George Ensor

George Ensor J.P. (17 December 1769 – 3 December 1843) was an Irish lawyer, radical political pamphleteer and freethinker. Among other conservative precepts, he pilloried the Malthusian doctrine that poverty is sustained by the "disposition to breed". As a hindrance to enterprise and prosperity, he pointed rather to the tyranny of concentrated wealth. In Ireland, it was a condition he believed could be reversed only through popular representation in a restored parliament. Ensor further outraged prevailing opinion by inveighing against the constitutional ascendancy not merely (as a supporter of Catholic emancipation) of Protestantism, but more broadly of the Christian religion. He argued that questions of morality and social justice cannot be addressed within a theology of salvation through faith.

George Ensor J.P. (17 December 1769 – 3 December 1843) was an Irish lawyer, radical political pamphleteer and freethinker. Among other conservative precepts, he pilloried the Malthusian doctrine that poverty is sustained by the "disposition to breed". As a hindrance to enterprise and prosperity, he pointed rather to the tyranny of concentrated wealth. In Ireland, it was a condition he believed could be reversed only through popular representation in a restored parliament. Ensor further outraged prevailing opinion by inveighing against the constitutional ascendancy not merely (as a supporter of Catholic emancipation) of Protestantism, but more broadly of the Christian religion. He argued that questions of morality and social justice cannot be addressed within a theology of salvation through faith. Ensor was a political pamphleteer, and a prolific correspondent to the press, noted for the sarcasm he employed against the government in Ireland and in Britain. His first tract, Principles of Morality (which argued that morality was independent of religion) was published in 1801¹. By the time of his death in 1843 he had produced over twenty disquisitions propagating "advanced" views on English laws and tribunals; Catholic emancipation; the triumph of reaction in post-Napoleonic Europe; political economy including the sources, and relief, of poverty; Ireland's fate within the United Kingdom; parliamentary reform; national education; and the corn laws. His broadest, most ambitious attempt, was to discredit the political economy of Thomas Malthus. In An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818), Ensor dismissed what has become known the "Malthusian trap". Regardless of what might be done to improve their condition, Malthus maintained that the labouring classes tend to propagate until, outpacing the means of their subsistence, their numbers invite "correction" by war, hunger, and pestilence. For Ensor the problem of poverty was not a "disposition to inordinate breeding". Rather it is that wealth is "iniquitously divided", a condition compounded by the fact that "the poor man's labour is far more surcharged that the rich man's property by taxes". In a wide-ranging critique, Ensor took aim at the duplicitous application of the moral principle by which Malthus justified his seeming indifference to the fate of the poor: Mr Malthus says no one has the right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it. [...] But suppose the position true, that a right to subsistence depends on the labour of the individual: whose labour?--the rich, the aristocracy, the proprietors of land, the holders of stock, heirs in their own right, and princes by divine right? Here again Paley interposes: "It is a mistake to suppose that the rich man maintains his servants, tradesmen, tenants and labourers: the truth is they maintain him". He finds Malthus's dogmatic insistence on absolving the rich and the institutions of society of responsibility for poverty "astounding": Mr Malthus considers that attributing in any way the distress of the poor to the higher classes of society is a vulgar error [...] and that it depends on the conduct of the poor themselves. Does slavery depend on the slaves themselves? [...] Does it depend on the Irish peasantry that the proprietors are absentees? or, on the Catholics of Ireland that they pay tithes to the protestant clergy? Does it depend on the poor of England that they pay for salt a tax thirty times the original cost of the article? Idleness and negligence, Ensor argued were as much an effect as a cause of social evils. In India, the English complain that "the people are without industry and without energy", attributing this "stupidity" to a "rich soil and inelastic atmosphere". But faced with the dread violence and extortion of district officers "it is prudent in [the Indian peasant] to appear and to be poor". The primary cause of poverty is not, as Malthus and his school believe, "nature and breeding". Rather (as Adam Smith proposed) it is that which impoverished the Roman state: rapti largiuntur—what is seized from the people and distributed as favours by the state. Conversely—Ensor invokes David Hume—"every country will abound with people and their comforts as it is well governed". To be well governed, is to be represented in "a well-organised constitution" and, advancing a case for parliamentary reform, Ensor observes that "representation is the most secure which is the most popular". Elevated from subject to citizen, people will "improve their intelligence; and this will regulate their number, by ascertaining their wants and conveniences". He was not aware "of any nation, which possessing confirmed liberty and equal laws, has become miserable merely by the excess of its people". Ensor's attack upon Malthus was seconded by Whitley Stokes. His Observations on the Population and Resources of Ireland (1821) similarly concludes that Ireland's problem is not her "numbers" but her indifferent government, and that once the Irish begin to feel "whole clothes" on their backs, "effort for profit" would be made. Consistent with Ensor, William Hazlitt (1819) was also to write, "Mr Malthus wishes to confound the necessary limits of the produce of the earth with the arbitrary and artificial distribution of that produce by the institutions of society". "Property in the few", wrote Ensor, "confirms an oligarchy—property in the many is the stay of liberty, and the means of its honest and profitable increase". In a posthumous work, Of Property and of its Equal Distribution as Promoting Virtue, Population, Abundance (1844), presented as a "detailed and extensive investigation" of "property its origin, distribution and progress", Ensor took this argument against Malthus a step further. Seizing upon Malthus's proposition that "manufacturing is at once the consequence of a better distribution of property and the cause of further improvement" (and noting William Pitt's acknowledgement that the unequal division of property was among "the chief causes of Ireland's vexations") Ensor proposed reforms to "reverse the excessive accumulation of landed property" and to "increase the middle order of society". Among other things, these included ejecting the unelected representatives of the landed interest (the hereditary Lords) from Parliament; taxing real estates passing by descent ("death duties" as they came to be known in Britain); ending the presumption of primogeniture (Ensor accounted the suppression of gavelkind as "greatest evil" the Norman Conquest visited upon England); admitting women to their share of inheritance, and recognising tenant right. In The Poor and Their Relief (1825), Ensor had argued that, as their wages "seldom exceed their necessities", "labouring people should be exempted from all taxation whatever". Taxation "should exclusively fall on the opulent". ]] In Anti-Union, Ireland as She Ought to Be (1831), Ensor maintained, not only that "England has always treated Ireland insidiously, enviously, destructively; [so that] so long as the Union continues Ireland must be poor and disturbed", but that England too is injured. Irish political considerations and the increased opportunity for corruption afforded by Irish representation at Westminster compromise the cause of civil liberty and impede parliamentary reform. In an 1831 Commons debate on the Reform Bill, O'Connell claimed that George Ensor, "one of the most intelligent and clever advocates of the Repeal of the Union", had called on the people of Ireland "to oppose Reform, as likely to raise up obstacles" to Repeal. In the event, Ensor professed himself unimpressed by the "pageant of reform" in Britain. The Reform Act 1832 had left the peoples of Britain and Ireland reason yet to envy France where the right to vote, albeit still tied to property, was exercised by secret ballot (out of sight of landlord and employer), and was undiluted by hereditary and ecclesiastical legislators. Ensor's own "Plan of Reform" was for "all adults" to have an equal right to elect their legislators. As first proposed in his treatise On National Government (1810) (a work forwarded to Thomas Jefferson by Ensor's Trinity College classmate and United Irish exile, William Sampson), this was based on the confidence that: Most people know in the main what is good for them. The savage would not be kidnapped—the slave would be emancipated—and all men, whatever would be their race, sect or colour would be free, and would enjoy the means of securing their freedom. There followed Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation" (1828), Ensor's broadside against the evangelical revival that had spurred Protestant "home missions" to Irish peasantry. Insisting that "the Bible without note or comment . . . be a schoolbook", the campaign, which began with the Scripture Education Movement led by William Magee, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, had also upended the government's conciliatory plans, broadly supported by Doyle, for a non-denominational system of primary education. That the Protestant clergy in Ireland should have obstructed "educating socially and religiously all the people in a common school", for Ensor was further evidence that a religious establishment is "inherently pernicious in all its relations". Principles of Morality (1801) The Independent Man (1806) On National Government (2 vols., 1810) On National Education (1811) Defects of the English Laws and Tribunals (1812) Observations on the present state of Ireland (1814) Janus on Sion, or Past and to Come (1816) An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818) Radical Reform: Restoration of Usurped Rights (1819) Address to the People of Ireland on the Degradation and Misery of their Country (1823) The Poor and their relief (1825) A Defence of the Irish and the Means of their Redemption (1825) Irish Affairs at the Close of 1825 (1826) Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation" (1828) Anti-Union, Ireland as She Ought to Be (1831) A Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments and of the Morality and Consolation of the Christian Religion (1835). Natural Theology: The Arguments of Paley, Brougham, and the Bridgewater Treatises on this Subject Examined (1836). Before and After the Reform Bill (1842) Of property and of its equal distribution as promoting virtue, population, abundance (1844) ==References== Oxford Biography Index entry George Ensor Ensor, George (1769–1843), political writer Oxford Biography Index Number 101008822 ==External links== Oxford DNB Ulster Biographies On National Government, Volume 2 (Free Ebook from Internet Archive) Irish Affairs at the Close of 1825 (Free Ebook from Internet Archive) The poor and their relief (Free Ebook from Google Books) An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations: Containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818) (Free Ebook from Google Books) New York Public Library

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