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Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick, to give its full title, proposed that the babies of the impoverished poor, a vast proportion of the population as a whole, ‘destined to turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or to sell themselves to the Barbados’ could be made into useful members of the community, if reared as a luxury dish for the tables of persons of quality or fortune. At one year old, Swift proposed, babies could be rendered plump and fat for the good table. Swift computed the gaps between the rich and poor that made his modest proposal financially feasible. He assessed the charge of nursing a beggar’s child (he included all cottagers, labourers and four-fifths of the farmers in this category) to be about two shillings per annum. A gentleman would, he assured, pay ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, leaving the mother with eight shillings net profit and fit for work until she produced her next child. The market would be seasonally glutted by babies born nine months after the end of Lent. This he attributed to a Lenten diet that included fish, popular in Catholic countries. Swift lampooned the conclusions that could be drawn from the marshalling of facts. ‘Empiricks’ and Royal Dublin Society scientists with faith in progress were always in his crosshairs. A Modest Proposal invoked statistics, weights and measures to propose a mad panacea for Ireland’s problems.1
A year before the publication of A Modest Proposal in the third of his Intelligencer Papers, Swift sprang to the defence of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera which had been dismissed in a sermon by a fellow Divine as containing merely a low kind of humour. Swift accepted that some things were too serious, solemn, or sacred to be ridiculed but abuses of them certainly were not. It was wrong perhaps to mock religion, politics or law but corruptions in these made proper topics for satire. He argued that The Beggar’s Opera would probably do more good than a thousand such sermons. His defence of Gay identified two reasons for writing satire. The less noble was for the private satisfaction of the author. The other was to write it in a public spirit, to prompt men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they were able. Swift argued that The Beggar’s Opera had such a moral purpose. It placed vices of all kinds in the strongest and most odious light and thereby, did eminent service to both religion and morality.
A Modest Proposal appeared at the tail end of a decade during which Swift wrote a number of anonymous pamphlets on the condition of Ireland. The first major one, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, was published in 1720.2 This exhorted its Irish readers to burn everything that came from England except its people and its coal. It was partly inspired by the distress of the 1,700 or so weavers living in the vicinity of St Patrick’s cathedral over whom Swift presided as Dean and magistrate when the export of Irish woollens to England was prohibited. Swift set up a loan fund of £500 to help them fund the purchase of looms and tools which many weavers had pawned off to avoid starvation.
As to Ireland, they know little more than they do about Mexico, further than is a country subject to the king of England, full of bogs, inhabited by wild Irish Papists, who are kept in awe by mercenary troops sent from thence. And their general opinion is, that it were better for England if this whole island were sunk into the sea; for they have a tradition that, every forty years there must be a rebellion in Ireland. I have seen the grossest suppositions pass upon them; that the wild Irish were taken in toils, but that, in some time, they would grow so tame as to eat out your hands. I have been asked by hundreds, and particularly by my neighbours, your tenants at Pepper-harrow, whether I had come from Ireland by seas. And upon the arrival of an Irishman to a country town, I have known crowds coming about him, and wondering to see him look so much better than themselves.
But like Molyneux, Swift’s focus was on the rights of the Protestant Irish. Papists and peasants only figured in his pamphlets as objects of concern when ‘British natives’ like himself were disparaged alongside them in the same breath. In the same year in which A Modest Proposal was published, Swift wrote despairingly about the consequences of the constitutional disabilities under which the Protestant Irish laboured. In the unpublished bitter Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Hands (1729) he argued that the ‘British Natives’ of Ireland were emigrating out of despair of things getting better in their own country. Three reforms were needed, he argued, to cure the misgovernment of Ireland.3 ‘First, a Liberty of Trade, Secondly, a Share of preferments in all kinds to the British Natives, and Thirdly, a return of those absentees, who take away almost one half of the Kingdom’s Revenues.’ He made no plea to rescind the penal laws against the Catholic majority.
Prudent laws, Swift first argued in A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, encouraged industrious cultivation in England but in Ireland landlords were ‘everywhere, by penal clauses, absolutely prohibiting their tenants from ploughing’. As a result it was cheaper to import corn from England. Swift lambasted country landlords (and landed clerics by implication) who ‘by unmeasurable screwing and racking their tenants all over the kingdom have already reduced a miserable people to a worse condition than peasants in France, or the vassals in Germany and Poland’. In various 1729 writings he disparaged the modest proposals of others for schemes for improvement that, for all that these might work in other countries, ignored the fundamental barriers to the economic improvement of Ireland:
There is hardly a scheme proposed for improving the trade of this kingdom, which doth not manifestly shew the stupidity and ignorance of the proposer: and I laugh with contempt at those weak wise heads, which proceed upon general maxims, or advise us to follow the Examples of Holland or England. These Empiricks talk by rote, without understanding of the Constitution of the Kingdom; as if a physician knowing that Exercise contributed much to health should prescribe to his Patient under a severe fit of gout, to walk ten miles every morning.4
Another 1729 unpublished essay, The Truth of Some Maxims in State and Government examined with reference to Ireland – his most coherent analysis of the political context of Irish social and economic problems – summed up how trade barriers imposed by England, patronage on matters such as charters to mint coinage and an absentee landlord system that promoted rack-renting, made maxims for improving land and industry ineffectual in Ireland. Such maxims presumed that the people of Ireland enjoyed natural rights in common with the rest of mankind who had entered into civil society. And as for the maxim ‘that people are the riches of a nation’, this clearly did not hold in the Irish case. With little of the satire of A Modest Proposal, Swift declared:
But, in our present situation, at least five children in six who are born lie in dead weight upon us for the want of employment. And a skilful computer assured me, that above one half of the souls in the kingdom supported themselves by begging and thievery, whereof two thirds would be able to get their bread in any other country on earth. Trade is the only incident to labour: where that fails, the poorer native must either beg, steal, or starve, or be forced to quit his country. This has made me often wish, for some years past, that, instead of discouraging our people from seeking foreign soil, the public would pay for transporting all our unnecessary mortals, whether Papists or Protestants, to America, as drawbacks are sometimes allowed where a nation is over-stocked. I confess myself to be touched with a very sensible pleasure, when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes treble the worth, brought up to steal or beg, for want of work, to whom death would be the best thing to be wished of, on account of both themselves and the public.5
Swift’s grim unpublished assertion that the Irish poor might be better off dead was reworked as satire in A Modest Proposal. But he disagreed with the unnamed ‘skilful computer’ in an undated sermon, Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland, that must have been written around the same time as A Modest Proposal:
It is a very melancholy reflection, that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want, our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, labourers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.6
In The Battle of the Books (1704) Swift described satire ‘as a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally observe everybody’s face but their own’, which was the chief reason why so few were offended by it. A Modest Proposal was not just the palatable and humorous expression of Swift’s frustration but a satire on the impossibility of schemes of improvement proposed by others and a mirror held up to his own face that mocked the Protestant patriot case for economic autonomy and constitutional reform he earnestly advanced. For making this case he came to be celebrated by subsequent generations of patriots and nationalists as varied as Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. In 1847, Mitchel edited a pamphlet on behalf of the Irish Confederation entitled Irish Political Economy that republished Swift’s A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture and pressed it into the service of a new separatist ideal.
Swift viewed himself as exiled from England and as having to cast his lot with the Irish. The manner in which he did so and the genius with which he expressed his own and Ireland’s predicaments canonised him for generations as a model patriot and as the architect of Anglo-Irish identity. But Swift’s relationship with Ireland remained ambivalent. As put in a 1727 poem, written at the port of Holyhead, awaiting passage to the land of his birth:
Remove me from this land of slaves,
Where all are fools and all are knaves,
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for nought…
BF
Notes
1Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick (Dublin, 1729).
2Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, & c. Utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Every Thing wearable that comes from England (Dublin, 1720).
3Jonathan Swift, An Answer to Several Letters sent to me from Unknown Hands (Dublin, 1729).
4Jonathan Swift, Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons (1729) (first published, London: William Johnston, 1765).
5Jonathan Swift, A Sermon on the Causes of the Wretched Conditions of Ireland in The Sermons of Rev Dr Jonathan Swift (Glasgow: Urie, 1763).
6Jonathan Swift, The Truth of Some Maxims in State and Government examined with reference to Ireland (Dublin, 1729).