A Modest Proposal

“I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl before twelve years old is no saleable commodity; and even when they come to this age they will not yield above 3l. or 3l. 2s. 6d. at most on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriment and rags having been at least four times that value.” 

Like the previous quote, this statement comes before Swift’s hyperbolic pivot. Therefore, it can be seen as expressing a sentiment and tone that is consistent with the pamphlets the author seeks to parody. For example, the quote puts forth the same view of people as commodities that prevailed at the time. Furthermore, it engages in the technique of political arithmetic popularized by William Petty.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” 

In the most famous line of the essay, Swift makes a sharp pivot toward hyperbolic satire. The shocking nature of the quote operates on two levels. One, the imagery of roasting and boiling babies is on its own astonishing. Second, the quote creates a whiplash-inducing incongruity between the narrator’s measured rhetoric up to this point and the taboo of infanticide.

“I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.” 

Swift almost breaks character as he cannot resist making a jab at the absentee landlords who prey on predominantly Catholic tenants. The issue of landlord absenteeism was an enormous source of contention in 18th-century Ireland, given the Penal Laws that deprived many Catholics of the right to own land and titles. Swift is particularly critical of landlords who earn money off the backs of hardworking Catholics but live in England, where they circulate these rent payments. Thus, landlord absenteeism is an issue of Irish nationalism to Swift and other so-called Irish patriots.

“Infant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentifully in March, and a little before and after: for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolific diet, there are more children born in Roman catholic countries about nine months after Lent than at any other season; therefore, reckoning a year after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of popish infants is at least three to one in this kingdom: and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of papists among us.” 

This is the earliest example of the narrator’s intense anti-Catholic bigotry. In the 17th and 18th centuries, England heavily reinforced these prejudices through Penal Laws and other statutes restricting Irish Catholics’ religious freedom and ability to own land. Because Irish Protestants—many of whom were of English descent—benefited from this institutionalized bigotry, the narrator’s anti-Catholic sentiments signal that he is a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant class. While Swift himself belonged to this class, he expressed far more tolerance toward Catholics than many of his peers.

“As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive than dressing them hot from the knife as we do roasting pigs.” 

Once again, Swift induces rhetorical whiplash by transitioning from a sober discussion of meat industry logistics to the enslavement, murder, and butchering of infants. This reflects the extent to which economic proposals with truly gruesome consequences are put forth with cold, scientific detachment. By pushing the methodology of his peers far past the point of human decency, Swift unveils the brutality of economic proposals that only seem just and fair on the surface.

“[A]nd besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be act to censure such a practice, (although indeed very unjustly,) as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, has always been with me the strongest objection against any project, how well soever intended.” 

The narrator seems to rely on a rhetorical technique known as false equivalency—or, in the parlance of the 21st century, whataboutism. In essence, the narrator implies that while some may view his proposal as cruel, cruelty is endemic to any number of social engineering proposals. Swift would likely agree with this. Yet the fact that such proposals so dominate the arena of economic debate in 18th-century Ireland suggests that the narrator is incapable of thinking up any anti-poverty scheme that doesn’t view human beings as commodities.

“But in order to justify my friend, he confessed that this expedient was put into his head by the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa, who came from thence to London above twenty years ago.” 

The narrator engages in one of many tactics used by the Anglo-Irish elite in their efforts to address poverty in Dublin and the surrounding countryside: an argument from authority. Swift subverts this rhetorical device by having his narrator cite George Psalmanazar as the source of his authority. Given that Psalmanazar was already a long-discredited imposter at the time of the essay’s publication, the narrator’s invocation of the man is designed to show that he is enormously out of touch.

“The poorer tenants will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be made liable to distress and help to pay their landlord’s rent, their corn and cattle being already seized, and money a thing unknown.” 

Once again, the narrator betrays his status as an Anglo-Irish elite by expressing sympathy for absentee landlords who prey on impoverished Catholic laborers. His concern appears to be limited solely to the fortunes of these landlords, despite the fact that they by and large reside in England and therefore circulate their rent payments through that country’s economy as opposed to Ireland’s. Furthermore, the quote reveals the extent to which these landlords already suck their tenants dry of everything they own, seizing crops and livestock.

“Whereas the maintenance of 100,000 children, from two years old and upward, cannot be computed at less than 10s.a-piece per annum, the nation’s stock will be thereby increased 50,0001. per annum, beside the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom who have any refinement in taste. And the money will circulate among ourselves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.” 

At first glance the narrator’s tendency toward mathematical accounting may not seem terribly significant to modern readers. Contemporary readers, however, would likely have recognized this as consistent with the methodology of economist William Petty and his followers. Economists like Petty tended to think of humans as little more than market inputs, a perspective Swift seeks to undermine in his essay.

“It would increase the care and tenderness of mothers toward their children, when they were sure of a settlement for life to the poor babes, provided in some sort by the public, to their annual profit or expense. We should see an honest emulation among the married women, which of them could bring the fattest child to the market.” 

In addition to once again using the language of animal husbandry to justify his atrocious scheme, the narrator casts his proposal as one that would benefit another vulnerable societal group: impoverished women. This too is a rhetorical technique often used in bad-faith arguments. In this case, harm done to one group—infants—is justified by framing it as a progressive reform on behalf of women.

“Men would become as fond of their wives during the time of their pregnancy as they are now of their mares in foal, their cows in calf, their sows when they are ready to farrow; nor offer to beat or kick them (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a miscarriage.”

Again, the narrator casts his proposal as a boon to women. This time, however, the argument is framed in an extraordinarily backhanded way, as if to suggest that men’s present treatment of their wives is so extraordinarily poor that pregnant livestock faces more favorable conditions than poor Irish women do, and that for women to rise up to the quality of life enjoyed by livestock would be considered progress. As an aside: In works like Gulliver’s Travels, Swift expresses a strong sense of anti-misogyny that many would have considered progressive for his era.

“Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: of taxing our absentees at 5s. a pound: of using neither clothes nor household furniture except what is of our own growth and manufacture: of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gaming in our women: of introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence, and temperance.” 

Swift engages in the literary device known as paralipsis, a technique commonly found in Roman satires by which an author expresses an argument by denying its importance or relevance. Swift’s sincere proposal to address the poverty crisis in Ireland involves a series of spiritual and civic policies that cannot be as easily summarized as the narrator’s proposal. Nor is it as attention-grabbing. Therefore, Swift formulates a brilliant way of expressing his genuine beliefs by framing them within a humorous and shocking satirical treatise.

“But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success I fortunately fell upon this proposal; which, as it is wholly new, so it has something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power and whereby we can incur no danger in disobliging ENGLAND.”

The narrator betrays his allegiance to England over Ireland, a trait common to Anglo-Irish Protestants like himself. Though nominally a kingdom with its own parliament, 18th-century Ireland was a client state of England and therefore subject to its laws. The narrator’s fear of offending England thus reflects Ireland’s fraught political dynamic with its political and legal overlords.