[In the following essay, Ferguson refutes the prior assumption that Swift was venting his saeva indignatio at England in A Modest Proposal, and instead proposes that Swift's anger was aimed at all social classes in Ireland.]

For two hundred years readers have admired Swift's Modest Proposal as one of the greatest pieces of sustained irony in the language. No one has failed to note the brilliance with which Swift balanced the opposing tones of the tract: the economic projector's studied disinterestedness and his own rage. But too little attention has been given to the object of that rage or to Swift's real purpose in the Modest Proposal.

The traditional assumption has been that it was upon England, and not Ireland, that he was venting his saeva indignatio. Leslie Stephen called the tract “the most complete expression of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs”; and Henry Craik concluded his brief discussion of it with a passionate rhetorical question: “Can England ever forget what lies on her conscience, while Swift's Modest Proposal continues to be read?” This position has for the most part been adopted by later critics. W. A. Eddy cites Walpole, Wood, and absentee English landlords as the immediate objects of Swift's attack and sees that attack as Swift's outraged protest against the brutality of England's exploitation of Ireland. Ricardo Quintana, both in The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift and the recent Swift, An Introduction, gives only the most general account of the tract, noting its irony and Swift's consummate use of the rhetorical device termed by Pons le mythe animal. A much more important study, Louis Landa's “A Modest Proposal and Populousness,” shows Swift's use of mercantilist theory in the tract, but argues that in terms of this theory Swift's satire was doubly damaging to England because her misrule in Ireland had there invalidated universal economic laws, especially the fundamental mercantilist maxim that people are the riches of a nation. George Wittkowsky, in his “Swift's Modest Proposal: the Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet,” is also interested in the part contemporary economic theory played in Swift's tract, and he reads the Modest Proposal as chiefly a parody on current expressions of this theory. Similar to this view is that of Herbert Davis, who, in The Satire of Jonathan Swift, says that Swift's irony is directed against serious proposals which “take no account of the determined policy of the English government to impoverish the Irish people.”¹

It is the purpose of the present study to show that Swift's anger in the Modest Proposal was directed towards Ireland, not England, and that the tract was his carefully itemized indictment of every class of Irish life, down to and including the very beggars. Further, it will show that Swift's view of the Irish was that of the defeated moral reformer, and it will show how this view determines the mode and tone of Swift's satire in the tract. It should be made clear that such a reading does not deny England's role in Ireland's tragedy or Swift's awareness of that role (there is, of course, a reference to England in the tract); rather, it emphasizes Swift's primary aim in writing the last major piece he ever published on Irish affairs.

A Modest Proposal was written, the projector tells us, because he had “been wearied out for many Years with offering vain, idle, visionary Thoughts.”² These “Thoughts” were Swift's own tracts written from 1720 to 1729, tracts which had touched on practically every aspect of Ireland's economy and which were directed solely to the Irish. In them Swift had considered the projects of other men and had advanced his own in a constant effort to stir Ireland from her lethargy—projects to establish a local mint, to introduce farm and road improvements, to encourage fair dealing among shopkeepers and tenants, and to discourage the excessive emigration that was depopulating the country. In fact, this newest proposal of 1729 was but a logical extension of a plea Swift had made unceasingly to the people of Ireland: domestic consumption of domestic products. It is in outlining the advantages of this latest plan that Swift systematically condemns the landlords, the idle rich of both sexes, the Irish poor, Protestant Dissenters, Papists, absentees, shopkeepers—in short, “the whole people of Ireland.”

The commodity, the projector admits, 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”. This, it should be noted, is a reference to Irish landlords, whether resident or absentee; as early as 1720, Swift was castigating “our Country Landlords” for their selfish unconcern with the welfare of Ireland.³ Continuing his attack on the upper classes, the projector notes that the scheme will appeal to “all Gentlemen of Fortune in the Kingdom, who have any refinement in Taste”—whose lavish manner of living Swift had sought to curb through sumptuary laws. For such epicures, a clever cook will be able to make the new delicacy “as expensive as they please”. And the “Gentlemen of Fortune” were not alone in their extravagance. At one point the projector directs a vicious aside to the women of fashion—whose ruinous demands for imported luxuries Swift had assailed for years: Though he rejects the “Refinement” of his scheme offered by a friend, that the eligible age limit of the children be extended to fourteen, he confesses that the kingdom would benefit if it could thus destroy “several plump young girls in this Town, who … appear at the Playhouse, and Assemblies in foreign Fineries, which they never will pay for”.

The lowest class of native Irish do not escape Swift's wrath: In addition to being economically advantageous, the scheme will teach the Irish poor common humaneness (the severity of the irony here attests to Swift's disgust at the brutish ways of the “mere Irish”). During his wife's pregnancy, a man will curb his usual brutality for fear of causing a miscarriage, and the new economic value of children will decrease the number of abortions and infanticides—crimes which the projector says are committed “more to avoid the Expense than the Shame”. Further, in his unwittingly callous way the projector will allow one male for every four females, because “these Children are seldom the Fruits of Marriage, a Circumstance not much regarded by our Savages”. This charge (a strange one to make against Catholic Ireland!) is Swift's contemptuous reference to the marriages performed among the Irish poor by “couple-beggars,” Roman priests who officiated at clandestine and—certainly from an Anglican point of view—illegal ceremonies.⁴

Swift even found an occasion to aim a gibe at his old enemies the Dissenters. Like many other writers on Irish affairs, he was alarmed at the widespread emigration, especially by Ulster Presbyterians, that was depleting the country of its people; and he angrily rejected the Dissenters' claim that they were leaving Ireland because of Anglican oppression. The projector's scheme will decrease the number of Catholics and thus partially restore the balance which was in danger of being upset by so many “good Protestants” emigrating rather than paying tithes “against their Conscience, to an idolatrous Episcopal Curate”.

These complaints, however, are incidental to the final, cumulative indictment of the nation. Losing for a moment his willingness to yield to a better patriot, the projector exclaims, “Let no man talk to me of other Expedients,” and he then lists such “expedients.” The important thing to note here is not that these had been proposed by Swift since 1720—almost every compiler of an anthology in which the tract is reprinted has made this obvious point—but that they had been proposed to the people of Ireland. Not one even remotely applies to England; Swift does not here mention legislative or commercial restrictions. Like the proposal at hand, the rejected expedients had been in Ireland's own power to effect: to tax absentees; to use products of native growth and manufacture; to refrain from importing luxuries; to imbue all the people with a sense of morality, coöperation, and patriotism.

“The two principal Branches of Preaching,” Swift wrote in 1720, “are first to tell the People what is their Duty; and then to convince them that it is so.”⁵ From the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) to the economic treatises of 1728-29, Swift had been “preaching” to the people of Ireland, trying to convince them of their duty. It was, as he saw it, to improve to whatever degree possible Ireland's tottering economy. In a sermon on the causes of the country's condition, he acknowledged that Ireland suffered from many disadvantages “not by our own Faults,” but in the same sermon he urged the people to try “what Remedies are in our Power towards removing, at least, some Part of these Evils.”⁶ With the exception of their resistance to Wood's Halfpence, however, the Irish had failed in their duty. Instead of listening to the advice of men who were trying to help them, or following the simple dictates of common sense, the people persisted in the practices which, along with English oppression, contributed to their ruin. And as Ireland's “beggars” included “all Cottagers, Labourers, and Four fifths of the Farmers”, so Ireland's guilt was shared by all Irishmen: the gentry, the tradesmen, the farmers—even, in some measure, the beggars. The gentry continued to import luxuries and to neglect agriculture. The shopkeepers and common laborers continued in their knavish and sottish ways. And at the very bottom of the social scale, the beggars—more sinning than sinned against—continued to infest the country, their idleness and wretchedness representing in small the state of the whole nation: “As a great part of our publick miseries is originally owing to our own faults,” Swift wrote in 1737, “so I am confident, that among the meaner people, nineteen in twenty of those who are reduced to a starving condition, did not become so by what lawyers call the work of God … but merely from their own idleness, attended with all manner of vices, particularly drunkenness, thievery, and cheating.”⁷

That Swift adopted the technique of the political arithmeticians in A Modest Proposal should not obscure his intent. He was not concerned with satirizing the proposals of other writers on Irish affairs—men like Viscount Molesworth, Thomas Prior, Alexander Macaulay, Arthur Dobbs, James McCulla, and Sir John Browne. Far from disagreeing with them, Swift shared many of their economic theories. He mentioned with approval the work of Molesworth and Prior, and he openly sponsored Macaulay's Some Thoughts on the Tillage of Ireland with a prefatory letter of commendation. Nowhere in his works is there a reference to Dobbs, but he must have approved of an author who reflected so many of his own beliefs. With Browne and McCulla he was not in agreement, but in his answers to them he objected to particular proposals and not to the authors as “projectors”; and he respected their intentions.⁸ Whatever parody Swift employed in the Modest Proposal at the expense of such writers was to show their foolishness—like his own—in trying to help an indifferent Ireland.

When Swift's real purpose is understood, the use of le mythe animal in the Modest Proposal is seen to be more than an effective and convenient device. It is a point of view integral to Swift's judgment of Ireland. Swift is saying to the Irish, in effect, “You have acted like beasts; hence you no longer deserve the title of men.”⁹ A passage from a tract written some seven months before A Modest Proposal anticipates this point of view. Swift wondered, he wrote,

whether those animals which come in my way with two legs and human faces, clad, and erect, be of the same species with what I have seen very like them in England, as to the outward Shape, but differing in their notions, natures, and intellectualls more than any two kinds of Brutes in a forest, which any men of common prudence would immediately discover, by persuading them to define what they mean by Law, Liberty, Property, Courage, Reason, Loyalty, or Religion.¹⁰

These animals the preacher had tried to show their duty; but their sloth and viciousness had defeated him. “I am banished,” he wrote a friend in 1732, “to a country of slaves and beggars—my blood soured, my spirits sunk, fighting with beasts like St. Paul, not at Ephesus, but in Ireland.”¹¹

Further, it is le mythe animal that allows Swift to make the one proposal so singularly appropriate to this abandoned nation—cannibalism. It is the Irish, not the English, who are to commit the final barbarity, the last indignity to human reason, of eating their children. And the paradox of their position accounts for the ambivalence between pity and wrath that Swift shows in the Modest Proposal. The wretchedness which surrounds him is a “melancholly Object” to Swift—the strolling mothers with their children, the young laborers unable to find work, the aged dying “as fast as can reasonably be expected.” But the more melancholy the object, the greater Swift's anger at the object itself; for he saw the Irish as at once victims and villains, by their criminal folly and selfishness devouring themselves.

If Ireland rather than England is the object of Swift's attack in the Modest Proposal, it follows that Swift is not so far removed from the ingenuous “projector” as has been supposed.¹² For the projector's remedy for the Irish is a hyperbolic parallel to Swift's abandonment of them. In their conception of the Irish as beasts, Swift and the projector are one. The crucial difference is in their attitudes towards this conception: The projector's is economic; Swift's is moral.¹³ It is a mistake to speak of Swift interrupting in his own voice in the key “other Expedients” passage. The voice is the same, and the weary impatience with which these expedients are rejected as “visionary Thoughts” is the same. Similarly, the reference to England at the conclusion of the tract is inconsistent not because Swift drowns out the projector's voice with his own, but because he momentarily diverts the direction of his attack.¹⁴

In A Modest Proposal, ten years of warning and exhortation gave way to frustration and despair, and Swift directed the full weight of his anger not against England, or callous economists, or visionary projectors, but against Ireland herself. Savage as this expression of his anger is, a tract written in 1728 contains a passage even more terrible than any in the Modest Proposal:

If so wretched a State of Things would allow it, methinks I could have a malicious Pleasure, after all the Warning I have in vain given the Publick … to see the Consequences and Events answering in every Particular. I pretend to no Sagacity: What I writ was little more than what I had discoursed to several Persons, who were generally of my Opinion: And it was obvious to every common Understanding, that such Effects must needs follow from such Causes. … Wisdom crieth in the Streets; because I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my Hand, and no Man regarded. But ye have set at nought all my Counsel, and would none of my Reproof. I also will laugh at your Calamity, and mock when your Fear cometh.¹⁵

Here, stripped of all irony and grounded in the authority of Scripture, is the moralist's judgment on the people of Ireland.

Notes

1. Leslie Stephen, Swift (London, 1889), p. 165; Henry Craik, The Life of Jonathan Swift (London, 1894), ii, 155; W. A. Eddy, Swift's Satires and Personal Writings (London & New York, 1932), p. 20; Ricardo Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (London, 1953), p. 346; Quintana, Swift, An Introduction (London & New York, 1955), pp. 176-77; Louis Landa, “A Modest Proposal and Populousness,” Modern Philology, xl (1942-43), 162; George Wittkowsky, “Swift's Modest Proposal: the Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet,” Journal of the History of Ideas, iv (1943), 74-104; Herbert Davis, The Satire of Jonathan Swift (New York, 1947), p. 107. In his Introduction to Vol. XII of Swift's Prose Works (Oxford, 1955), Dr. Davis modifies his earlier view to the extent of saying that the Modest Proposal was addressed to an Irish audience (p. xx). John Middleton Murry, in his Jonathan Swift (London, 1954), reads Swift's satire in too narrow a scope in seeing the Protestant ruling class in Ireland as the object of Swift's attack in the Modest Proposal (p. 429).

2. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1955), xii, 117. All subsequent quotations from A Modest Proposal are taken from this edition.

3. Prose Works, ed. Davis, ix, 21.

4. See W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1892), i, 382.

5. Prose Works, ed. Davis, ix, 70.

6. Prose Works, ed. Davis, ix, 199.

7. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1925), vii, 330.

8. Prose Works, ed. Davis, ix, 58-59; The Drapier's Letters, ed. Davis (Oxford, 1935), pp. 157 & 317; Prose Works, ed. Davis, xii, 22 & 97.

9. It is just possible that the motif actually comes from the Americas, as the projector tells us (p. 111). In the Commentarios Reales, by Garcilaso de la Vega (1609-1617[?]; English translation, 1688), is an account of how the Peruvians ate their own children. Whether Swift knew Garcilaso is impossible to say. However, it is interesting to know that Bolingbroke probably did. In Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles, attributed to Bolingbroke, there is a reference to Garcilaso's “Man-Eaters” with the comment, “We should never find whole Nations butchering their Kindred, and their Offspring, as we never find whole Nations destroying themselves” (London: S. Bladon, 1752, p. 63). It was just because Swift found such a thing in Ireland that he wrote A Modest Proposal.

10. Prose Works, ed. Davis, xii, 65.

11. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. F. E. Ball (London, 1910-14), iv, 357.

12. See, for example, Ricardo Quintana, “Situational Satire: A Commentary on the Method of Swift,” University of Toronto Quarterly, xvii (1947-48), 130.

13. The technique is similar to that in the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, where both Swift and the defender of nominal Christianity accept the necessity of the Established Church, but do so for different reasons.

14. For an example of the view that in these passages the projector is out of character, see W. B. Ewald, The Masks of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 171 & 173.

15. Prose Works, ed. Davis, xii, 22-23.