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. 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". The primary cause of poverty is not, as Malthus and his school believe, "nature and breeding". Rather (as
Adam Smith proposed) 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".
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. 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
Clare by-election. (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 the end O'Connell stood for the Clare seat alone. 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". But in 1828, he refused to accept appointment as a
justice of the peace. Did we enjoy a domestic legislature, I might in some measure, compromise my aversion to partiality and misrule. But while the UNION, which deprives the nation of its revenue, and the people of its legislature continues, I should consider myself by accepting office, accessory to the misery and degradation of my country. Ensor maintained, not only that "England has always treated Ireland insidiously, enviously, destructively; [so that] so long as the Union continues Ireland must be poor and disturbed", In the event, Ensor professed himself unimpressed by the "pageant of reform" in Britain. The
Reform Act 1832 had left the peoples of Britain and Ireland reason yet to envy
France where the right to vote, albeit still tied to property, was exercised by secret ballot (out of sight of landlord and employer), and was undiluted by hereditary and ecclesiastical legislators. Ensor's own "Plan of Reform" was for "all adults" to have an equal right to elect their legislators. As first proposed in his treatise
On National Government (1810) (a work forwarded to
Thomas Jefferson by Ensor's Trinity College classmate and
United Irish exile,
William Sampson), this was based on the confidence that:Most people know in the main what is good for them. The savage would not be kidnapped—the slave would be emancipated—and all men, whatever would be their race, sect or colour would be free, and would enjoy the means of securing their freedom. from the leading
Protestant divine, the Rev. Edward Ryan, and in "An Ensorian Essay on Something" both a parody and a rebuke in the pages of the
Tory monthly,
The Scourge. Undeterred, albeit under a pseudonym (Christian Emmanuel) in
Janus or Sion; or, Past and to Come, published in ten editions between 1816 and 1826, and, in 1835, under his own name, in a larger work,
A Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments and of the Morality and Consolation of the Christian Religion, Ensor pressed forward with a polemic his critics considered both crass and blasphemous
. There followed
Letters showing the inutility, and exhibiting the absurdity, of what is rather fantastically termed "the new Reformation" (1828), Ensor's broadside against the evangelical revival that had spurred Protestant "home missions" to Irish peasantry. Insisting that "the Bible without note or comment . . . be a schoolbook", the campaign, which began with the Scripture Education Movement led by
William Magee, the
Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, had also upended the government's conciliatory plans, broadly supported by Doyle, for a
non-denominational system of primary education. That the Protestant clergy in Ireland should have obstructed "educating socially and religiously all the people in a common school", for Ensor was further evidence that a religious establishment is "inherently pernicious in all its relations". == Death and legacy ==