SOURCE: Pencak, William. “Swift Justice: Gulliver's Travels as a Critique of Legal Institutions.” In Law and Literature Perspectives, edited by Bruce L. Rockwood, pp. 255-67. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

[In the following essay, Pencak comments on Swift's Gulliver's Travels as a critique of English legal injustices but emphasizes that neither anger nor utopian thinking prove useful for Gulliver, but only working within the realities of the present system.]

Gulliver's Travels ends with a paradox. Gulliver wrote the book for the Publick Good, the only words so capitalized in the entire text, “for who can read the virtues I have mentioned in the glorious Houyhnhnms, without being ashamed of his own Vices, when he considers himself as the reasoning, governing Animal of his Country” (256).¹ Yet the man who would have his countrymen imitate these exemplars can stand neither the sight nor the stench of his loving family, can barely tolerate the civilized sea-captain who rescues him, prefers a solitary life with his horses—“degenerate” Houyhnhnms—to avoid the “Yahoos” of England, and tells us that “I have now done with all such visionary Schemes for ever” of “so absurd a Project as that of reforming the Yahoo Race” (vii). Just as the Houyhnhnms determine to abolish the Yahoos, only debating whether to do it at once or to adopt the “juster” method of mass castration to exterminate the brutes within a generation, the post-travels Gulliver is true to his equine masters in seeking to rid his life of human contact. He is disdainfully looking away from us in his portrait on the frontispiece of his book.

Gulliver's Travels is Swift's multi-layered treatise on law and government, presented as a satire so engaging that it has been adapted as a children's fairy tale for television, while words such as “Yahoo” and “Lilliputian” have entered the language as generic terms. But its first, foremost message is that humans do not really desire, or have not thought through the implications of, the Utopias they think they yearn for. Gulliver, a likeable enough Everyman when his adventures begin, is so repulsive at their end that his behavior belies any chance his countrymen might take the Houyhnhnms' ideals seriously. A briefer, comic foreshadowing of Gulliver's miserable end occurs after his voyage to Brobdingnag, where he finds the smallness of the kindly folk who rescue him extremely amusing. Despite his long absence, he cannot bear to be in England more than ten days before he is off again.

As one of the “radical Tories” associated with Lord Bolingbroke and his circle in the early eighteenth century, Swift viewed as his task the criticism of a corrupt Whig aristocracy that had come to dominate England after 1714.² But he determined to score his points without posing the “ideal” societies proposed by some of his countrymen as counter-models. Gulliver's Travels is designed to show that these remedies were far more deadly than the social diseases they purported to cure. Swift employs two methods to make his case with a vividness that remains undiminished after a quarter of a millennium. First, he exhibits different constitutions and their effects as outsiders would see them, and exaggerates their features that their principles may be more clearly perceived. Second, he shows that those who preach the virtues of ideal societies, like the retired Gulliver, are self-righteous, obnoxious, and living contradictions of the codes they champion.

Although he would undoubtedly satirize me for my jargon, Swift is presenting a complex semiotic analysis of law, government, and society. The first two voyages deal with the English constitution. It is corrupted in a Lilliput with numerous allusions to the early eighteenth century, but functions well in a Brobdingnag which exhibits the virtues of the mythical “antient constitution” for which Whig and Tory critics pretended to long.³ The last two journeys depict ideal societies. Laputa and Balnibarbi—which I shall treat together—are dystopias of science and technology, forerunners of Orwell's 1984. The Houyhnhnms, who may either represent Plato's Republic or animals' view of humanity, in either case stand for (supposedly) naturally good beings who cannot be otherwise.

These places receive the most attention, but Glubbdubdribb and Luggnagg also deserve comment. They mock those who think following models from history, respect for the elderly, or absolute monarchy will solve our problems. Swift shows that real history, especially modern, is a scene of almost perpetual vice and corruption, where those praised as saviors of their country are frequently tools of behind-the-scenes favorites and prostitutes while genuine patriots live and die in obscurity. Gulliver praises the Roman Senate as “an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-gods” in contrast to “the Knot of Pedlars, Pick-Pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies” comprising modern bodies (167). But his depiction of the quarrels of Caesar, Pompey, and Brutus, for all their nobility, provides a brief counter-text that those who idealize antiquity had best think again. Swift also shoots down the venerated wisdom of old age through the deaf, blind, crotchety, and totally senile Struldbrugs, whose immortality is a cruel joke. He also castigates partisans of absolute monarchy: would they really prefer to crawl and lick the dust in front of their king, as is done in Luggnagg? Although Swift gives these symbolic nostrums for contemporary problems less shrift than he does the Utopias of science, reason, and the restoration of the ancient Constitution, he is trying to tell their supporters that they too are pretending to desire solutions they have not thought through carefully.

Swift also calls attention to linkages between voyages one and three, and journeys two and four. The similarity of the words “Lilliput” and “Laputa”, “puta” being Spanish for whore, reinforce the parallel depravity of these societies. However, the diminutive representation of Augustan England is only a comic, miniature version of the horrible evils Swift predicted—with amazing accuracy viewed from the twentieth century—would follow a world dedicated to science and technology. Just as the first and third travels are paired as examples of corruption, parts two and four are their theoretical yet impossible antidotes. This is signified through parallel long speeches by Gulliver defending his nation and era in Brobdingnag and Houyhnhmnland. His auditors also respond similarly. terms British history “an Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments; the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition could produce” (107). For his part, Gulliver's Houyhnhmn Master “looked upon us as a Sort of Animals to whose Share, by what Accident he could not conjecture, some small Pittance of Reason had fallen, whereof we made no other Use than by its Assistance to aggravate our natural Corruptions, and to acquire new ones which Nature had not given us” (225). Although the King's reaction is common-sense outrage and the Houyhnhmn's the reasoned deduction of an apparently superior being, Gulliver's defenses signify that a properly functioning, harmonious society would find little empathy with the pride an average Englishman took in his laws, freedom, and heritage.

Swift provides a variety of signs, some contradictory, some ambiguous, to judge the variety of societies he has asked us to examine. One criterion, quite different from the surface praise for Brobdingnag and Houyhnhmnland, is the potential for destruction and harm contained in each. Lilliput is perhaps the most corrupt, but also the least dangerous. Like England and France, Lilliput and Blefuscu have large fleets and armies. They have fought numerous wars and undergone internal rebellions and factionalism over politics and religion—Big Endians vs. Little Endians, High Heels vs. Low Heels. But traditional European societies, many of whose inhabitants speak each other's language and travel in other nations, as do the people of Lilliput and Belfusco, are no real danger to humanity.

Gulliver has two personae during the Lilliputian voyage. He signifies Lord Bolingbroke, the statesman who made peace between England and France in 1713 yet was forced to flee across the channel on charges of treason: Gulliver and Bolingbroke both benefit their kingdoms yet suffer exile and execrations through the manipulations—in the Travels literally—of much smaller men. Yet Gulliver also stands for Every Englishman, whose common sense is much greater than the intrigues of the petty courtiers who rule the realm. They can no more dispose of Gulliver than they can ruin England's spirit through their machinations. Gulliver cannot be murdered—the stench and problem of disposing of his body would endanger the public's health. In other words, for all their disdain for ordinary folk, the courtiers cannot survive without them. Gulliver's enemies hope to blind him and persuade him to accept this punishment as merciful. He would become more useful, and “see by the Eyes of the Ministers since the greatest Princes do no more.” Furthermore, “Blindness is an addition to Courage, by concealing Dangers from us” (50). Then he would receive reduced rations until he withered away, which would make getting rid of his corpse easier.

Read symbolically, the effort to blind and starve Gulliver suggests that an aristocratic England may keep its people “blind,” that is, oblivious to its misgovernment, and “starve” the poor majority. The Lilliputians are severely taxed not only to maintain Gulliver, but the court and its wars: Gulliver later tells his Houyhnhmn Master that in England “the Bulk of our People supported themselves by furnishing the Necessities or Conveniences of Life to the Rich” (219). But Gulliver simply leaves, as did both Bolingbroke and the numerous English people who left for the colonies when their freedom or subsistence were threatened. Symbolizing both the statesman and the average man, upon whom the greatness of England rests rather than on the machinations of the court, Gulliver is superior to his government. In the Lilliputian episode he represents the best of his country. And as long as there are good officials like his friend Reldresal or writers like Swift to blow the whistle, England can be rescued from its corruption.

The Brobdingnagians, although good and virtuous representatives of a healthy British constitution, have a much greater potential for destruction than the corrupted Lilliputians. Their armed force is a citizen army of over 200,000, which is similar to the militia of an earlier day where soldiers elected their officers—the custom persisted in the American colonies and then parts of the United States until the Civil War. Loyal to a simple state which provides well for its members, the Brobdingnagian forces recall the armies of antiquity and foreshadow those of the modern world, comprised of much of the male population, rather than a professional force. Of course such an aggregation would be more powerful than the small standing armies of the eighteenth century. In a Brobdingnag which solved the problem of internal violence by balancing the three estates—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—as England claimed to in theory but failed to in practice, it is Gulliver who is the Lilliputian, the absurd champion of his unjust society. His exhibitions as a virtual one-man flea circus recall the rope-dancing and creeping and crawling under a stick of the Lilliputian courtiers. Despite its approximation of a just society, Brobdingnag carries within it tremendous potential power.

Laputa realizes this potential. Here are rulers who are isolated from their people: they live, literally, in the air above them, their main contact being to lower ropes on which tribute is placed. The principal effect of technological advancement is to create a flying city which is a weapon that can change the weather and threaten to annihilate the entire population of any region which opposes it. This in turn begat deterrence, where a rebel city won home rule by constructing magnets; these would attract the lodestone which enabled the flying city to move and thereby immobilize and destroy it. As Swift foresaw, societies like Laputa and Balnibarbi, fascinated by science and technology, would squander resources on absurd projects while the bulk of the population lived in misery. His criticisms of modern architecture, state-directed academies which waste funds on useless research, vivisection, and “programming” individuals to perform simple, machine-like functions are especially prescient. But for all its absurdity, Laputa/Balnibarbi, unlike Lilliput, is a danger to all life with which it comes in contact, and distorts the human spirit unrecognizably.

Finally, the Houyhnhnms. They may live “naturally” according to “reason” and justice to the extent that they do not need laws or courts and can barely comprehend, much less engage in, deceit. But in terms of destructive capability, they are the worst of all. The Laputans only threaten to use their flying city to exterminate opposition, for they realize their subsistence and wealth depend on the wretched people they terrify. But the “perfect” Houyhnhnms only disagree over one item in their entire history—whether to exterminate the “alien” Yahoos at once or to reap the benefit of their labor for an additional generation by sterilizing them and rendering them more tractable. As creatures who claimed to live only by reason, they therefore deduced that Gulliver as the representative of his race either be used like any other Yahoo or forced to leave the country. In fact, he was the worst Yahoo of all, for possessing some “Rudiments of Reason, added to the natural Depravity of those Animals, it was to be feared, I might … bring them in Troops by Night to destroy the Houyhnhnms' Cattle” (244). “Reason” as practiced by the Houyhnhnms refuses to admit the modifying effects of experience—Gulliver is either a Yahoo or a freak of nature and thus cannot be perceived to speak reasonably even when he does. Similarly, the Houyhnhnms “reason” that Gulliver must be a Yahoo noble, for he is the most reasonable Yahoo they have ever seen. They cannot imagine things being other than in their own “reasonable” world—they have trouble comprehending lying. The Houyhnhmn's pure reason thus interferes with understanding what really exists and occurs. Symbolically, the Houyhnhnms represent those who are convinced of their perfection and seek to universalize it: they are fanatics who would eschew selfishness and sacrifice everything in united pursuit of their common good. The Houyhnhmn is the philosopher-king who would have all submit to reason upon pain of extinction.

Gulliver's excuse why he did not claim any of the lands he discovered for England in the usual manner of explorers makes explicit the hierarchy of potential destructiveness inherent in these societies: “The Lilliputians I think are hardly worth the Charge of a Fleet and Army to reduce them; and I question whether it might be prudent or safe to attempt the Brobdingnagians: Or, whether an English Army would be much at their Ease with the Flying Island over their Heads.” And while the Houyhnhnms had no experience of war, “their Prudence, Unanimity, unacquaintedness with Fear, and their Love of their Country would amply supply all Defects in the military Art. Imagine Twenty Thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European Army, confounding the Ranks, overturning the Carriages, battering their Warriors' Faces into Mummy, by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs” (257-58). Again a parallel and dissimilarity of Houyhnhmnland with Brobdingnag suggests itself. In the latter case a peaceful citizenry is patriotically prepared to defend its county, in the former it is poised to wipe out those who cannot be assimilated and conduct themselves “reasonably.”

A key passage in Gulliver's Travels occurs when Gulliver opposes his “weak and corrupt” Reason to the Houyhnhnms': either swimming or leaving the island in a small boat would be “the certain Prospect of an unnatural Death.” Swift here stresses that the natural, like the reasonable, is far more problematic than Utopian theorists pretend. But death would be a blessing, claims Gulliver, for should he survive he would have to pass his days with the Yahoos. Ironically, he promises that if he lives he would “celebrate the Praises of the renowned Houyhnhnms, and proposing their Virtues to the imitation of Mankind” (245). These virtues, of course, lead to the extermination of his species in Houyhnhmnland, his own removal, and his hostility to the kindly people he meets in his private capacity—sea-captains, his family—who are a far cry from the terrible public figures he depicts for his readers.

Swift satirically adapted the Houyhnhnms' solution to the Yahoo problem in his 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”—Gulliver's Travels was written in 1726 although not published until 1735. In a parody of the essays on useful projects circulating at the time, Swift lists numerous benefits if the poor Irish would sell their children for food to “Persons of Quality and Fortune”: preventing abortions; reducing poverty, unemployment, thievery, and the number of Papists; encouraging mothers to be tender to their offspring—that they might become plump and juicy; creating jobs for traffickers in the baby trade; and providing the poor with money to pay rent, among other things. In this stinging parody of Daniel Defoe and other believers that capitalism and increased commerce inevitably contributed to the wealth and well-being of humanity,⁴ Swift gave stark physical expression to an obvious truth his prosperous contemporaries preferred to ignore. Great extremes of wealth and poverty come from exploitation rather than from merit, industry, or the interplay of peaceful market forces. The poor must literally sell themselves and sacrifice their lives that the rich may enjoy their comforts. We can again commend Swift's prescience, for today birth control is urged to mitigate Third World poverty, by those who conveniently overlook the fact that productive land is engrossed by a small class and food grown in plenty—for export.

In “A Modest Proposal,” unlike Gulliver's Travels, Swift does provide an explicit list of sensible things that could be done to alleviate poverty and injustice. The Irish poor could benefit by “taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound”—that is, making the rich return a substantial part of the rent obtained from those they exploit; by encouraging and using domestic manufactures, rather than wallowing in “foreign Luxury,” which could be accomplished if we learned “to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the Inhabitants of Topinamboo [Brazilian aborigines]”; and, Swift suggested, by “quitting our Animosities and Factions, nor act[ing] any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very Moment their City was taken” (508). What was not needed was a model Utopia or tinkering with the British Constitution—persuading people to live frugally, improve productivity, support the poor through taxes, and take an interest in their nation's welfare would suffice. If it didn't, the only alternative was for people to continue to sell themselves and die, which is where the Utopian theorist may enter to rationalize the abominable in the name of capitalism, survival of the fittest, and the triumph of civilization.

The law itself, both in theory and practice, is another Swiftian sign of the societies Gulliver encounters. The Lilliputians stand for Hanoverian England. According to their laws, fraud is illegal, false informers are harshly punished, law-abiding citizens are honored, and “for all Employments, they have more Regard to good Morals than to great Abilities.” But all this is only theoretical, notes Gulliver, for these are “the original Institutions, and not the most scandalous Corruptions into which these People are fallen by the degenerate Nature of Man” (40-41).

The arguments made by the royal admiral and treasurer supporting Gulliver's trial for treason and a death sentence illustrate this degeneration. The admiral maintains that future crimes Gulliver might possibly commit justify the accusation of treason: putting out the fire in the royal palace by defecating on it “might, at another time raise an Inundation by the same Means, to drown the whole Palace; and the same Strength which enabled you to bring over the Enemy's Fleet, might serve, upon the first Discontent to carry it back” (50). The admiral's case perfectly exemplifies Gulliver's ferocious denunciation of the law as enforced in England and practiced by lawyers to his Houyhnhmn Master; “A Society of Men among us, bred up from their Youth in the Art of proving by Words multiplied for the Purpose, that White is Black, and Black is White, according as they are paid. To this Society all the rest of the People are Slaves” (215).⁵

The treasurer, for his part, substitutes reason of state for law to condemn Gulliver. The expense of feeding and clothing him “would soon grow insupportable,” and blinding him would only make him eat more. Besides, “his sacred Majesty and the Council, who are your Judges, were in their own Consciences fully convinced of your Guilt; which was a sufficient Argument to condemn you to death, without the formal Proofs required by the strict Letter of the Law” (51). In a pinch, the elaborate system of English law could simply be dispensed with. Or, as Gulliver points out to the professor in Balnibarbi who is trying to discover conspiracies against the government by examining men's excrement, the papers of accused conspirators could be secured and “delivered to a Set of Artists very dexterous in finding out the mysterious Meaning of Words, Syllables, and Letters. For Instance, they can decipher a Close-stool to signify a Privy-Council,” and “when this Method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the Learned among them call Acrosticks and Anagrams” (163-164). Were he alive today, I imagine Swift would defend a semiotics which regarded legal and military institutions as symbols of national character; he would have a great deal of fun with those who deconstruct and decontextualize.

In Brobdingnag, where learning is limited to “Morality, History, Poetry, and Mathematics,” no law could exceed twenty-two words, and all were “expressed in the most plain and simple Terms, wherein those People are not Mercurial enough to discover above one Interpretation” (111). Indeed, it was a capital crime to write a comment on a law. Gulliver repeatedly takes the Brobdignagians to task for “Ignorance,” “confining the Knowledge of governing within very narrow Bounds; to common Sense and Reason, to Justice and Lenity, to the Speedy Determination of Civil and criminal Causes; with some other obvious Topicks which are not worth considering.” (111). That he does so is obviously a reflection of Swift's approval, especially since one giant author he cites shared Swift's opinion that the uncorrupted Greek and Roman republican “antients” were superior to the moderns. But Gulliver's criticism of Brobdignagian simplicity also points to a real problem: Brobdingnag's laws would be as utterly unpalatable for a commercial, complex society such as eighteenth-century England as the harsh broth of the Spartans is for Gulliver in Glubbdubdribb (169). Like Laputa and Houyhnhmnland, Brobdingnag is a Utopia; its isolation from the rest of the world ensures its persistence. Like it or not, we are Lilliputians.

Laputa ultimately rests on force, not law. To be sure, its court, like the intellectuals Swift is satirizing, were “perpetually enquiring into publick Affairs, giving their Judgments in Matters of State; and passionately disputing every Inch of a Party Opinion” (137). However, their government persists because of the threat of the flying island. It was a terrible land for all save the intellectual rulers. As none of their “Projects are yet brought to Perfection … the whole County lies miserably waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths” (151). We do not learn about Laputa's laws. Indeed, as “neither Prince nor People appeared to be curious in any Part of Knowledge, except Mathematicks and Musick” (147), laws are irrelevant even if they exist.

The same absence of law is true of Houyhnhmnland. “Reason” determines all; there are no disputes. An unquestioned hierarchy ranked the inhabitants: “the White, the Sorrel, and the Iron-grey, were not so exactly shaped as the Bay, the Dapple-grey, and the Black; nor born with equal Talents of Mind, or a Capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the Condition of Servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own Race, which in that Country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural” (223). Still, it is a servant, the Sorrel Nag, who helps Gulliver build his escape craft because “he had a tenderness for me” (246). Houyhnhmnland needs no laws because the possibility of questioning the social order never existed; when it arose through Gulliver's presence, it is only “rational” for the Houyhnhnms to deduce the potential revolt of the Yahoos, exterminate them, and exile Gulliver as a pre-emptive response. And nothing could be more unreasonable and unnatural than Gulliver's identification with the horses who rid themselves of him rather than the people who welcomed him back to reality.

Good people—kindly sea-captains, Gulliver's family, let us include the Sorrel Nag, the well-disposed Lilliputian Reldresal—are other signifiers Swift has carefully dispersed throughout the Travels. It is easy to overlook their importance and revel in the unusual features of the imaginary societies, or the pirates and evil sailors who cause Gulliver's shipwrecks. Swift is telling us that it is indeed easy to lose ourselves—in our rage against an unjust state and society, in dreaming up ideal schemes to correct it, or in attempting to escape. The decent people trying to do their best in an absurd world are sometimes hard to spot, but unless they find each other and work for justice within the limits of reality the alternatives are the alienated, hateful Gulliver the author and the tyranny of impossible Utopias.

One senses in Gulliver's Travels Swift's herculean effort to avoid succumbing to his anger at injustice by warning himself, through Gulliver, what would happen if he got carried away with righteous indignation. It is a warning well worth heeding today. We may now live in a present which unlike Swift's Lilliputian present incorporates much of the Laputan nightmare he foresaw as the future. But we can still be guided by semiotic reflection on the lures of the false Brobdignian past and Houyhnhmn reasonable Utopias. Let us not forget the importance of the Glubbdubdribb revelation of written history as a romanticized perversion of the awful truth. This lets us know Swift was not taken in by the belief that a “merry old” England with its “antient Constitution” similar to Brobdingnag really existed. Gulliver and Swift are our alternatives: “A Modest Proposal” on the one hand; work, charity, and concern for the Publick Good on the other.

Notes

1. Pagination from Gulliver's Travels and “A Modest Proposal” in Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper, eds., The Writings of Jonathan Swift (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). [For contemporary law review references to Swift, see: James W. Ducayet, “Publius and Federalism,” N. Y. U. L. Rev. 68 (October 1993): 821, 869, nt. 251; Thomas W. Merrill, “A Modest Proposal for a Political Court,” Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 17 (Winter, 1994): 137; Robert M. Ackerman, “Bringing Coherence to Defamation Law Through Uniform Legislation,” N. C. L. Rev. 72 (January 1994): 291, 349, nt. 16; Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “Scorn,” Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 35 (Spring 1994): 1061, 1064, arguing later (1099) that “satire, sarcasm, scorn, and similar tools” should only “be deployed upward” by judges, at powerful actors and institutions, and not against “the weak and lowly,” particularly because of the special role of the judiciary as “countermajoritarian protector of minorities in our system of politics.” Howard B. Eisenberg, “A ‘Modest’ Proposal: State Licensing of Parents,” Conn. L. Rev. 26 (Summer 1994): 1415, 1451-1452; Floyd Abrams, “Prior Restraints,” Communications Law: 1994 (New York: Practising Law Institute, November, 1994), 399 PLI/Pat. 247, 185: “‘Since Jonathan Swift's time, creators of fictional worlds have seen their vocabulary for fantasy appropriated to describe reality,’” quoting Lucasfilm Ltd. v. High Frontier, 622 F. Supp. 931 (D.D.C. 1985) upholding the right of public interest groups to use the term “Star Wars” in discussing the Reagan Administration's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.). Jeffrey M. Shaman, “The Theory of Low-Value Speech,” SMU L. Rev. 48 (January-February 1995): 297, 344, citing Swift for the principle that “[t]hroughout history, political ideas often have been expressed in sexual, scatological, profane, or offensive images.” William Boulier, “Sperm, Spleens, and Other Valuables: The Need to Recognize Property Rights in Human Body Parts,” Hofstra L. Rev. 23 (Spring 1995): 693, 731, nt. 193, citing a satirical article by a pseudonymous author “Jonathan Swift”: “Anthropophagy: Swift Reprisal,” New Eng. J. Med. 279 (1968): 890. Lisa M. Katz, “A Modest Proposal? The Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption,” Emory Int'l L. Rev. 9 (Spring 1995): 283, 327-328 and nt. 1. Ed.]

2. For Swift and Tory radicalism, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Tory Radicalism,” in Margaret Jacob and James R. Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984). See also: Philip A. Hamburger, “Revolution and Judicial Review: Chief Justice Holt's Opinion in City of London v. Wood,” Colum. L. Rev. 94 (November 1994): 2091, 2114.

3. For glorification of the mythical “antient constitution,” see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, A Study in English Historical Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1957, revised 1987).

4. For Defoe and the celebration of commercial wealth as beneficial and just, in eighteenth century England, see Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

5. Cited in: William Domnarski, “The Autobiographical Lawyer,” J. Legal Prof. 19 (1994): 165, 168, and Demitry N. Feofanov, “Defining Religion: An Immodest Proposal,” Hofstra L. Rev. 23 (Winter 1994): 309, 405, nt. 210.