Five Million Pledges

Two questions sit under this whole series, and they are not the same question.

How many people took the pledge? And did it make any difference?

The first has a bad answer and the second has an excellent one, and most accounts of the temperance movement get them the wrong way round.

1841. The number nobody can stand over

The figures given in the sources run like this.

By 1841, four million six hundred and forty seven thousand abstainers in Ireland. By 1841, Mathew was claiming some five million pledges. By 1844, nearly five and a half million adherents. Another six hundred thousand in England and Scotland.

Ireland held a little over eight million people at the time.

So the claim is that between a half and two thirds of every man, woman and child on the island had personally taken a pledge from one friar. Strip out the children and it is close to the entire adult population.

Notice the verbs in the sources. Claiming. Estimated. Reputed. Not one of them is a count. There was no register, no central roll, no audit. There was a man at the front of a crowd and a rough sense of how large the crowd was.

The honest position is that the pledge numbers are not evidence. They are advertising, and some of them were Mathew's own.

1842. The number that settles it

Now the other question, and here the ground is firm.

The Crown taxed spirits. The Crown counted them. The Crown had no interest whatever in making a Capuchin friar look successful, and a considerable interest in the revenue he was destroying.

1839: 12,296,000 gallons cleared for consumption. Duty of £1,434,573.

1842: 6,485,443 gallons. Duty of £864,725.

The consumption of spirits in Ireland roughly halved in three years, and the Exchequer lost well over a third of its Irish spirit revenue while it happened. [1]

That is the answer. Whoever signed and whoever did not, the country was drinking about half of what it had been.

How a pledge was made to hold

A promise made in a field is worth very little by itself. What made this one stick for a few years was a piece of social engineering that is easy to underrate.

The pledge itself was public and it was total. Not moderation, which every man interprets to suit himself, but nothing at all, which is a line that can be crossed or not crossed and everybody can see which.

The medal made the invisible visible. A man wearing one had told his parish something about himself, and taking it off was an event.

The hall answered the real objection. A man who stopped going to the public house had nowhere to go, and the movement gave him somewhere with a roof, a fire, a newspaper and other men in it.

The band and the procession did the rest. A temperance society that marched through a town with instruments was making a claim about who the respectable people were, in public, loudly, and inviting the rest to join them.

None of that is preaching. It is a membership scheme with a uniform, a clubhouse and a parade, and it worked for the same reasons such things always work.

1844. Why it did not hold

And then it came apart, and it came apart before the blight.

The movement was in serious decline by 1844. Mathew was jailed for debt that year. Every source that looks closely says the fall had begun while the potatoes were still sound. [2]

Three reasons show in the record.

The scheme had no finance. Mathew gave medals to people who could not pay for them and the accounts never balanced. A mass organisation funded by one man's refusal to say no has a fixed lifespan.

The movement had no institution behind it. Most of the bishops would not back it, and no structure existed to carry it when its founder faltered. That is the subject of the next article.

And a total pledge is brittle by design. The thing that made it strong, the bright line, is the same thing that made it unforgiving. A man who kept it for four years and then took one drink had not fallen short. He had broken it, and there was no way back that did not begin with admitting so in front of the same people who had watched him swear.

What it proves

The temperance crusade is usually filed as a curiosity. Medals, bands, an eccentric friar, a country that went dry for a while and then did not.

The excise returns say something harder than that.

A population with no state, no vote worth the name, no wealth and no institutions cut its own consumption of spirits by half in three years, on nothing but a public promise and a piece of stamped metal.

Whatever else that is, it is not a curiosity. It is the largest voluntary change in behaviour in nineteenth century Ireland, and it was organised by people the record mostly does not name.