh incredible shallow- 
 ness and woodenness of the following comment upon 
 Swift's jesting advice to Gay to turn bishop. 
 
 " Take care of your health and your money," Swift 
 writes to Gay, " Be less modest, more active, or else 
 turn parson and get a bishopric here." 
 
 Upon this Thackeray, the humourist, makes the 
 comment of an old Scotchwoman. 
 
 " I know of few things more conclusive as to the sin- 
 cerity of Swift's religion than his advice to poor John 
 Gay to turn clergyman and look out for a seat on the 
 Bench. Gay, the author of the ' Beggar's Opera ' ; Gay, 
 the wildest of the wits about town it was this man that 
 Jonathan Swift advised to take orders to invest in a 
 cassock and bands just as he advised him to husband 
 his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at interest." 
 
 " Flat burglary as ever was committed ! " quoth 
 Dogberry.
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. 183 
 
 And what is this luckless little joke adduced to 
 prove? That Swift was a hypocrite. Why, if 
 Thackeray knew anything of Swift's life, he must have 
 known that this hypocrite stole off daily to morning 
 prayers when at the height of his power in London : 
 that he read prayers daily to his servants so unosten- 
 tatiously that Delany was six months in the Deanery 
 before he became aware of this function : and that the 
 prayers composed for Mrs. Esther Johnson on her 
 death-bed breathe the most intense religious conviction. 
 
 Is it conceivable either, that Thackeray could have 
 known of Swift's letter to Oxford on his fall, or of 
 his correspondence with the family of Bolingbroke, 
 when he had become the Secretary of the Pretender, 
 and with Ormond when he had become the Pre- 
 tender's General, and yet believe him to be a bluster- 
 ing coward ? 
 
 "It is the first time," writes Swift to Oxford, 
 begging to be allowed to attend him in the Tower 
 on his fall. " It is the first time that I ever solici- 
 ted you on my own behalf, and, if I am refused, 
 it will be the first favour you ever refused me." 
 
 Could Thackeray have read or remembered Swift's 
 dismissal of his butler when he was in Blakeney's 
 power, and because he was in his power, and think 
 the Dean a coward ?
 
 184 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 " I know that my life is in your power ; and I shall 
 not bear out of fear either your insolence or neg- 
 ligence." 
 
 How, again, any man unblinded by political par- 
 tizanship can charge Swift, as Thackeray does, with 
 having his pen and principles on sale, is to me 
 inconceivable. As a matter of fact in a day of 
 almost universal and shameless corruption Swift stood 
 uncorrupted and incorruptible, towering as high 
 morally as he did intellectually above most of his 
 contemporaries. It is as difficult for historians as it 
 is for painters to paint atmosphere, while their readers 
 hardly ever allow environment its due effect upon 
 the characters and careers of historical personages; 
 yet it would be as unfair to judge a man without 
 consideration of his environment, as it would be to 
 pronounce a plant stunted or luxuriant without regard 
 to its native climate or the clemency or inclemency 
 of the season. Thus to appreciate duly the moral 
 strength and purity of Swift's character, you must 
 realize the foulness and infection of the air he 
 breathed and of the surrounding corruption. I 
 know no better way of attempting this in the short 
 space at my command than that of taking an average 
 man of Swift's position, profession, country and time, 
 and comparing together their careers. 
 
 Here, then, is Dr. Theophilus Boulton, another Irish
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. 185 
 
 Protestant divine, dignitary, and patriot who stood as 
 high above the majority of his episcopal brethren as 
 Swift stood above him. Upon Dr. Boulton's promotion 
 to the See of Clonfert, Swift, in congratulating him, 
 expressed the hope that the bishop, being an Irish- 
 man himself a very exceptional thing in those days 
 would do what he could to further the interests of 
 Ireland in the Irish House of Peers. 
 
 Dr. Boukon, however, pleaded that, as the bishopric 
 was a poor one, and his promotion to a richer de- 
 pended upon his keeping well with the Court, he could 
 not yet afford to be a patriot. 
 
 " But, if you should get a better, you will then 
 become an honest man ? " urged Swift. 
 
 " That I will, Mr. Dean," replied the Bishop. 
 
 Upon his translation to Elphin, Swift reminded him 
 of this promise in vain. There was still to deflect 
 the bishop from the path of patriotism the possibility 
 of a promotion to an archbishopric. No sooner, how- 
 ever, had he attained this elevation than he waited on 
 Swift to make to him the following naive declaration : 
 
 " Mr. Dean, I am now at the top of my preferment, 
 for I well know that no Irishman will ever be made 
 Primate. Therefore, as I can rise no higher in fortune 
 or station, I will zealously promote henceforth the 
 good of my country." 
 
 And he did.
 
 1 86 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Here was an exceptionally worthy specimen of an 
 Irish Church dignitary of that day, but how poor a 
 creature does he look beside Swift. 
 
 " Miserable will be the condition of time-servers," 
 says Fuller, " when their master is taken from them !" 
 But "sufficient unto that day was the evil thereof" 
 was the principle of the bulk of the Irish Protestant 
 Hierarchy in Swift's time. They had their reward ; 
 and to suppose that a man of Swift's supreme power 
 would have gone unrewarded, if his abilities and 
 principles could have been purchased at any price is 
 foolish. However, Thackeray's competency to lecture 
 on Swift may be judged from his interpretation of that 
 maddened cry against oppression the " Modest Pro- 
 posal " as a mere exhibition of Swift's rage against 
 children I probably the most shallow comment ever 
 made on that terrible indictment of misgovernment. 
 Indeed, Thackeray's lecture altogether would be below 
 notice, if it had not unfortunately been the source from 
 which the popular impression of Swift in our genera- 
 tion has been derived. His onslaught on Swift was, 
 like Johnson's, inspired by personal antipathy, which 
 may excuse prejudice, but not calumny. If you do 
 not like Dr. Fell, cut him, but do not slander him ; 
 and Thackeray would have done better to keep clear 
 of a subject to which he could not in any sense do 
 justice,
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. 187 
 
 For Jeffrey's and Macaulay's savage onslaughts on 
 Swift, political prejudice is chiefly answerable. 
 
 Here is a single specimen of Jeffrey's truculent 
 abuse : " An apostate in politics, infidel or indifferent 
 in religion, a defamer of humanity, the slanderer of 
 statesmen who had served him, and destroyer of the 
 women who loved him." 
 
 Jeffrey's venom, unlike Thackeray's, has long lost 
 what little malignant power it had a tiny blot of acrid 
 ink which blackened himself more than Swift at the 
 time, faded now to illegibility. 
 
 Macaulay's onslaught is of so much more conse- 
 quence as he is so much more read ; but all Macaulay's 
 judgments have been by this so discredited that his 
 readers now fortunately are on their guard. A judge 
 who, like the prince in the fairy-tale, has but two 
 alternatives to offer everyone brought before him 
 a throne or a block necessarily gets to be sus- 
 pected of weighting the scales of justice ; and this 
 Macaulay did habitually, influenced sometimes by pre- 
 judice, always by the love of startling effects. Hence 
 Macaulay's "black and white style," which was the 
 result of a precisely similar process to that by which 
 the steward of the great Earl of Leicester stocked his 
 preserves with black and white rabbits only. 
 
 " I should like in my warrens rabbits either all black 
 or all white," ordered the Earl, and on his next visit
 
 1 88 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 he found his warrens almost depopulated owing to the 
 steward's method of carrying out the order. By the 
 simple process of eliminating all neutral-coloured 
 rabbits he had contrived that the dozen or so which 
 remained should be all either pure black or pure white. 
 Similarly Macaulay's black and white is obtained by 
 the elimination of all modifying or moderating facts, 
 circumstances, or considerations. 
 
 To Swift he is even unusually and malignantly unfair. 
 Contrasting him after this black and white fashion 
 with Addison, he writes : " In the front of the 
 opposite ranks appeared a darker and a fiercer spirit 
 the apostate politician, the ribald priest, the perjured 
 lover, a heart burning with hatred against the whole 
 human race, a mind richly stored with images from 
 the dung-hill and the lazar house," 
 
 All this because Swift with perfect consistency 
 quitted the Whigs and their thrice-apostate Marl- 
 borough ! Yet no one could read the life of Swift 
 with any attention, but without any prepossession, and 
 fail to see written in almost every line of it his incor- 
 ruptible consistency. 
 
 " Only those," writes Scott in his Life of Swift, 
 " who confuse principle with party and deem that 
 consistency can only be claimed by such as with blind- 
 fold and undiscriminating attachment follow the
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS. 189 
 
 banners and the leaders of a particular denomination 
 of politicians," can deny that Swift " uniformly acted 
 up to the two leading principles of his life " the two 
 principles being, support, on the one hand, of the 
 Revolution, and, on the other, of the Church of 
 England. 
 
 If Macaulay had read only Gulliver's Travels^ he 
 might not unfairly impute to Swift " a heart burn- 
 ing with hatred against the whole human race ; " but 
 he had read also the Journal to Stella, Bolingbroke's 
 letters, and the letters of his literary idol, Addison. 
 A more human and humane heart seldom beat than 
 that whose every pulse we feel in the " Journal : " 
 Bolingbroke, who lived in life-long and brotherly 
 intimacy with Swift, writes: "I love you for a 
 thousand things." Addison, who, as we have seen 
 describes Swift in his dedication to him of his Travel^ 
 in Italy -, as " the most agreeable companion, the truest 
 friend and the greatest genius of his age," says in a 
 letter, that more even than for all these merits he 
 honours him for his exceeding good nature and tender- 
 ness of heart. And even in her fury poor Vanessa 
 makes this acknowledgment, " I know your good nature 
 such that you cannot see any human creature miserable 
 without being sensibly touched." Nor could he. He 
 never left the Deanery without a pocketful of coppers 
 for the beggars in spite of his sound anti-mendicancy
 
 IQO SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 principles while, in accordance with these principles, 
 he kept ^"500 in the constant service of the industrious 
 poor, which he lent out at $ at a time for repay- 
 ment at two shillings weekly. " You cannot imagine," 
 testifies his house-keeper, Mrs. Brent, "what numbers of 
 poor tradesmen, who have even wanted proper tools 
 to carry on their work, have, by this small loan, been 
 put into a prosperous way, and brought up their 
 families in credit." 
 
 The most unworthy thing of many unworthy things 
 in Johnson's Life of Swift y is his sneer at this mode 
 of beneficence perhaps the only form which does not 
 feed the disease of mendicancy by abating a symptom. 
 As for Swift's penuriousness which also Johnson 
 allows himself to sneer at, without remembering, what 
 he of all men might well have remembered, that it 
 had been bred into Swift's very bones by the bitter- 
 ness of early dependence it but subserved the Dean's 
 generosity. 
 
 "The Dean," said Mrs. Brent, " hath found out a 
 new method of being charitable, in which, however, I 
 believe, he will have but few followers which is, to 
 debar himself of what he calls the superfluities of life, 
 in order to administer to the necessities of the dis- 
 tressed. You just now saw an instance of it the money 
 a coach would have cost him he gave to a poor man 
 unable to walk. When he dines alone, he drinks a
 
 SWIFT'S DETRACTORS- IQI 
 
 pint of beer, and gives away the price of a pint of 
 wine. And thus he acts in numberless instances." 
 
 Swift was infinitely above the imbecility of valuing 
 money in and for itself as though a manure-heap 
 were an intrinsically desirable thing and not desirable 
 only for the fruit and flowers producible through it. 
 We should have been spared these unworthy sneers if 
 Johnson had contrasted Swift's letters on the loss of 
 friends with his letters on the loss of fortune. He was 
 twice pecuniarily ruined by the ruin of friends. Of 
 the bankruptcy of Stratford in 1712, which swallowed 
 up Swift's entire fortune of ^400, he writes thus to 
 Stella : 
 
 " I came home reflecting a little ; nothing concerned 
 me but M.D.. I called all my philosophy and reli- 
 gion up, and I thank God it did not keep me awake 
 beyond my usual time, above a quarter of an hour." 
 
 Compare this with the letter to Stella on the stab- 
 bing of Harley, or that on the death of young Harrison, 
 or that on the bereavement of the Duchess of Hamil- 
 ton. Where in literature will you find deeper or 
 tenderer sympathy expressed for mere and new 
 friends ? 
 
 " He that had a heart of that fine frame 
 To pay this debt of love but to a brother,"
 
 I$2 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 was not tainted with inhumanity, least of all with the. 
 petty inhumanity of avarice. 
 
 In 1725 he writes thus to Sheridan of his second loss 
 of fortune. 
 
 " You are to know that by Mr. Pratt's ruin I lose only 
 twelve hundred and fifty pounds which he owes me. So 
 that I am now, as near as I can compute, not worth one 
 farthing but my goods. I am therefore just to begin 
 the world. I should value it less if some friends and 
 the public were not to suffer ; and I am ashamed to see 
 myself so little concerned on account of the two latter. 
 For, as to myself, I have learned to consider what is left, 
 and not what is lost. But enough of this.'' 
 
 Where was this philosophy, when his servant, 
 Magee, died, at whose grave he wept so bitterly ? 
 Where was it, even when Sheridan himself, was being 
 parted from him, not by death, but by distance? 
 When Sheridan's house was being dismantled, prepara- 
 tory to his removal to Cavan, Swift, unable to endure 
 the sight of the disfurnishing of the parlour where he 
 had passed so many happy hours with his friend, burst 
 into tears, rushed into a dark closet, and had long to 
 remain there before he could recover his composure. 
 
 The truth is that Johnson, Jeffrey, Macaulay, 
 Thackeray and the other literary detractors of Swift 
 have a human, beside, or apart from, a political, grudge
 
 SWIFTS DETRACTORS 193 
 
 against the author of Gullivers Travels. "Homo 
 sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto" and as a 
 Whig can hardly be impartial toward a Tory, or a 
 patriot toward a traitor to his country, so a man finds 
 it difficult to forgive Gulliver his inhumanity. Hence, 
 his detractors will not see that it was abstract and 
 literary only and that few more "tender-hefted natures" 
 than Swift's can be found among his contemporaries. 
 Thus 
 
 " The evil that men do lives after them ; 
 Tlie good is oft interred with their bones," 
 
 when the good is personal and practical, but the evil 
 impersonal and literary. It must, besides, be re- 
 membered that Swift differed from all other men of 
 letters, not only in his scorn of fame (with one slight 
 exception, all his works were published anonymously) 
 but in his positive courtship of obloquy. He 
 turned his back with savage scorn towards the world, 
 and showed only his friends and the poor his heart. 
 But those to whom alone he showed his heart are the 
 best judges of its goodness, and by them Swift was 
 loved as few men have ever been loved. Surely, these 
 two considerations Swift's anti-hypocritical affectation 
 of brutality, and the love of all his intimates deepen- 
 ing with their intimacy might have suggested to his 
 posthumous maligners from Lord Orrery to Thackeray, 
 
 o
 
 194 
 
 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 that the man was as humane as the creator of the 
 " Yahoos " and of the " Struldbrugs " was inhuman. 
 I do not think I need ask my own people, who find 
 so often that a rough tongue, a kind heart and a free and 
 full hand go together among ourselves that "sweetest 
 nut hath sourest rind" to forget Swift's words of scorn 
 of the " natives," and remember only his championship 
 of our cause, his tears as of blood for our sufferings, 
 and his lonely and weary and hopeless, but Titanic, 
 struggle for our deliverance.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 "IRELAND IS MY DEBTOR." 
 
 T was a kind of Prometheus Vinctus sense 
 of powerlessness in spite of all his power 
 which inspired much of Swift's fero- 
 city, and did much at last to break his 
 heart. The savagery of the sardonic 
 " Modest Proposal," for instance, is that 
 of a tigress frenziedly tearing at the 
 spear-shaft in her vitals in helpless agony of rage and 
 pain. These horrors ever under his eye roused in 
 him a sense at once of pity, of rage, and of mortified 
 pride. All this suffering was horrible, was preventable, 
 yet not a hand but his was outstretched to prevent 
 it, and his was outstretched in vain. His proud spirit 
 could not brook defeat, yet defeated he certainly was, 
 not alone by Walpole and Boulter and England, but 
 by Ireland herself. The success of the Drapier's
 
 196 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 Letters agitation only made Walpole more merciless, 
 and left Ireland more at his mercy. The country, as 
 it has always done, and does still to-day, made a great 
 effort only to sink back after it in exhaustion, apathy 
 and despair ; and neither Boulter's despotism nor 
 Swift's appeals could stir it from its stupor. Swift 
 had even condescended to apply to the Countess of 
 Suffolk the king's mistress, but the queen's tool, 
 for in that swinish household the queen absolutely 
 governed her husband through his mistress ! to this 
 woman Swift also stooped to apply in his own interests, 
 and in those of Ireland. " I wish," he writes to hen 
 " Her Majesty would remember what I largely said 
 to her about Ireland, when before a witness she gave 
 me leave and commanded me to tell her what she 
 had spoken to me on that subject, and ordered me, 
 if I lived to see her in her present station, to send 
 her our grievances, promising to read my letter, and 
 to do all the good in her power for this miserable 
 and loyal kingdom, now on the brink of ruin, and 
 never so near as now." But from that day to this 
 the House of Hanover has shrunk from Ireland as 
 a rack-renting absentee shrinks from an estate which 
 is a disgrace and reproach to him always, and of 
 course excepting her present Most Gracious Majesty, 
 who has spent in our country twelve entire days 
 during a reign of well-nigh sixty years.
 
 " IBEL AND IS MT DEBTOR." 1 97 
 
 Where else, then, could Swift look for help of 
 hope ? Only to Ireland herself, her Government and 
 her Parliament, and these proved even rottener reeds 
 to lean upon than the mistress of the king and of 
 his kingdom. In 1734 Swift writes, "I have done 
 some smaller services to this kingdom, but I can 
 do no more. I have too many years upon me, and 
 have too much sickness. I am out of favour at 
 Court, where I was well received during two summers 
 six or seven years ago. The governing people here 
 do not love me ; for, as corrupt as England is, it is 
 a habitation of saints in comparison of Ireland. 
 We are slaves and knaves and fools, and all but 
 bishops and people in employment, beggars. The 
 cash of Ireland does not amount to ^200,000 ; the 
 few honest men among us are dead-hearted, poor, 
 and out of favour and power." 
 
 Thus Swift, in spite of his great powers and great 
 efforts, had failed in everything, and in nothing more 
 utterly, as it seemed, than in his single-handed 
 struggle for the deliverance of Ireland. Can there 
 be a doubt that the consciousness of what he was, 
 the reflection of what he ought to have achieved for 
 himself and for his country, and the contemplation 
 of the comparatively beggarly result of all his life- 
 long struggles, at once hastened and aggravated the 
 malady which makes the last chapter of Swift's
 
 IQ8 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 biography the most terrible reading in literary 
 history? 
 
 For what more terrible spectacle is there in itself 
 or in its suggestions than that of a great man who 
 has survived himself ; whose body but holds together 
 the wrecks and ruins of his mind ; and whose life, 
 like the light in a Roman vault, shines only to show 
 the piteous decay of mortality? Or, if there be 
 anything more terrible and it is so terrible that 
 Dante makes it a torment of hell it is the conscious- 
 ness of all you have fallen from, haunting you in 
 your fall. And this too, Swift had occasionally, if 
 not continually, till he sank at last into the torpor 
 of absolute imbecility. Such muttered groans as, 
 " I am what I am," show his appalling consciousness 
 of a great darkness that might be felt closing over 
 him for ever, as waters over the drowning. And to 
 this was superadded insupportable bodily agony. 
 Not his brain only, but his whole body became 
 violently inflamed, and the inflammation settling 
 finally in one eye, caused him for weeks such torture 
 that it needed all the strength of five young men 
 to keep this old man of seventy-three from tearing 
 his eye-ball from its socket. Nor was the cup full 
 yet. The greatest genius of his age is at the last to 
 lapse into idiocy, and its proudest spirit to be ex- 
 hibited in its degradation as a show ! After this last
 
 " IRELAND IS MY DEBTOR." 1 99 
 
 assault of physical torture, brain and body yielded 
 together, leaving the enemy in possession of a shattered 
 shell ; and Swift for three years lived the life of 
 
 "The fat weed 
 That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf." 
 
 In this condition he was on show, for payment, to 
 strangers ! The hackneyed lines of Johnson were 
 literally true : 
 
 " In life's last scene what prodigies surprise ! 
 Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise ! 
 From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, 
 And Swift expires a driveller and a show ! " 
 
 Those who saw Swift, before madness sank into im- 
 becility, as a flame goes out in smoke, pacing cease- 
 lessly and unapproachably his study, his very meals 
 left for him to devour unwatched as for a savage beast 
 newly caught and caged witnessed only the full and 
 final development of a lifelong disorder. The appall- 
 ing spectacle of a mind so noble so o'erthrown pleads 
 in mitigation of the harsh judgments measured out to 
 him, and on grounds more rational than those of mere 
 pity. For surely this daemonic spirit, which so rent 
 and tore him when it was being finally driven out, 
 must have possessed him all his life through, inspiring 
 that fell rage against man, which has raised every man's
 
 200 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 hand against the creator of the Yahoo. Those who wit- 
 nessed Swift's insane and ceaseless pacing of his den, 
 were witnessing, in fact, a revelation similar to that 
 made to Vathek by Soliman in the Halls of Eblis, 
 when the prophet, raising for a moment his hands 
 toward heaven, disclosed through his bosom, which 
 was transparent as crystal, a heart enveloped in flames. 
 This, then, was the frightful reason that each baleful 
 spectre, hiding ever his heart with his hand, wandered 
 lonely in a crowd, homeless in a palace, and tor- 
 mented, '' like a tiger wounded with a poisoned 
 arrow," by insatiate and insensate rage. Swift had 
 gone through life as these doomed souls through the 
 Halls of Eblis, hiding a heart in flames, which were 
 unveiled at its close, showing his misanthropy to be a 
 disease claiming pity, and not Ihe majest'e against 
 human nature deserving vindictive reprobation. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten, either, and least of all 
 forgotten in Ireland, that Swift's misanthropy was 
 abstract hate of man, not of men and that its con- 
 crete form was the noblest which hatred can assume 
 rage against injustice and oppression. But it is not 
 possible for Irishmen to forget this, since it stands on 
 record and it is all that is recorded in the epitaph 
 in St. Patrick's composed by Swift himself. Looking 
 back upon a life memorable for many and great things, 
 he cares to be remembered for one thing alone his
 
 " IRELAND IS MY DEBTOR." 2OI 
 
 strenuous struggle for Irish freedom. He gave in his 
 will precise instructions, which were carried out to the 
 letter, that he was to be buried privately at dead of 
 night in the cathedral, and that on a tablet of black 
 marble, in large letters, " deeply cut and strongly 
 gilded," was to be engraved this epitaph : 
 
 "HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS, 
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT, S.T.P, 
 HUJUS ECCLESIAE CATHEDRALIS 
 
 DECANI : 
 
 UBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO 
 ULTEBIUS COR LACERARE NEQUIT. 
 
 ABI VIATOR 
 ET IMITARE SI POTERIS 
 STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM 
 
 OBIIT ANNO (1745) 
 
 MENSES (OCTOBRIS) DIE (19) 
 
 AETATIS ANNO (78)." 
 
 Johnson also in his Life of Swift, where he extenuates 
 nothing, but sets much down in unaccountable malice, 
 thinks his service to Ireland the chief distinction of 
 his life. 
 
 "In the reign of Queen Anne he turned the stream 
 of popularity against the Whigs, and must be confessed 
 to have dictated for a time the policy of the English 
 nation. In the succeeding reign he delivered Ireland 
 from plunder and oppression ; and showed that wit,
 
 202 SWIFT IN IRELAND. 
 
 confederated with truth, had such force as authority was 
 unable to resist. He said truly of himself that ' Ireland 
 was his debtor.' It was from the time that he first 
 began to patronise the Irish that they date their riches 
 and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own 
 interest ; their weight and strength, and gave them spirit 
 to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects, to which 
 they have ever since been making vigorous advances, 
 and to claim those rights which they have at last estab- 
 lished. Nor can they be charged with ingratitude to 
 their benefactor ; for they reverenced him as a guardian, 
 and obeyed him as a dictator.'' 
 
 It is, in fact, incontestable that Swift's service to 
 Ireland deserves the distinction he gives it in his 
 epitaph. Look at it how you will, either from the point 
 of view of the need of the service, or of its righteousness, 
 or of its greatness, or of its difficulty, and Swift's work 
 in Ireland is his supreme achievement. When " in 
 the reign of Queen Anne he dictated for a time the 
 policy of the English nation," he had at his back a 
 powerful and compact party, all the influence (then 
 enormous) of the Court, Harley's serviceable cunning 
 and the brillant intellect of Bolingbroke. But of his 
 work in Ireland he might say with literal truth, "Alone 
 I did it ! " All England, Court and Ministry, parties 
 and people, were solid against him ; solid against him 
 also was a nearer, fiercer and fouler enemy, the Irish 
 Government and Judiciary, murderous and remorseles 
 as hired bravos ; but at his back, no one ! The spirit
 
 " IRELAND IS MY DEBTOR." 203 
 
 of the Irish people " the aborigines " had fainted 
 within them under insupportable oppression and 
 misery, while the currish spirit of the " colonists " 
 cringed to England's heel at a word. If there was a 
 single sensitive spot about them it lay in their breeches 
 pocket, yet the " Proposal for the Universal Use of 
 Irish Manufacture," addressed exclusively to this 
 susceptible region, was incriminated by two colonist 
 Grand Juries as "a seditious, factious and virulent 
 libel." 
 
 Here was stuff as promising as those recruits of Clive's 
 who fled at the first report of one of their own guns ; 
 yet to the same men in a few months the strongest 
 French fortress in India capitulated. Not less astonish- 
 ing was the spirit to which Walpole capitulated, 
 breathed by Swift in a few months into hearts as craven. 
 He had declared war without a single soldier behind 
 him, and then, as it were with a stamp of his foot, he 
 had raised an army out of the ground and led it to 
 victory. The victory was not final ; what, on the 
 contrary, seemed final was the subsequent defeat and 
 prostration of the country under the heel of Archbishop 
 Boulter; but almost every great teacher, secular or 
 sacred, in history has had to pay the price of present 
 failure for the future and final success of his principles. 
 
 The greatest of teachers is the farthest in advance of 
 his time ; and to be far in advance of your time is the
 
 204 SWIFT IN IRBLAKD. 
 
 greatest of crimes. Thus the arch-malefactors of 
 yesterday are the saints of to-day, and we build the 
 sepulchres of the Prophets our fathers had stoned. It 
 is not the extravagant compliment it seems, to rank 
 Swift with the Prophets who were defeated in their 
 life-time and because of their greatness, only to 
 triumph finally, through the spirit and the doctrine 
 they bequeathed ; for politically and in Ireland he was 
 the Moses of his day. If he left his people in the 
 Wilderness he showed them the way out of Egypt and 
 the way into Canaan. To his example Ireland owes 
 and it is no small debt her Protestant leaders, Lucas, 
 Flood, Grattan and Parnell; to his initiative she owes 
 the system of inert, dogged and solid resistance to 
 oppression ; and to his teaching she owes the lessons, 
 that we must be self-respecting to be respected, self- 
 reliant to be prosperous and self-dependent to be free. 
 But of all the noble and needed exhortations he has 
 addressed to us, that of his epitaph makes on us the 
 most urgent, exacting and heroic demand : 
 
 IMITARE SI POTERIS 
 STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM
 
 THE STORY OF 
 EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D. 
 
 NEW IRISH LIBRARY, Vol. VI, 
 
 NOTICES OF THE PEESS. 
 
 "The story of 'Early Gaelic literature' is the title 
 of the latest work added to the rapidly growing series 
 of the New Irish Library. The author is Dr. Douglas 
 Hyde, and the book, though issued in an unpretentious 
 form by Mr. T. Fisher Unwin is of the rarest interest 
 to every student of Irish literature. . . . Books like 
 that of Dr. Hyde are lights in the van of advancement." 
 IRISH TIMES, March 8th, 18U5. Leading article on 
 the book. 
 
 " Dr. Hyde has the ideal scholarly qualities, the 
 patience, the enthusiasm, the research, the love of his 
 work, and he has in addition the power of placing be- 
 fore us the knowledge he has collected with a literary 
 skill and charm that lift his work out of the category 
 of the specialist. . . . We hope this addition to the 
 New Irish Library will sell by tens of thousands in 
 Ireland. It is informed with more knowledge, sympathy, 
 and power of imparting knowledge that many rich tomes
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 on the shelves of wealthy collectors and in college libraries. 
 A rich shilling's-worth ! It makes us thirsty for more 
 yet to come from this fountain-head." DAILY INDEPEN- 
 DENT. Leading article on the book, March 15th, 1895. 
 
 "One could not have a pleasanter or a more ac- 
 complished guide to the beauties of the treasure-house 
 of Irish poetry and romance. His translations, while 
 preserving as much as possible of the colour, style, and 
 even accent of the original, are excellently done, and 
 are in themselves good literature." FREEMAN'S JOUR- 
 NAL, March 17th, 1895. 
 
 " Those who read the Story of Early Gaelic Litera- 
 ture should not omit to read its preface, for it is 
 one of the most remarkable parts of a remarkable 
 book. . . . The Story of Early Gaelic Literature is a 
 book of which every Irishman, no matter what his creed 
 may be, should feel proud. It is a noble work on a 
 noble theme, and it is to be hoped its gifted author will 
 produce many more like it." DAILY EXPRESS, March, 
 21st, 1895. 
 
 "To the true Celtic Irishman it will be as wine to 
 warm his blood, one of the noblest vindications ever 
 penned of the learning, the genius, and the civilization 
 of the far-scattered, but indestructable race of the Clan- 
 na-Gael." UNITED IRELAND, March 30th, 1895. 
 
 "In the Story of Early Gaelic Literature is given to 
 the public a book which we trust no Irishman pretend- 
 ing to interest in national matters will neglect to read. 
 . . . Dr. Hyde set before himself what to him is a 
 pleasant task, and he has fulfilled it in a manner beyond 
 all praise." EVENING TELEGRAPH, March 9th, 1895.
 
 Preparing for Immediate Publication 
 
 A FINAL EDITION 
 
 OF 
 
 YOUNG IRELAND. 
 
 A FRAGMENT OF IRISH HISTORY 1842-1846. 
 
 Illustrated with Portraits, Autographs, 
 Facsimilies and Historical Scenes. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. SIR C. GAVAN DUFFY, K.CM.G. 
 
 To be published in two parts, 2s. each, largely illus- 
 trated, and in a volume handsomely bound, price 5s. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE CRITICAL PRESS. 
 
 From the SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 "The party which Davis created, and of which Duffy 
 took the leadership from his hand, had many engaging 
 characteristics, and these characteristics had never been 
 so effectively set out before. The author abstained to 
 a great extent from that curse of Irish controversy 
 indiscriminate and personal abuse of those who differed 
 with him. The reception of YOUNG IRELAND was thus 
 favourable even with those who could least admit its
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESb. 
 
 author's political postulates, or arrive at his historical 
 standpoint. It was recognized as a .valuable contribution 
 to history where the author spoke with personal know- 
 ledge, and an interesting contribution to literature even 
 where he did not." 
 
 From THE TIMES. 
 
 "The gifted and ill-fated Party of Young Ireland 
 certainly deserved an APOLOGIA, and it is past dispute 
 that no one could be more competent for the task than 
 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. Notwithstanding the genuine 
 modesty with which he always attributes the origin of 
 the school (for, in the true sense, it was a school rather 
 than a party) to Thomas Davis, he will, we think, 
 be always regarded as its true founder. He established 
 and guided from 1842 to 1855 the NATION, which 
 was in those days its one accepted organ. A State 
 prisoner with O'Connell in 1844, with Smith O'Brien in 
 1848, three times tried, and all but convicted of treason 
 in 1848, he organized, after his release from prison, a 
 peaceful agitation for the measures which afterwards 
 formed the main achievements of Mr. Gladstone's Irish 
 policy. Proceeding to Australia in 1855, he has been 
 some time Prime Minister of Victoria and Speaker, and 
 while he filled the chair it is said order reigned in that 
 tumultuous Parliament." 
 
 From THE EDINBTJKGH REVIEW. 
 " These, it seems, were the founders, heroes, and 
 martyrs of the NATIOX, and we are free to confess that 
 the Young Ireland of those days had incomparably more 
 patriotism, eloquence, and energy than their degenerate 
 successors. But even Ireland cannot produce an inex- 
 haustible supply of Davises and Duffys. It is in the 
 nature of all human things : 
 
 ' In pej us ruere et retro sublapsa ref erri. ' " 
 
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