be compassed. A great turmoil was cre- ated ; and a general panic ensued, which the Ministry in vain endeavoured to allay by an examination of the coin at the mint, and the issue of a certificate of its purity signed by Sir Isaac Newton. Swift's fourth letter turned the agitation into the desired channel. Declaring that a people long used to indignities soon lose by degrees the very idea of liberty, he boldly and clearly defined the limits of the prerogatives of the^Crown, asserted the in- dependence of Ireland, and the nullity of those measures which had not received the sanction of the Irish Parliament. " He avowed his entire adherence to the doctrine of Molyneux ; he declared his allegiance to the King, not as King of England, but as King of Ireland ; and he asserted that Ireland was rightfully a free nation, which implied that it had the power of self- legislation ; for, ' government withovrt the consent of the governed, is the very de- finition of slavery.' " ^'^ All parties in Ireland combined in resistance to the obnoxious patent ; the Lord-Chancellor denounced the coin ; the Lords-Justices refused to sanction its circulation ; Parlia- ment voted addresses against it ; most of the grand juries at quarter sessions con- demned it ; Primate Boulter lamented " that the people of every religion, country, and party here are alike set against Wood's halfpence, and that their agreement in this has had a very unhappy influence on the state of this nation, by bringing on in- timacies between Papists and Jacobites, and the Whigs." Neither the Duke of Grafton nor his successor. Lord Carteret, was able to quell the agitation ; a reward of £300 was in vain offered for the dis- covery of the author (who was well known to be Swift); the grand jury refused to find a bill against the printer; public feeling grew stronger every day; and at last Walpole was compelled to cancel the patent. Mr. Lecky says : " Such were the circumstances of this memorable contest — a contest which has been deserved- ly placed in the foremost ranks in the annals of Ireland. There is no more momentous epoch in the history of a nation than that in which the voice of the people has first spoken, and spoken with success. . . . Before this time rebellion was the natural issue of every patriotic effort in Ireland. Since then rebellion has been an anachron- ism and a mistake. The age of Desmond and of O'Neill had passed. The age of Grattan and of O'Connell had begun. Swift was admirably calculated to be the leader of public opinion in Ireland, from his complete freedom from the character- istic defects of the Irish temperament. His writings exhibit no tendency to ex- aggeration or bombast; no fallacious im- ages or far-fetched analogies ; no tumid phrases, in which the expression hangs loosely and inaccurately around the mean- ing. His style is always clear, keen, nervous, and exact. He delights in the most homely Saxon, in the simplest and most unadorned sentences. His arguments are so plain that the weakest mind can grasp them, yet so logical that it is seldom possible to evade their force. . . After the Drapiefs Letters, Swift published several minor pieces on Irish affairs, but most of them are very inconsiderable. The principal is his Short View of the State of Ireland, published in 1727, in which he enumerated fourteen causes of a nation's prosperity, and showed in how many of these Ireland was deficient. He also brought forward the condition of the country indirectly, in his amusing pro- posal for employing children for food — a proposal which a French writer is said to have taken literally, and to have gravely adduced as a proof of the wretched con- dition of the Irish. His influence with the people, after the Drapiefs Letters, was unbounded. . . There are few things in the Irish history of the last century more touching than the constancy with which the people clung to their old leader, even at a time when his faculties had wholly decayed ; and, notwithstanding his creed, his profession, and his intoler- ance, the name of Swift was for many generations the most universally popular in Ireland. He first taught the Irish people to rely upon themselves. He led them to victory at a time when long oppression and the expatriation of all the energy of the country had deprived them of every hope." ^" Swift's scornful feelings towards the native Irish have been much exaggerated. In a letter addressed by him to Sir Charles Wogan in July 1732, we fiud the following estimate of the Irish Catholics abroad and at home : " I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland, who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think above all other nations, which ought to make the English ashamed of the reproaches they cast on the ignorance, the dullness, and the want of courage in the Irish natives ; those defects, wherever they happen, aris- ing only from the poverty and slavery they suffer from their inhuman neighbours, and the base, corrupt spirit of too many of 510
