George Ensor facts for kids

Quick facts for kids George Ensor
George Ensor by John Comerford
Born	17 December 1769
Died	3 December 1843
Nationality	Irish
Alma mater	Trinity College Dublin
Occupation	Barrister
Notable work	An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818). Of Property and of its Equal Distribution as Promoting Virtue, Population, Abundance (1844)

George Ensor (17 December 1769 – 3 December 1843) was an important Irish lawyer and writer. He wrote many strong articles about politics. He was also a freethinker, meaning he believed in using reason and logic, not just religious faith.

Ensor strongly disagreed with ideas like Malthusianism. This idea suggested that poverty happened because poor people had too many children. Ensor believed the real problem was that wealth was held by only a few rich people. He thought this stopped businesses from growing and people from becoming successful. He also believed that Ireland needed its own parliament back, with people chosen by the public, to fix these problems.

Ensor also challenged common beliefs about religion. He was a supporter of Catholic emancipation, which meant giving Catholics equal rights. But he went even further, arguing against the special power of the Christian religion in government. He believed that questions about what is right and fair in society couldn't be answered just by religious ideas about salvation.

Early Life and Education

George Ensor was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father, George Ensor Sr., was an architect and builder who came from England. In 1783, his mother, Sara Ensor (whose maiden name was Clarke), inherited a house called Ardress House in County Armagh. His father made many changes to it, including adding fake windows to make the house look bigger.

Ensor went to Dr. Murray's school in Dublin. After that, he studied at Trinity College Dublin. He finished his studies in 1790. In 1792, he became a lawyer in Ireland.

On January 7, 1804, he married Esther Weld. Her brother, Isaac Weld, was a famous Irish explorer, writer, and painter. George and Esther had two sons and six daughters. One of their daughters, Caroline, married the historian J. P. Prendergast.

His Strong Opinions

Ensor was known for writing many political articles and letters to newspapers. He often used sarcasm to criticize the governments in Ireland and Britain. His first article, Principles of Morality, was published in 1801. In this work, he argued that being moral was separate from being religious.

By the time he died in 1843, he had written over twenty books and articles. These shared his "advanced" ideas on many topics, including:

• English laws and courts.
• Equal rights for Catholics.
• The political situation in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.
• How to solve poverty.
• Ireland's place within the United Kingdom.
• Changing how Parliament worked.
• National education.
• The Corn Laws (laws about grain prices).

Challenging Malthus's Ideas

One of Ensor's biggest goals was to prove wrong the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus was an economist who believed that human population grows faster than the food supply. This idea is sometimes called the "Malthusian trap." Malthus thought that no matter what was done to help poor people, they would always have too many children. This would lead to problems like war, hunger, and disease.

In his 1818 book, An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, Ensor disagreed. He said that poverty wasn't caused by people having "too many children." Instead, he argued that wealth was "unfairly divided." He also pointed out that poor people's hard work was taxed much more heavily than rich people's property.

Ensor criticized Malthus for blaming the poor for their situation. He argued that Malthus seemed to ignore how society's rules and the actions of the rich contributed to poverty. Ensor asked:

• "Does slavery depend on the slaves themselves?"
• "Does it depend on the Irish farmers that the landowners live elsewhere?" (These were called absentee landlords.)
• "Does it depend on the Catholics of Ireland that they pay tithes (taxes) to the Protestant clergy?"
• "Does it depend on the poor of England that they pay a salt tax that is thirty times the original cost?"

Ensor believed that laziness and carelessness were often a result of social problems, not just a cause. He said that in India, English people complained that the local people were not hardworking. But he argued that if people faced violence and unfair demands from officials, it was smart for them to appear poor.

Ensor concluded that the main cause of poverty was not "nature and breeding" (as Malthus thought). Instead, it was what was taken from people and given as favors by the government. He believed that a country would have more people and more comfort if it was well-governed. To be well-governed, people needed to be represented in a "well-organised constitution." He argued that the safest way to be represented was through popular elections. He thought that if people were treated as citizens, they would become smarter. This would help them control their population by understanding their needs. He said he didn't know of any country with true freedom and fair laws that became poor just because it had too many people.

Other thinkers, like Whitley Stokes and William Hazlitt, also supported Ensor's views against Malthus.

For Fairer Wealth Distribution

Ensor believed that "property in the few" (wealth held by a small number of people) creates an unfair ruling class. But "property in the many" (wealth spread among many people) supports freedom and helps honest growth.

In a book published after his death, Of Property and of its Equal Distribution as Promoting Virtue, Population, Abundance (1844), Ensor went further. He suggested ways to stop too much land from being owned by a few people. He wanted to increase the number of middle-class people in society.

His ideas included:

• Removing unelected lords from Parliament.
• Taxing inherited wealth (what we now call "death duties").
• Ending the rule where only the oldest son inherited everything (called primogeniture).
• Allowing women to inherit property.
• Recognizing tenant rights for farmers.

In his 1825 work, The Poor and Their Relief, Ensor argued that working people should not have to pay any taxes. He believed that taxes "should exclusively fall on the opulent" (the very rich).

Portrait of George Ensor, lithograph by Bernard Mulrenin

Supporting Catholic Rights and Reform

Ensor was one of the first Protestant members of the Catholic Association in Armagh. This was unusual because Armagh was a strong area for the Orange Order, a group that opposed Catholic rights. Ensor called these groups "illiberals" who used their loyalty to the King to exclude and insult Catholics.

In 1828, Daniel O'Connell, the leader of the Catholic Association, debated with Jeremy Bentham. Ensor was considered as a possible running mate for O'Connell in an election. (Ensor had even traveled to Paris with a young John Stuart Mill in 1820, showing his connections to important thinkers). This election was a big test to see if the government would allow Catholics into Parliament.

However, Ensor criticized O'Connell for agreeing to a plan that would take away voting rights from many poor Catholic and Protestant farmers. This plan would raise the amount of property a person needed to own to vote. Ensor warned that this "disenfranchisement project" would be "disastrous" for the country. In Armagh, this change reduced the number of voters by three-quarters.

In the end, O'Connell ran for the seat alone. He called Ensor "a man of pure principle." O'Connell noted that Ensor was a radical, not a Whig (a more moderate political group).

After the 1829 Act was passed, O'Connell tried to explain why so many tenants who had voted for him lost their right to vote. He said the new voting rules might give more power to Catholics by focusing it in more reliable hands. But Ensor called this abandonment a "crime" against the Irish people.

For an Irish Parliament and Universal Voting Rights

Ensor did agree with O'Connell on one thing: calling for the Act of Union to be cancelled. This Act had joined Ireland with Great Britain. Ensor believed that "England has always treated Ireland unfairly and destructively." He argued that as long as the Union continued, Ireland would be poor and troubled. He also thought that the Union hurt England by making its politics more corrupt.

In 1828, Ensor refused to become a Justice of the Peace (a local official). He said: "If we had our own government, I might accept this job. But as long as the Union continues, which takes away our country's money and our people's government, I would feel that by accepting office, I would be helping the misery and shame of my country."

In his 1831 book, Anti-Union, Ireland as She Ought to Be, Ensor argued that England was also harmed by the Union. He felt that Irish political issues and the chance for corruption in the British Parliament hurt the cause of freedom and stopped parliamentary reform.

Ensor was not impressed by the "pageant of reform" in Britain, referring to the Great Reform Act of 1832. He felt that people in Britain and Ireland still had reason to envy France, where voting was secret and not controlled by landlords.

Ensor's own "Plan of Reform" was for "all adults" to have an equal right to choose their lawmakers. He first suggested this in his 1810 book, On National Government. He believed that "Most people know in the main what is good for them." He thought that if people had freedom, they would use it wisely.

Against the Power of Christianity

Ensor was known for "attacking Christianity" in his 1811 book, On National Education. This led to public responses from religious leaders. But Ensor continued his strong arguments against religion, even using a fake name for some works. In 1835, he published a larger book under his own name, A Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments and of the Morality and Consolation of the Christian Religion.

Ensor argued that the moral teachings of Christianity were often contradictory. He also believed that questions of morality were "incidental" to a faith focused on salvation through Jesus Christ. He felt that religious leaders focused on getting "all the good things of the earth" for themselves, telling their followers to give up worldly pleasures.

Despite his views, Ensor was hired by James Warren Doyle, a Roman Catholic Bishop. Ensor was asked to investigate reports of hundreds of people converting to the Protestant faith in Cavan. Ensor's reports told the bishop that these conversions were likely due to "souperism" (people converting for food during near-famine conditions) and would not last.

This led to Ensor's 1828 book, Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation". This book was a strong criticism of the Protestant religious movement that sent missionaries to Irish farmers. This movement also insisted that the Bible be used as a schoolbook without any explanations. This went against the government's plans for a non-denominational (not linked to one religion) primary education system, which Bishop Doyle supported.

For Ensor, the fact that Protestant clergy in Ireland stopped "educating socially and religiously all the people in a common school" was more proof that a religious establishment (a church supported by the government) is "inherently harmful in all its relations."

Death and Legacy

George Ensor died on December 3, 1843, at his family home, Ardress House. This house is now owned by the National Trust.

Some critics at the time called Ensor's writing overly academic and ridiculous. They saw him as a lesser writer, copying others like William Cobbett and Thomas Paine. They said his arguments were weak and would only convince those who already agreed with him. However, they still felt his work needed to be answered.

Ensor was well-known enough that in 1821, John Cartwright suggested to Jeremy Bentham that they, along with Ensor, should lead the reform movement. He proposed they form a group called the "seven wise men" to guide constitutional reform.

Even Karl Marx, a very famous thinker, read Ensor's work. Marx called Ensor "a political economist of English origin" and recommended his writings to Friedrich Engels, saying they contained "all sorts of piquant things." Marx even mentioned Ensor in the first volume of his famous book, Capital. He cited Ensor's idea that in the Highland Clearances (when Scottish landowners forced people off their land), they did what the Mongols in China only thought about: "to exterminate the inhabitants and convert the land into pasture."

Today, George Ensor is not as well-known, but he was important in his time. A recent history of Irish thought places him alongside other radical thinkers like William Thompson, Anna Doyle Wheeler, and Henry MacCormac. All of them had connections to Bentham and Mill, just like Ensor. An excerpt from Ensor's On the State of Europe in January 1816, where he criticizes the return of kings who claimed to rule by divine right, is included in a collection of texts about radical debates in Britain after the French Revolution.

Works

• Principles of Morality (1801)
• The Independent Man (1806)
• On National Government (2 vols., 1810)
• National Education (1811)
• Defects of the English Laws and Tribunals (1812)
• Observations on the present state of Ireland (1814)
• Janus on Sion, or Past and to Come (1816)
• An Inquiry Concerning the Population of Nations containing a Refutation of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population (1818)
• Radical Reform: Restoration of Usurped Rights (1819)
• Address to the People of Ireland on the Degradation and Misery of their Country (1823)
• The Poor and their relief (1825)
• A Defence of the Irish and the Means of their Redemption (1825)
• Irish Affairs at the Close of 1825 (1826)
• Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation" (1828)
• Anti-Union, Ireland as She Ought to Be (1831)
• A Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments and of the Morality and Consolation of the Christian Religion (1835).
• Natural Theology: The Arguments of Paley, Brougham, and the Bridgewater Treatises on this Subject Examined (1836).
• Before and After the Reform Bill (1842)
• Of property and of its equal distribution as promoting virtue, population, abundance (1844)