George Ensor J.P. (17 December 1769 – 3 December 1843) was an Irish lawyer, radical political pamphleteer and freethinker. Among other conservative precepts, he pilloried the Malthusian doctrine that poverty is sustained by the "disposition to breed". As a hindrance to enterprise and prosperity, he pointed rather to the tyranny of concentrated wealth. In Ireland, it was a condition he believed could be reversed only through popular representation in a restored parliament. Ensor further outraged prevailing opinion by inveighing against the constitutional ascendancy not merely (as a supporter of Catholic emancipation) of Protestantism, but more broadly of the Christian religion. He argued that questions of morality and social justice cannot be addressed within a theology of salvation through faith.
Family and education Ensor was born in Dublin where is father George Ensor Sr., originally from England, was a prominent architect and developer. In 1783, his mother Sara Ensor (née Clarke) inherited Ardress House, a modest farmhouse in County Armagh, that his father transformed with, amongst other alterations, a facade with false windows to increase the property's apparent size.
Ensor was educated at Ensor Dr Murray's school, Dublin, followed by Trinity College Dublin. He graduated in 1790 and was called to the Irish Bar in 1792.
He married Esther Weld (sister of famous Irish explorer, author and painter Isaac Weld) on 7 January 1804. They had two sons and six daughters. His second daughter, Caroline, married the historian J. P. Prendergast.
Polemics Ensor was a political pamphleteer, and a prolific correspondent to the press, noted for the sarcasm he employed against the government in Ireland and in Britain. His first tract, Principles of Morality (which argued that morality was independent of religion) was published in 1801. By the time of his death in 1843 he had produced over twenty disquisitions propagating "advanced" views on English laws and tribunals; Catholic emancipation; the triumph of reaction in post-Napoleonic Europe; political economy including the sources, and relief, of poverty; Ireland's fate within the United Kingdom; parliamentary reform; national education; and the corn laws.
"Refutation of Mr Malthus's Essay on Population" His broadest, most ambitious attempt, was to discredit the political economy of Thomas Malthus. In An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818), Ensor dismissed what has become known the "Malthusian trap". Regardless of what might be done to improve their condition, Malthus maintained that the labouring classes tend to propagate until, outpacing the means of their subsistence, their numbers invite "correction" by war, hunger, and pestilence. For Ensor the problem of poverty was not a "disposition to inordinate breeding". Rather it is that wealth is "iniquitously divided", a condition compounded by the fact that "the poor man's labour is far more surcharged that the rich man's property by taxes".
In a wide-ranging critique, Ensor took aim at the duplicitous application of the moral principle by which Malthus justified his seeming indifference to the fate of the poor:Mr Malthus says no one has the right to subsistence when his labour will not fairly purchase it. [...] But suppose the position true, that a right to subsistence depends on the labour of the individual: whose labour?--the rich, the aristocracy, the proprietors of land, the holders of stock, heirs in their own right, and princes by divine right? Here again Paley interposes: "It is a mistake to suppose that the rich man maintains his servants, tradesmen, tenants and labourers: the truth is they maintain him". He finds Malthus's dogmatic insistence on absolving the rich and the institutions of society of responsibility for poverty "astounding":Mr Malthus considers that attributing in any way the distress of the poor to the higher classes of society is a vulgar error [...] and that it depends on the conduct of the poor themselves. Does slavery depend on the slaves themselves? [...] Does it depend on the Irish peasantry that the proprietors are absentees? or, on the Catholics of Ireland that they pay tithes to the protestant clergy? Does it depend on the poor of England that they pay for salt a tax thirty times the original cost of the article?Idleness and negligence, Ensor argued were as much an effect as a cause of social evils. In India, the English complain that "the people are without industry and without energy", attributing this "stupidity" to a "rich soil and inelastic atmosphere". But faced with the dread violence and extortion of district officers "it is prudent in [the Indian peasant] to appear and to be poor".
The primary cause of poverty is not, as Malthus and his school believe, "nature and breeding". Rather (as Adam Smith proposed) it is that which impoverished the Roman state: rapti largiuntur—what is seized from the people and distributed as favours by the state. Conversely—Ensor invokes David Hume—"every country will abound with people and their comforts as it is well governed". To be well governed, is to be represented in "a well-organised constitution" and, advancing a case for parliamentary reform, Ensor observes that "representation is the most secure which is the most popular". Elevated from subject to citizen, people will "improve their intelligence; and this will regulate their number, by ascertaining their wants and conveniences". He was not aware "of any nation, which possessing confirmed liberty and equal laws, has become miserable merely by the excess of its people".
Ensor's attack upon Malthus was seconded by Whitley Stokes. His Observations on the Population and Resources of Ireland (1821) similarly concludes that Ireland's problem is not her "numbers" but her indifferent government, and that once the Irish begin to feel "whole clothes" on their backs, "effort for profit" would be made. Consistent with Ensor, William Hazlitt (1819) was also to write, "Mr Malthus wishes to confound the necessary limits of the produce of the earth with the arbitrary and artificial distribution of that produce by the institutions of society".
For a more equal distribution of property "Property in the few", wrote Ensor, "confirms an oligarchy—property in the many is the stay of liberty, and the means of its honest and profitable increase". In a posthumous work, Of Property and of its Equal Distribution as Promoting Virtue, Population, Abundance (1844), presented as a "detailed and extensive investigation" of "property its origin, distribution and progress", Ensor took this argument against Malthus a step further.
Seizing upon Malthus's proposition that "manufacturing is at once the consequence of a better distribution of property and the cause of further improvement" (and noting William Pitt's acknowledgement that the unequal division of property was among "the chief causes of Ireland's vexations") Ensor proposed reforms to "reverse the excessive accumulation of landed property" and to "increase the middle order of society".Among other things, these included ejecting the unelected representatives of the landed interest (the hereditary Lords) from Parliament; taxing real estates passing by descent ("death duties" as they came to be known in Britain); ending the presumption of primogeniture (Ensor accounted the suppression of gavelkind as "greatest evil" the Norman Conquest visited upon England); admitting women to their share of inheritance, and recognising tenant right.
In The Poor and Their Relief (1825), Ensor had argued that, as their wages "seldom exceed their necessities", "labouring people should be exempted from all taxation whatever". Taxation "should exclusively fall on the opulent".
For emancipation and reform—break with O'Connell Ensor was among the first Armagh members of the Catholic Association. This was a notable position for a Protestant in a county renowned as a stronghold of the Orange Order and the Brunswick Clubs. As described by Ensor, these were associations of "illiberals" whose "loyalty" to the Crown rests on the impunity to exclude, "abuse and insult" their Catholic fellow countrymen.
In Armagh, Ensor did have an unexpected ally: the sitting MP Charles Brownlow recanted his Orange Order opposition to emancipation, and was successfully returned to Westminster for the county in the general election of 1826. Loyalist opposition, however, was sufficiently intimidating that Ensor and a coterie of Ulster reformers around Lord Rossmore had to abandon plans to build on this success with a provincial meeting to be convened, as they imagined, in the patriotic spirit of the Irish Volunteers.
In 1828, Daniel O'Connell, the leader of the Catholic Association, debated with Jeremy Bentham allowing Ensor to stand with O'Connell as a running mate in the County Clare by-election.Crimmins, James E.(1997), "Jeremy Bentham and Daniel O'Connell: their correspondence and radical alliance 1828–1831", Historical Journal, xl (1997), pp. (359-387) 373. (Enjoying the confidence of Bentham, Ensor had accompanied the young John Stuart Mill to Paris in 1820). The by-election was to be a decisive test of the government's revolve to uphold the oaths of allegiance, supremacy and abjuration that barred Catholics from higher office and from Parliament. But Ensor had criticised O'Connell's willingness to accept "disenfranchisement project" attached to the compromise Catholic relief bill. The Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829, which received its royal assent on the same day as the Roman Catholic Relief Act, raised the freehold qualification for the county vote in Ireland fivefold to English ten-pound level.
In letters to the press, Ensor cautioned that "relief" bought at the price of "casting two or three million" forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, "into the abyss", might allow a few Catholic barristers to attain a higher grade in their profession, and a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament, but the "indifference" demonstrated to parliamentary reform would prove "disastrous" for the country. (In Armagh, "Emancipation" reduced a county electorate of over 8,000 by three quarters so that even after the Reform, and the Representation of the People (Ireland), acts of 1832, it stood at just 3,487).
In the end O'Connell stood for the Clare seat alone. He described Ensor as "a man of pure principle and excellent notions", although, "if a Christian at all, certainly not a Catholic", and a radical rather than [as most of O'Connell's Protestant and English friends] a Whig.
O'Connell sought rationalise the disenfranchisement of so many of the tenants who, in defiance of their landlords, had voted for him: the new ten-pound franchise might actually "give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands". Ensor, meanwhile, described their abandonment as a "crime ... against the whole Irish people [for which] wretches are found to applaud, corrupted or cajoled by insidious agents of our ancient enemy".
For an Irish parliament and universal suffrage