The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Vol. VI | Page 2

governments must inevitably end, in impoverishing the people, in
wholesale emigration, in starvation and even death, in revolt, and in
fostering among those who remained, and among those whom
circumstances exiled, the dangerous spirit of resentment and rebellion
which is the outcome of the sense of injustice. It has also served, even
to this day, to give vitality to those associations that have from time to
time arisen in Ireland for the object of realizing that country's
self-government.
It may be argued that the people of Ireland of that time justified Swift's
petition when he prayed to be removed from "this land of slaves, where
all are fools and all are knaves"; but that is no justification for the
injustice. The injustice from which Ireland suffered was a fact. Its
existence was resented with all the indignation with which an
emotional and spiritual people will always resent material obstructions
to the free play of what they feel to be their best powers.
There were no leaders at the time who could see this, and seeing it,
enforce its truth on the dull English mind to move it to saner methods
of dealing with this people. Nor were there any who could order the
resentment into battalions of fighting men to give point to the demands
for equal rights with their English fellow-subjects.
Had Swift been an Irishman by nature as he was by birth, it might have
been otherwise; but Swift was an Irishman by accident, and only
became an Irish patriot by reason of the humanity in him which found

indignant and permanent expression against oppression. Swift's
indignation against the selfish hypocrisy of his fellow-men was the cry
from the pain which the sight of man's inhumanity to man inflicted on
his sensitive and truth-loving nature. The folly and baseness of his
fellow-creatures stung him, as he once wrote to Pope, "to perfect rage
and resentment." Turn where he would, he found either the knave as the
slave driver, or the slave as a fool, and the latter became even a willing
sacrifice. His indignation at the one was hardly greater than his
contempt for the other, and his different feelings found trenchant
expression in such writings as the "Drapier's Letters," the "Modest
Proposal," and "Gulliver's Travels."
It has been argued that the saeva indignatio which lacerated his heart
was the passion of a mad man. To argue thus seems to us to
misunderstand entirely the peculiar qualities of Swift's nature. It was
not the mad man that made the passion; it was rather the passion that
made the man mad. As we understand him, it seems to us that Swift's
was an eminently majestic spirit, moved by the tenderest of human
sympathies, and capable of ennobling love--a creature born to rule and
to command, but with all the noble qualities which go to make a ruler
loved. It happened that circumstances placed him early in his career
into poverty and servitude. He extricated himself from both in time; but
his liberation was due to an assertion of his best powers, and not to a
dissimulation of them. Had he been less honest, he might have risen to
a position of great power, but it would have been at the price of those
very qualities which made him the great man he was. That assertion
cost him his natural vocation, and Swift lived on to rage in the narrow
confines of a Dublin Deanery House. He might have flourished as the
greatest of English statesmen--he became instead a monster, a
master-scourger of men, pitiless to them as they had been blind to him.
But monster and master-scourger as he proved himself, he always took
the side of the oppressed as against the oppressor. The impulse which
sent him abroad collecting guineas for "poor Harrison" was the same
impulse which moved him in his study at the Deanery to write as "M.B.
Drapier." On this latter occasion, however, he also had an opportunity
to lay bare the secret springs of oppression, an opportunity which he
was not the man to let go by.
No doubt Swift was not quite disinterested in the motives which

prompted him to enter the political arena for the second time. He hated
the Walpole Ministry in power; he resented his exile in a country
whose people he despised; and he scorned the men who, while they
feared him, had yet had the power to prevent his advancement. But,
allowing for these personal incentives, there was in Swift such a large
sympathy for the degraded condition of the Irish people, such a tender
solicitude for their best welfare, and such a deep-seated zeal for their
betterment, that, in measuring to him his share in the title of patriot, we
cannot but admit that what we may call his