Since this is St. Patrick's Day and people are thinking about Ireland maybe it's a good day to think a little about Irish history.
The segments below are from the book "The Age of Voltaire" by Will and Ariel Durant
Chapter III section VI Ireland 1714-1756
"Rarely in history has a nation been so oppressed as the Irish. Through repeated victories by English armies over native revolts, a code of laws had been set up that chained the Irish in body and soul. Their soil had been confiscated until only a handful of Catholic landowners remained, and nearly all of it was held by Protestants who treated their agricultural laborers as slaves. "The poor people of Ireland," said Chesterfield, "are used worse than Negroes by their lords and masters." It was "not unusual in Ireland," said Lecky, "for great landed proprietors to have regular prisons in their houses for the summary punishment of the lower orders." ...The tenants - racked by rents paid to the landlord, by tithes paid to the Established Church which they hated, and by dues paid to their own priests - lived in mud hovels with leaky roofs, went half naked, and were often on the edge of starvation; Swift thought "the Irish tenants live worse than English beggars." Those landlords who remained in Ireland, and the deputies of the absentees, drugged themselves against the barbarism and hostility of their surroundings with carousals of food and drink, extravagant hospitality, quarreling and dueling, and gambling for high stakes"......
"The structure of Irish politics made impossible any resistance to English domination except by mob action or individual violence. Since no one could hold office except by adherence to the Church of England, the Irish Parliament, after 1692, was composed entirely of Protestants, and was now wholly subservient to England. In 1719 the English Parliament reaffirmed its paramount right to legislate for Ireland. Laws that in England protected parliamentary or individual liberty, like the Habeus Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights, were not extended to Ireland; the relative freedom of the press enjoyed in England had no existence in Ireland. The two parliaments resembled each other only in the corruption of their electors and their members. They differed again in the dominant influence of Anglican Bishops in the Irish House of Lords."
"The established Church in Ireland included about a seventh of the population among it's adherents, but it was supported by tithes taken from the peasantry, nearly all of whom were Catholics. A small proportion of the people followed the Presbyterian or other Dissenting creeds, and received a measure of toleration, short of eligibility to office. Catholics were excluded not only from office but from all learned professions except medicine, and from nearly every avenue to higher education wealth of influence. They were forbidden to purchase land, or to invest in mortgages on land, or to hold any long or valuable lease. They could not serve as jurors, except where Protestants were not available. They could not teach in schools; they could not vote for municipal or national offices; they could not validly marry a Protestant."...
"The disorder of religious life shared with the poverty of the people and the hopelessness of social advancement in demoralizing Irish life. The ablest and bravest Catholics - who would have raised the level of Irish capacity, morality and intelligence - emigrated to France or Spain or America. Many Irishman sank into beggary or crime to escape from starvation. Robber gangs hid in the countryside, smugglers and wreckers lurked near the shores, and some property owners kept as many as eighty bravos to do their bidding regardless of the law. Thousands of cattle and sheep were slaughtered by roving bands, apparently as Catholic revenge upon Protestant landlords. It was difficult for a people to respect the laws passed by an Irish Parliament that often spoke of the Catholics - three quarters of the population - as "the common enemy.""
"There were some brighter elements in Irish life. The cheerful, easygoing, laughter-loving temper of the people survived through all their hardships, and their superstitions and legends surrounded their lives with magic and poetry without leading them to such violence as marked the witchcraft persecution in Scotland and Germany.....There were many instances of individual Protestants helping indigent Catholics, and of magistrates applying leniently the Draconian regulations of the penal code."
By and large the Irish scene was one of the most shameful in history. A degrading poverty, a chaotic lawlessness, a nomadic pauperism, 34,000 beggars, countless thieves, an upper class living in drunken extravagance amid a starving peasantry, every crop failure bringing widespread starvation - "the old and sick," said Swift, "dying and rotting by cold and famine and filth and vermin" - this terrible picture must find a place in our conception of man."
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I've been thinking about the history of people who are able to overcome adversity in the form of poverty and oppression and exploitation by those with money and power. I recently finished the book "Unfree Labor - American Slavery and Russian Serfdom" by Peter Kolchin. It's an interesting book showing some of the similarities and differences between American slavery and Russian serfdom. A key takeaway may be that the percentage of unfree labor aka slaves/serfs in the general population was much higher in Russia than in the U.S. Of course this means today that more Russians are descendants of slaves/serfs than Americans. Slavery in the U.S. and serfdom in Russia were both ended in the mid 1800's. In Russia in 1861 voluntarily by the aristocracy and in the U.S. in 1865 via the Civil War.
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The Chesterfield mentioned above is Lord Chesterfield aka Philip Dormer Stanhope 4th Earl of Chesterfield. He was, among other things, the lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1745. Will and Ariel Durant write, "His one year in Ireland was the most successful of his career. He established schools and industries, cleansed the government of corruption and jobbery, administered affairs with competence and impartiality. He ended the persecution of Catholics, promoted several of them to office, and so earned the respect of the Catholic population that when the Young Pretender invaded England from Scotland, and England expected a simultaneous revolution in Ireland, the Irish refused to rise against Chesterfield."
What I find fascinating about Lord Chesterfield is the book of letters published after his death to his illegitimate son Philip Stanhope. Wikipedia describes this book as -
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774), comprises a thirty-year correspondence in more than 400 letters. Begun in 1737 and continued until the death of his son in 1768, Chesterfield wrote mostly instructive communications about geography, history, and classical literature. with later letters focusing on politics and diplomacy, and the letters themselves were written in French, English and Latin to refine his son's grasp of the languages.
As a handbook for worldly success in the 18th century, the Letters to His Son give perceptive and nuanced advice for how a gentleman should interpret the social codes that are manners:
... However frivolous a company may be, still, while you are among them, do not show them, by your inattention, that you think them so; but rather take their tone, and conform in some degree to their weakness, instead of manifesting your contempt for them. There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt; and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult. If, therefore, you would rather please than offend, rather be well than ill spoken of, rather be loved than hated; remember to have that constant attention about you which flatters every man's little vanity; and the want of which, by mortifying his pride, never fails to excite his resentment, or at least his ill will....
Samuel Johnson said of the letters that "they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master" as means for getting on in the world as a gentleman.
I found the book interesting, but slow reading, with what seems like some timeless advice for how to get along and get ahead (if that's your thing) in the world. It's an incredibly sad book in a way - Lord Chesterfield means well and wants his son to thrive in the 18th century world of politics, salons and society (as did Lord Chesterfield). The son gets a seat in the English parliament thanks to Dad but gives only one speech which he doesn't finish because he gets so tongue-tied. Philip marries without his father's knowledge and dies at 36. After Philip's death, Lord Chesterfield learned of the existence of Philip's wife and children. He received them kindly and took upon himself the cost of education and maintenance of his grandsons and became very attached to them.
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Finally...you might ask yourself why Will and Ariel Durant titled this 900 page book "The Age of Voltaire", or if you are like me you might ask yourself - "who is Voltaire?" One way to get to know him a little is read his book Candide, although it would be useful to read a bit about the political, religious, and philosophical climate of his time to understand what that book is about - a fairly devastating attack on the ideas of philosophers like Leibniz, and theologians of the Calvinist stripe, who propose that all things are predetermined by God i.e. free will does not exist and even terrible disasters that kill innocent people (like the Lisbon earthquake in Voltaire's case) are the best thing that could happen in this - the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire had seen to much of humanity's inhumanity to think one could find the best of all worlds in the world at large....so not totally unlike Chance the Gardner (if we take away Chance's constant TV watching) he recommended we tend our own gardens.
You could also listen to this 40 minute BBC Radio 4 podcast about Voltaire's Candide to see if any of this interests you.
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