The writer of a pamphlet entitled "The Groans of Ireland in a Letter to a Member of Parliament," published in Dublin in 1741, thus begins:—
"I have been absent from this country for some years, and on my return to it last summer found it the most miserable scene of universal distress that I ever read of in history.
"Want and misery in every face, the rich unable, almost as they were unwilling, to relieve the poor; the roads spread with dead and dying bodies; mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles which they fed on; two or three, sometimes more, on a car going to the grave for want of bearers, to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches where they perished. This universal scarcity was ensued by malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts; whole villages were laid waste by want and sickness and death in various shapes, and scarce a house in the whole island escaped from tears and mourning.
"It were to be wished, Sir, that some curious enquirer had made a calculation of the numbers lost in this terrible calamity. If one for every house in the kingdom died (and that is very probable, when we consider that whole families and villages were swept off in many parts together), the loss must have been upwards of 400,000 souls. If but one for every other house (and it was certainly more), 200,000 perished—a loss too great for this ill-peopled country to bear and the more grievous as the loss was mostly of the grown-up part of the working people."
The writer then proceeds to emphasise the fact to which Swift had previously directed attention: that Irish famines are artificial.
"Sir,—When a stranger travels through this country and beholds its wide extended and fertile plains, its great flocks of sheep and black cattle, and all its natural wealth and conveniences for tillage, manufactures, and trade, he must be astonished that such misery and want could possibly be felt by its inhabitants; but you, who know the Constitution and are acquainted with its weaknesses, can easily see the reason."[108]
Writing in the year 1779, Hely Hutchinson says, "In this and the last year about twenty thousand manufacturers in this metropolis were reduced to beggary for want of employment; they were for a considerable length of time supported by alms; a part of the contribution came from England, and this assistance was much wanting, from the general distress of all ranks of people in this country. Public and private credit are annihilated."[109] Again, "A country will sooner recover from the miseries and devastation occasioned by war, invasion, rebellion, and massacre, than from laws restraining the commerce, discouraging the manufactures, fettering the industry, and, above all, breaking the spirits of the people."[110] He thus summarises the effects of the eighty years' restrictive legislation, between the destruction of the woollen trade in 1699 and 1779, the date at which he was writing. "Can the history of any other fruitful country on the globe, enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness, and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern story. If the ineffectual endeavours by the representatives of those poor people to give them employment or food had not left sufficient memorials of their wretchedness, if their habitations, apparel, and food were not sufficient proofs, I should appeal to the human countenance for my voucher, and rest the evidence on that hopeless despondency that hangs on the brow of unemployed industry."[111]