serves as the final point on which the reader should linger.

I think that the first answer does a good job of summing up the main points of the final paragraph.  However, I do not think it really addresses the rhetorical purpose of that paragraph.  I assume that's why you have rated it poorly, at least...

To me, the importance of this paragraph is that it really provides a good finish to the tone of the essay.  The whole essay has been written in a very serious way.  Swift is pretending that he is making a serious proposal.

Because of this, it makes sense for him to finish off the essay in a very serious way -- to make it sound to the very end like he really means what he has said.  So when he finishes off by saying essentially "look -- this is a really good idea and I'm not just putting it forward to help me get rich" he is ending the essay in just the same tone that he has presented the rest of the argument.  This makes it, to me, a very effective ending.

The final paragraph of Swift's "A Modest Proposal," first, serves the usual purpose of a final paragraph in an essay by providing the conclusion.  He summarizes the benefits of his proposal, for instance:

• it's for the public good
• will advance trade
• will provide for infants
• will relieve the poor of their poverty
• will give some pleasure to the rich

Beyond that, the final paragraph establishes that the speaker is not making this proposal so that he can profit financially from it.  He has no children that are not already too old, and his wife is past child-bearing age. 

In general, in addition to these specifics, the paragraph contributes to the irony of the piece, as well as the humor.  The speaker presents his proof that he is not trying to get rich off of his proposal as if it is a serious proposal, continuing the irony used throughout the piece.     

Swift’s central argument in A Modest Proposal is that children should not eternally remain the financial burden of their parents, and that the people and government of Ireland should take steps to ensure that children do not become beggars, but rather productive members of society. It is a satirical piece because Swift sardonically suggests that the vast majority of Irish children should be used to make stews and ragu and their skin should be used to produce clothing.

The use of pathos in his work is conveyed whenever he attempts to convince his reader of this argument not by reference to logic or facts, but rather through the passion and emotionality of his writing itself. For example, early in the essay, he says,

whoever could find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

The use of the words “deserve” and the imagery he evokes of heroism—the fulfillment of his wishes honored with the erection of a statue—are examples of the use of pathos in his writing.

One of the sharpest barbs in Swift’s essay comes toward the end, when he rejects any possible exceptions to his proposal for reducing the population. Eating children is obviously reprehensible, but Swift playfully promotes it as Ireland’s last resort. He goes on to say that one should not bother him with alternative, reasonable solutions to Ireland’s population problem, such as

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 goes on to say that, though these solutions are prudent, the Irish people have never had enough conviction to put them into practice. As he says,

Therefore, I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, 'till he hath at least some glimpse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

The irony here that Swift is pointing out is that by this point in history, his almost seems to be a more likely scenario (the eating of children and turning them into leather) to be used to control the population than these other, more reasonable—and obviously preferable—methods. Because Ireland has never been willing to implement the moderate and healthy, the only option left is the extreme and macabre. Swift’s utter rejection of Ireland’s ability to engage in population reform via civilized means is a form of sardonic pathos. Obviously, he does not really believe that wealthy Irish families should start eating the children of peasants. He is using emotive language and extreme imagery to point out Ireland’s failure to intelligently deal with a serious social issue.

In the first paragraph, the speaker uses words like "melancholy," "rags," "beggars," and "helpless." These all paint a fairly pathetic picture of what is happening in Ireland, as Irish peasants of all ages beg anyone and everyone for a penny. He wants to raise sympathy for these individuals so that his proposal will become more acceptable because it would, in his view, provide a means by which these individuals can improve their lives (as well as provide a valuable food source that will increase customers for the owners of taverns and so forth). The speaker's use of pathos is actually ironic because he appears to be quite compassionate and sympathetic toward these individuals, but he is about to suggest that the peasants have babies and raise them until their first birthdays and then sell them as a food source to the rich English. This is hardly a proposal that we would expect from a person who is actually sympathetic. This irony ought to help readers to understand that this text is satirical, though some of Swift's contemporaries missed the point and thought he was serious!

In addition to what the other educator wrote, I think Swift also wanted to inspire the English to feel more compassion for the poverty-stricken Irish. Rather than continue to think of the Irish as breeders who simply produce more mouths than they can feed, or a horde of Catholics reveling in the corruption that Protestants believed was inherent to their faith, if the English could learn to see them not as "other" but as fellow human beings who only desire basic rights—to live in peace, to care for their families, to be gainfully employed—they might begin to right the wrongs that have been done to this group.

By implying that the wealthy English landowners were figuratively "devouring" the poor Irish and so they might as well literally devour them, Swift sought to draw attention to the plight of those victimized as well as to inspire change in the way they were viewed and treated.

The purpose of all satire is to hold up for public inspection behaviors of which the writer disapproves.  These can be seriously bad behaviors (Juvenalian satire) or ones that are just foolish (Horatian satire).  When these behaviors are exposed to public scrutiny, the author hopes, those who engage in them will be pressured to mend their ways.

Since "A Modest Proposal" is one of the greatest satirical essays of all time, we can assume that its purpose is to try to change behaviors Swift doesn't like.  In this case, the main target of his disapproval is the way that the British government is ruling Ireland, which was a British possession at the time.

I believe that Swift hoped that his satirical essay would get people to think about what he saw as the evils being visited upon Ireland by British rule.  Once they did that, he would have hoped they would pressure the government to change its policies.

This text is a satire, one that uses exaggeration and ridicule to expose and criticize the rich English in order to provoke change. The speaker is not Swift himself but, rather, a man who genuinely believes that he is suggesting a truly great idea, something that will make him deserving of a "statue set up for [him as] a preserver of the nation." We can tell that we are not supposed to take this man seriously for a number of reasons. First, for example, although the idea of the Irish selling their babies as a food source for the English is audacious at best and inhuman at worst, the speaker thinks this proposal is merely a "Modest" one. Further, he claims that a newborn child, on average, will weigh twelve pounds and will grow to twenty-eight in a year. Twelve pounds is a huge baby now, in the twenty-first century, so we can assume that a starving Irish mother in the early eighteenth century is not having twelve-pounders or nursing children to twenty-eight pounds within a year. His calculations are way off and they make him seem stupid and uninformed. There are many such examples. The purpose of satire is to provoke change, and so we can assume that Swift hoped that the English would read this text and reexamine their treatment of the Irish, perhaps treating them with some compassion rather than acting only for profit at the cost of human life.

Swift, a clergyman who was appointed the dean of St. Patrick's Church in Dublin, had written several pamphlets suggesting solutions to the horrific problem of poverty in Ireland. Out of deep frustration, after his ideas were ignored, he wrote "A Modest Proposal," a satire suggesting that if the English planned to "devour" the Irish poor anyway through high taxation, unfair pricing and terrible wages, they might as well allow the poor to make some money by selling their babies as delicacies to be eaten by the rich. He didn't seriously mean for anyone to adopt this proposal. His goal was to shock and shame people who thought of the poor only in economic terms into seeing them as real, suffering humans. He hoped horror at his narrator's idea would finally motivate the people with power to come up with a reasonable alternative to letting so many people suffer and starve. 

By presenting the anticipated outcomes before detailing the actual proposal, the speaker tries to win us to his side before actually going into the specifics, which he may suspect we will reject without due consideration. He talks about the sad sight of beggar women and their many children and how these women do not have the opportunity or time to procure gainful employment because they must care for these children. Thus, the reader feels sympathy for them, and the speaker points out what these women need to be useful: fewer children.

He writes, however, that his proposal will not only present a way to make the "children sound, useful members of the commonwealth," but it will "take in the whole number of infants . . . who are born of parents . . . as little able to support them as those who demand . . . charity in the streets." Therefore, his scheme seems to benefit not only those who have been reduced to panhandling but also those who are nearly as desperate. He also comments on the women who commit infanticide rather than bear the cost or the shame of having a baby out of wedlock. His plan, he purports, will solve this problem too.

The first thing the speaker actually says of his own plan is, 

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

In other words, he has anticipated objections to his plan and has attempted to remedy them, before they can even be voiced, by enumerating the wonderful outcomes of his proposal.

Any case to present a proposal, as in this essay, is made stronger and more powerful if the anticipated results are presented before the actual details of the proposal itself as it focuses the readers' attention on the potential results and what could be gained rather than problems or issues arising from the proposal itself. Note how Swift is very careful to delay the actual nature of the proposal. Indeed, at the beginning of his essay, he is careful to paint a very bleak picture of the "deplorable state of the kingdom" and the "prodigious number of children." Note how he also makes a very strong ethical appeal before detailing his proposal:

There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense, than the shame...

Presenting the advantages of his plan in such a reasonable fashion helps us to agree with the proposal once it is unveiled, and also raises our anticipation and curiosity as to what the proposal might be. Of course, Swift has a double purpose here, because by making us wait to hear his proposal he emphasises the horror of it when it is actually unveiled thus reinforcing his main theme: the inhumane way that the government and people of Britain viewed the starving in Ireland.

Swift's essay satirizes the easy acceptance of rational, "scientific" solutions to social problems in a number of ways. One way is to advocate a solution that, according to cold, rationalistic reasoning, makes sense. Swift only accounts for the children of Ireland as economic units, not as human beings.  Seen in this light, they are burdens on their desperately poor parents and Irish society as a whole. Swift's shocking "proposal" to breed, raise, and sell children as food for the English is thus framed as a rational solution to a serious social problem. Of course, it is because we cannot overlook the fact that the children are in fact human beings, and that the moral implications of such a policy would be unacceptable to say the least, that his proposal works as the wickedly pointed satire that it is.

So the basic premise of the essay satirizes the cold rationalism of some social reformers of the day. Swift also writes in the style of such a reformer. His essay is full of facts and figures, calculating, for example, that the cost of raising a "beggar's child" is about "two shillings per annum," asserting that the sensibility of his proposal becomes evident when he estimates that the child's parents can probably sell him for ten shillings at one year of age. He goes on and on, citing a litany of statistics to support his point which is, of course, morally untenable. So in both substance and style, Swift satirizes the social reformers of his day who relied excessively on reason and science. He wants to show that solutions to the problems confronting mankind cannot be undertaken without giving due consideration to human morality.

The issue on which Jonathan Swift was commenting when he wrote "A Modest Proposal" was the chronic poverty of the Irish and their ongoing exploitation by the wealthy and powerful in England, many of whom owned land in Ireland and employed the Irish to farm it but paid them little.

The satirical essay utilizes a problem/solution format. Swift opens the essay, subtitled "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick–1729," with shocking descriptions of how Irish children grow up to become thieves because they are unemployed, or they become mercenaries and fight for Spain or sell themselves into slavery in Barbados.

He goes on to portray children as burdens to their impoverished parents and obstacles to their parents' ability to work. Therefore, he suggests that a "fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the common-wealth" would be to sell them to the wealthy of England to be eaten.

He claims to have learned from an American visiting 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 fricasie, or a ragoust."

Swift portrays himself in this text by creating dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows more than the character does, and Swift gives us a great many clues that we ought not to think this narrator is a particularly smart or selflessly compassionate fellow, despite his professions to the contrary. For example, the narrator (who is not Swift) says that a newborn baby will weigh approximately twelve pounds. This would be considered a very large baby now, born to a well-fed mother who received adequate prenatal care; the chance of an impoverished Irish woman living in the eighteenth century giving birth to a twelve-pound infant seems nearly impossible. Likewise, the narrator says that a ready-for-consumption one year-old would weigh twenty-eight pounds; again, such a number is highly, highly improbable given the likely poor health of the breast-feeding mother. Further, the fact that he calls his proposal a "modest" one is equally ridiculous, and his assertion that his proposal will do such good for the nation that he would deserve a statue of himself in some public place is infuriatingly laughable at best. By making the narrator so ridiculous, Swift allows us to see what he believes to be true: that the figurative "devouring" of the Irish by the English is cruel and inhumane and morally tantamount to cannibalism. Thus, he portrays himself and his own beliefs by creating dramatic irony: Swift creates a narrator who does not realize his own stupidity so that we can ascertain Swift's own views.

Swift's essayist (and it is important to remember that he adopts a different persona from his own in "A Modest Proposal") is an enlightened, educated man. He portrays himself as thoroughly familiar with the human crisis developing in Ireland, citing facts and figures throughout the essay to demonstrate his expertise. He cites "a very knowing American," "an eminent French physician," and a "native of the island of Formosa" in support of his "proposal." Above all, he is a rational man, one who seeks an enlightened solution to a serious social problem. This persona, really, is at the heart of Swift's satire. He is not only detailing the horrors of life in Ireland, then a possession of England controlled mostly by absentee English landlords. He is satirizing those who seek solutions to human problems that do not take human factors into account. The essayist conceives of people in almost solely economic terms--mothers are "breeders" or "dams" and children are a "burden on their parents." Morality and humanity, Swift is saying, must be taken into account as we attack our social problems. His essayist and his "solution" represent the logical conclusion of treating human beings as economic units.

First, we should begin noting that the narrator of "A Modest Proposal" is a fictional creation used to make a satiric point. This character is not meant to represent Swift himself, but rather a type of person that Swift despises. 

The speaker's persona is one created to counter the accusation that people concerned with Irish poverty were merely being sentimental. In a sense, Swift is doing a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that moral questions should be decided independent of sentiment. Thus the persona Swift creates appears eminently rational, approaching the problem of starvation in Ireland simply as a logical, pragmatic technocrat.

For egotism, we should take into account that Swift himself was a priest who served as Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. In the Gospel of John, Jesus commanded that the primary duty of the Apostles was to "feed my lambs/sheep". For Swift, not alleviating suffering and hunger goes against his religious beliefs. He would have seen his narrator's callous approach to treating the lives of others as like the sin of Lucifer, a sort of extreme arrogance that puts human reason and will above divine ordinance, following his own "devices and desires" rather than moral and religious duty, which is a sort of egotism that would be considered the sin of pride (one of the 7 deadly sins). 

As the title of this essay suggests, the speaker of this treatise makes every effort to present himself as, above all, a reasonable and modest individual who diffidently makes his "modest proposal." This is of course part of Swift's irony, as his proposal is anything but modest, and the voice of the speaker in this essay heightens the irony when the proposal is finally made. Note how this is achieved through the following quotation:

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

What makes the way in which his ideas are expressed even worse is the logic, hard work and thought that has evidently gone into them through his many calculations, and his attempt to work out how much food could be made from a child and how many children could be raised and what price children as a food source could be sold for. Swift, by presenting these arguments in above all else a reasonable voice, shows the danger of a system of thought which is divorced from feelings and morality and only sees humans as a saleable commodity.

First, and this is important, it is not "Swift's" plan that we are discussing, but that of his clueless narrator. Swift does not approve of this proposal and wants his readers to be horrified by it. Only the narrator, who is not Swift, thinks it is a good idea.

It is not until the ninth paragraph of this essay that we come to understand that the narrator is proposing that the poor sell their babies for food. It is here that he says he has learned from an "American" 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.

This is a shocking and nauseating proposal, and yet, although the narrator is clueless about the boundaries of common humanity, he is a good rhetorician. He does his best in the opening paragraphs to first use pathos—appeals to our emotions—and logos—appeals our logical, rational minds—to build support for the idea that the situation of the poor is urgent. He begins by painting a heartbreaking picture of a poor woman in rags trailed by her starving children and then convincingly shows that he has a grasp on the statistics about the number of poor and their prospects. This builds his credibility, and by the ninth paragraph, we are anxious to hear his proposal. The trouble is that it is heartless and barbaric.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this essay has been very carefuly scripted and drafted precisely to delay the "unveiling" of this very immodest "modest proposal." It is important therefore to ask what Swift does in the lead up to the revelation of his plan. Swift is very careful to try and establish the voice and tone of the essay to present himself as a caring, concerned and earnest individual who sincerely wants to help alleviate the poverty and terrible famine in Ireland. The reference to numbers and statistics likewise presents his voice as credible. Note an example of how this works in practice:

I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children, in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

Note how Swift is trying to show his reasonable nature by appealing to "all parties" and identifying areas of commonality between them all. Having established himself as a reasonable and even caring speaker, who is concerned for the plight of the poor, the shock of reading his exact proposal is that much more exaggerated. Thus the proposal is delayed to lull us into a false sense of security before shocking us.

Among Swift’s reasonable propositions include using locally manufactured products as opposed to imports and landlords showing the smallest amount of mercy towards their tenants. However, he refuses to discuss them further owing to the fact that for years he had brought forth the same proposals but none had been adopted. He had grown weary trying to advocate for their implementation when he came across his “modest proposal.” Swift further stated that no one should bother discussing the alternative proposals or others of the same nature because it would be further efforts in futility as those with the power to implement change were unwilling. He said, “Therefore I repeat, let no Man talk to me of these and the like Expedients, till he hath at least a Glimpse of Hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into Practice.”

It is vitally important to identify the satire and irony that runs throughout the entire essay that Swift wrote. The "other expedients" that Swift suggests and that I assume you are referring to are actually very sensible ideas and suggestions. In reality, Swift previously had championed every one of these measures, yet they were all ignored by the British government. Interestingly, these suggestions were italicised in all editions printed during Swift's lifetime to show that Swift made these proposals with sincerity rather than ironically.

However, by overtly pretending to dismiss such reasonable suggestions, Swift is highlighting the failure of the British government to do anything to alleviate the harsh penury of the Irish. He deliberately brushes aside these suggestions, just as Britain itself brushed them aside in the past. Of course, Swift is not being serious at all in this essay. Rather, his position is deliberately created to highlight the callous and unsensitive way in which Britain was treating the Irish famine.

A Modest Proposal is one of the wittiest and well-written satirical texts ever. In this text, the speaker is arguing that Ireland's impoverished citizens can better themselves financially by selling their young children to the rich for food. The speaker persuades the reader by concretely organizing his argument (ie: firstly, secondly....sixthly), stressing the benefits to all involved (tavern industry, the poor, the rich, the government), and using favorable statistics to back his argument (cost of raising a child vs. selling one as food for profit. For example:

Thirdly, Whereas the maintainance of an hundred thousand children, from two years old, and upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten shillings a piece per annum, the nation's stock will be thereby encreased fifty thousand pounds per annum, besides 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 our selves, the goods being entirely of our own growth and manufacture.
Fourthly, The constant breeders, besides the gain of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year.

Swift's aims are two-fold. First, he wants to mock government officials' and politicians' rhetorical discourse. Swift is suggesting that politicians often lose sight of the actual people involved in the issues they are discussing, so the solutions they put forward are widely impractical (such as his proposal is). Secondly, Swift is able to put forward his own actual argument, but having his speaker seemingly refute it:

Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither cloaths, nor houshold 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: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ even from Laplanders, and the inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our animosities and factions, nor acting any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the very moment their city was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants. Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty, industry, and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure, and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it.

Swift could be very critical and contemptuous of self-proclaimed experts, and this is often reflected in his satire. The Royal Society in London regularly published papers by scientists that put forward grand proposals of which they claimed would solve many of society's ills. The proceedings of the Society are famously satirized by Swift in Gulliver's Travels when professors of the Grand Academy of Lagado carry out pointless experiments, such as attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. And "A Modest Proposal" is written in much the same spirit.

As it is expressly designed to parody the kind of scientific papers published by the Royal Society, the "Proposal" is written in a suitably learned prose. However, as it is also an appeal to the audience's emotions, it presents itself as being an ethical treatise concerned primarily with tackling the twin scourges of poverty and famine. By a constant appeal to the emotions, Swift is cleverly diverting our attention away from the revolting details of the proposal and instead towards its alleged moral benefits –– of those, there are many. A higher value will be placed on children, as they will become precious commodities; there will be fewer Catholics in Ireland, thereby contributing to the stability of the Protestant state; poorer tenants will finally have something of value in the children that they breed, instead of the corn and cattle that is usually seized by their landlords anyway.

Swift's "Modest Proposal" prefigures the work of utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham, who believed that society should pursue the greatest good of the greatest number. In other words, what mattered was not the intrinsic morality of a particular act, but its effects in generating overall happiness. Satire or not, "A Modest Proposal" has more than a touch of the utilitarian about it.

Swift is a master of satire...and ethos. 

He begin by establishing himself as a man who has spent years studying the problem, and offering evidence that he has "maturely weighed" the various schemes of others who have offered solutions, and found them "grossly mistaken in the computation." 

His plan also proposes to "prevent those voluntary abortions" so many of these poor women have, and he points out that we can all agree that murder of one's own child is horrible. Thus, he notes and agrees with the values of his audience, establishing further ethos. Along these lines, he points out that the children of the poor quickly become a scourge on society, being forced to turn to begging and stealing themselves, which is another thing no one wishes. 

At the end of the essay, he points out that he has nothing to gain himself, clarifying that his proposal is for the good of the people of Ireland only: 

I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

This certainly is the big danger of such devastating works of satire. Unfortunately, this pamphlet was taken at face value by many during the time of its publication and Swift was indeed accused of barbarism and savagery beyond the imaginings of most people. For me, teaching this essay each year to my AP English Literature students, I normally get one student who doesn't "get" the satire and returns next class with a horrified expression on their face.

However, I believe that we can argue that Swift's irony is effective because his proposal is so exaggerated that it cannot be taken seriously. We need to remember that the success of this essay lies in the fact that Swift makes himself (overtly at least) appear like a monster to highlight the monstrous attitudes and behaviour of others, who have done nothing to help the situation that had taken the lives of so many. Thus, although there will always be the risk of those who read superficially assuming the worst, to have changed this aspect of the satire would have diluted its impact to such a great extent as to rob it of its effectiveness.

It is hard to know how every individual will respond to "A Modest Proposal," but it seems very unlikely that many people in Swift's day would have taken it seriously. Remember that Swift's essay was aimed at an educated readership, people who would have been well-versed in both the essay format of argumentation and in the use of satire which Swift carried to new extremes with "A Modest Proposal." In fact, some literary critics have argued that, because its proposal was so patently absurd, Swift's essay was actually less sophisticated a satire than some other works, like those of Alexander Pope. But it is worth noting that it was a powerful satire on a number of levels, criticizing the overly scientific "political economy" solutions to social problems offered by many educated men as well as the effects of British colonialism on the Irish poor. What aspects of the essay resonated with people largely depended on the reader. As a side note, from personal observation, I have used this text with many different students, ranging from high school freshmen to college students, and I do not recall that any failed to "catch on" to the joke at some point. 

Your original question had to be edited because you asked two questions. Enotes only allows you to ask one question, so please do not ask multiple questions again.

I think it is quite clear that Swift deliberately sets out to shock and horrify his audience with this excellent example of satire. Obviously the most shocking element of this treatise comes when Swift says:

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 ragout.

Swift makes his so-called "modest proposal" all the more shocking by writing it in a reasonable, calculated tone that seeks to find a practical solution to the Irish famine. Note how he has carefully presented himself as a concerned and practical citizen wanting to do his part to suggest a way of helping the famine victims. His objective and sensitive tone shows that really Swift is protesting against a view of humanity that treats humans as mere numbers. In thinking the unthinkable, Swift tries to show his audience how they have failed to do anything about the tremendous tragedy that is occurring so close to them.