3rd, the unwholesome, foul, I had almost said corrupted water that great numbers of the inhabitants are necessitated to use during the dry months of the summer.
4th, the vast quantities of animal offals used by the meaner sort, during the slaughtering seasons: which occasion still more mischief by the quick and sudden transition from a diet of another kind.”
In farther explanation of the fourth concurring cause, he says that in no part of the earth is a greater quantity of flesh meat consumed than in Cork by all sorts of people during the slaughtering season—one of the chief industries of the place being the export of barrelled beef for the navy and mercantile marine. The meat, he says, is plentiful and cheap, and tempts the poorer sort “to riot in this luxurious diet,” the sudden change from a meagre diet, with the want of bread and of fermented liquors, being injurious to them[430].
Famine and Fevers in Ireland in 1718 and 1728.
Thus far Rogers, for the city of Cork in the three epidemic periods, 1708-10, 1718-21, and 1728-30, two of which, if not all three, were periods of dysentery as well as of typhus. But it was usual in Ireland for the country districts and small towns to suffer equally with the cities. The circumstances of the Irish peasantry in the very severe winter of 1708-9 are not particularly known; if there was famine with famine-fever, it was not such as to have become historical. But for the next fever-period, 1718-20, we have some particulars. Bishop Nicholson, of Derry, writes: “Never did I behold even in Picardy, Westphalia or Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as appeared he countenances of most of the poor creatures I met with on the road.” One of the bishop’s carriage horses having been accidentally killed, it was at once surrounded by fifty or sixty famished cottagers struggling desperately to obtain a morsel of flesh for themselves and their children[431].
This was a time when the population was increasing, but agriculture, so far from increasing in proportion to the number of mouths to feed, was positively declining, unless it were the culture of the potato. In a pamphlet of about 1724, on promoting agriculture and employing the poor, the complaint is of beef and mutton everywhere, and an insufficiency of corn. “Such a want of policy,” says one, “is there, in Dublin especially, on the most important affair of bread, without a plenty of which the poor must starve.” Another, a Protestant, has the following threat for the clergymen of the Established Church: “I’ll immediately stock one part of my land with bullocks, and the other with potatoes—so farewell tithes[432]!” From this it is to be inferred that potatoes were not made tithable until a later period, pasture being exempted to the last. For whatever reason, grazing, and not corn-growing, was then more general in Ireland than in the generations immediately preceding, much land having gone out of tillage. The culture of the potato was driven out of the fertile lowlands to the hill-sides, so as to leave the ground clear for ranges of pasture. Rack-renting was the rule, doubtless owing to the same reason as afterwards, the competition for farms. While the Protestants emigrated in thousands, the Catholics multiplied at home in beggary. A pamphleteer of 1727 says: “Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty, and you may send away the other forty-nine.” Thus we find the pasturing of cattle preferred to agriculture long after the barbaric or uncivilized period had passed, preferred indeed by English landlords or farmers[433].
There were three bad harvests in succession, 1726, 1727 and 1728, culminating in a famine in the latter year. Boulter, archbishop of Armagh, who then ruled Ireland, was able to buy oats or oatmeal in the south and west so as to sell it below the market price to the starving Protestants of Ulster, an interference with the distribution of food which led to serious rioting in Cork, Limerick, Clonmel and Waterford in the first months of 1728[434]. No full accounts of the epidemic fever of that famine remain. Rutty, of Dublin, says it was “mild and deceitful in its first attack, attended with a depressed pulse, and frequently with petechiae[435];” while, according to Rogers and O’Connell[436], the epidemic fever of Munster was the same. Of the famine itself we have a glimpse or two. Primate Boulter writes to the Duke of Newcastle on 7 March, 1727:
“Last year the dearness of corn was such that thousands of families quitted their habitations to seek bread elsewhere, and many hundreds perished; this year the poor had consumed their potatoes, which is their winter subsistence, near two months sooner than ordinary, and are already, through the dearness of corn, in that want that in some places they begin already to quit their habitations[437].”
Quitting their habitations to beg was a regular thing at a later time of the year. It was in the course of these bad years, in 1729, that Swift wrote his ‘Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country.’ The scheme to use the tender babes as delicate morsels of food for the rich, was a somewhat extreme flight of irony, not so finished as in Swift’s other satires, but the circumstances out of which the proposal grew were more real than usual.
“It is a melancholy object,” says the Dean of St Patrick’s, “to those who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.” Having ventilated his project for the children, he proceeds to show that “their elders are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.”