Population, providence and empire

The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland

Sarah Roddy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719090196
• eBook ISBN: 9781847799760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Over seven million people left Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book is the first to put that huge population change in its religious context, by asking how the Irish Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches responded to mass emigration. Did they facilitate it, object to it, or limit it? Were the three Irish churches themelves changed by this demographic upheaval? Focusing on the effects of emigration on Ireland rather than its diaspora, and merging two of the most important phenomena in the story of modern Ireland – mass emigration and religious change – this study offers new insights into both nineteenth-century Irish history and historical migration studies in general. Its five thematic chapters lead to a conclusion that, on balance, emigration determined the churches' fates to a far greater extent than the churches determined emigrants' fates.

Part I

1

Talk of population: the clergy and emigration in principle

Migration from nineteenth-century Ireland, no less than migration from any other society, was driven primarily by an economic imperative. Whether attracted by the promise of a better life in Britain or the New World, or feeling compelled to leave by a lack of opportunity at home, most Irish emigrants determined their course based on a rational assessment of their own and their family’s best economic interests.¹ Accordingly, as Professor David Fitzpatrick has eloquently observed, ‘for its opponents as much as its advocates, the massive fact of emigration outweighed and enfeebled the expression of mere opinion’.² Yet for long periods of the century, usually coinciding with the years of greatest departures, debates on the economic utility and desirability of emigration raged. As intermediaries between the poor and the state, clergymen had an undeniable and continuing interest in the questions that were thrown up: Was emigration a legitimate means of relieving acute distress or of improving Ireland’s economic fortunes? If so, should it be encouraged, directed, or organised? If not, should it somehow be prevented? Who should take responsibility for such measures? Who or what was to blame for ‘excessive’ emigration? According to circumstances, these questions acquired varying prominence with different denominations, and clerical answers to them often evolved, and even became radically altered. This chapter, by tracing these processes, will assess how members of the clergy regarded emigration as an economic principle.

That Ireland’s problems could be dispensed with alongside a portion of its population became a common belief in the depressed decades following the Anglo-French wars. Figures ranging from MPs to classical economists to, in this instance at least, a rather unromantic Poet Laureate, were convinced that an expanded and expanding post-Waterloo population could not be immediately provided for in any other manner.³ The idea derived from a widely held dogma of Irish ‘overpopulation’, in itself a rather problematic concept. As Joel Moykr noted some years ago, it is ordinarily difficult to define what overpopulation precisely entails, and as critics of his ambitious econometric investigation have since reinforced, the hard data necessary to test the thesis as applied to pre-Famine Ireland is too scant to be conclusive.⁴ What is true of economic historians today was equally true of contemporary political economists, yet there were few who did not propose ‘overpopulation’ as the base explanation for Irish ills.⁵

Such thinking relied heavily on the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the principle of population, which first appeared anonymously in 1798, and went through six modified editions up to 1826. An acknowledged classic of the relatively new discipline of ‘political economy’, and a sensation when published, the essay challenged an eighteenth-century orthodoxy that people formed part of a nation’s wealth, and that a greater population meant a wealthier – certainly a potentially wealthier – nation.⁶ To Malthus, the inherent danger of unregulated population growth was a pressure on the means of subsistence so great as to induce, at best, a general drop in the living standards of the poorest classes, and, at worst, imminent disaster. He did not initially have Ireland in mind, but, particularly from the first of a number of localised ‘pre-Famine famines’ in 1816–17, many Irish observers, and latterly Malthus himself, came to find this prognosis strikingly applicable to the island.⁷

Within these Malthusian parameters the key question for Ireland was how to remedy the emerging imbalance. Two sets of options presented themselves. Firstly, efforts might be made to increase resources in line with population growth. Secondly, measures to reduce the population or the rate of its growth might be applied. Many contemporaries favoured prescriptions of the former sort. A host of proposals to introduce land reform, improve agricultural cultivation, and stimulate industry were forthcoming from pamphleteers of varying expertise, while most classical economists, as R. D. Collison Black has noted, were similarly focused on finding long-term strategies for economic development.⁸ Pitted against such capital-increasing plans were population-reducing ideas including Malthus’s favoured ‘prudential check’, wherein ‘moral restraint’ and marriage later in life would produce fewer children, and the as-yet theoretical check of artificial birth control, which Malthus was not alone in rejecting on religious grounds.⁹ The problem which all of these proposals shared was their ambitious, long-term nature. Assuming they were possible at all, it would be several years before, say, industry could be sufficiently developed, or before the kind of cultural and moral transformation which Malthus envisaged could be brought about. Emigration, by contrast, appeared to promise immediate relief.

This perception gave emigration a new and broad appeal as a potential policy. Even for those who doubted its ability to single-handedly reverse the trend towards an overabundant population, it seemed to offer an expedient means of avoiding crisis until broader strategies could take effect. In 1817 the MP and economist Robert Torrens suggested in direct reference to Ireland that, ‘until our institutions for extending education, and moral and prudential habits, have had time to give effect to a preventive check upon the number of births, there can be neither relief nor safety, except in emigration’.¹⁰ Torrens was also among the first to advocate emigration as an alternative to another proposal for more immediate relief of Irish distress which was gaining traction, namely an Irish poor law, which, as in England, would use a local property tax to create a minimal welfare safety net for the Irish poor; this was a constructed choice which did much to persuade others that state-directed emigration ought to be practised as the lesser evil.¹¹ This was decidedly new territory. In the eighteenth century, in line with contemporary thinking, sustained emigration from Ulster had provoked the alarm of administrators and landlords alike. They feared, respectively, a weakening of the Protestant interest and a lowering of rents as competition for land became less fierce.¹² Where once legislative efforts had been made to keep people in Ireland,¹³ a widespread acceptance of the Malthusian overpopulation principle meant that the opposite was now on the agenda.

There was great irony, therefore, in Malthus’s own distinct opposition to any measure of assisted emigration. The first edition of his essay had entirely ignored the possibility of emigration as a check on population growth, while the second took care to dismiss it – as did others including J. R. McCulloch – as only ‘a slight palliative’, because it would simply create a vacuum to be filled by the unchanged reproductive behaviour of those left behind.¹⁴ Malthus was, in a sense, a double heretic on the issue, rejecting the previously accepted notion of government intervention to prevent emigration, but being equally leery of the new, opposing tendency. ‘I have’, he explained, ‘always thought it very unjust on the part of Governments, to prohibit, or impede emigration; but I have doubted whether they could reasonably be expected so to promote it, as to undertake the responsibility of settling those who may wish to emigrate particularly as the superintendence of so powerful an agent has often the effect of weakening the exertions of the settlers themselves’.¹⁵ Nonetheless, by the early 1830s, even Malthus expressed a grudging acceptance of the benefits of government emigration as a temporary measure, particularly – though he opposed it – before any poor law was to come into effect in Ireland.¹⁶

This gradual softening in Malthus’s attitude can be traced in, but perhaps not to, his correspondence with Robert Wilmot Horton, an enthusiastic advocate of state-assisted migration, who also happened to be under-secretary at the Colonial Office. From this position, Horton successfully lobbied senior colleagues to assent to an experimental scheme of migration, which, he hoped, would prove that by the same stroke the underemployed Irish (and English) could be relieved and the underpopulated colonies could be peopled. Named for its overseer, Peter Robinson, the emigration took place in two stages, in 1823 and 1825, and involved the transfer of more than 2,500 applicants from the Blackwater region of north Munster to the Canadas, where they were settled on farmland to their apparent contentment.¹⁷ The problem was the cost. At an average of £22 per head, or £53,000 overall, the scheme was extravagantly expensive, rendering further government funding of emigration improbable. Notwithstanding this unconvincing result, Horton’s continued agitation was rewarded (or perhaps bought off) with a select committee of inquiry into the subject in 1826. From this point, tied in with the growing discussion of a poor law, and spurred on by the emergence of another popular variation of the measure – Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ‘systematic colonisation’¹⁸ – the debate on Irish emigration as a point of state-directed relief, far from lessening, intensified.

Oliver Goldsmith’s Reverend Primrose was famously critical of men who ‘merely talked of population’, but after Malthus, there were many of his own vocation ready to do just that.¹⁹ The opinion of the Irish clergy on the point had been recognised as important from early on. Under the old dispensation, the Dublin and London governments had made direct appeals to Presbyterian ministers – occasionally known to encourage and even personally lead emigrants – to exercise their influence in a contrary manner and prevent the depletion of their congregations.²⁰ Although happy to use the unusual attention from those in power to air their grievances, it is not apparent whether they had the ability or inclination to do any such thing.²¹ Later, Peter Robinson took care to consult with all local clergymen, and was especially surprised by the active cooperation of Catholic priests, who he had been warned would be overtly hostile. His gratitude was all the greater for his awareness of the fatal effect that ‘their influence might have had if exerted against me upon the minds of the people, who were still suspicious that all was not right’.²²

Clerical involvement in the debate went beyond such local considerations, however. As the influence of Malthus demonstrates, what Boyd Hilton has termed the ‘rage of Christian economics’ did not bypass Ireland.²³ Richard Whately, former professor of political economy at Oxford, and cheerleader for the new science, was appointed to the Church of Ireland archbishopric of Dublin in 1831, from where he continued to make the case against the introduction of an Irish poor law, and in favour of emigration as a preferable alternative. As he had previously elaborated, emigration offered a mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index