The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII | Page 6

in which he lived, had he
found liberty and justice wanting there. The matter of the copper
coinage patent was but a peg for him to hang arguments which applied
almost everywhere. It was not to the particular arguments but to the
spirit which gave them life that we must look for the true value of
Swift's work. And that spirit--honest, brave, strong for the right--is
even more abundantly displayed in the writings we have just
considered. They witness to his championship of liberty and justice, to
his impeachment of selfish office-holders and a short-sighted policy.
They gave him his position as the chief among the citizens of Dublin to
whom he spoke as counsel and adviser. They proclaim him as the
friend of the common people, to whom he was more than the Dean of
St. Patrick's. He may have begun his work impelled by a hatred for
Whiggish principles; but he undoubtedly accomplished it in the spirit of
a broad-minded and far-seeing statesman. The pressing needs of Ireland
were too urgent and crying for him to permit his personal dislike of the
Irish natives to divert him from his humanitarian efforts. If he hated the
beggar he was ready with his charity. The times in which he lived were
not times in which, as he told the freemen of Dublin, "to expect such an
exalted degree of virtue from mortal men." He was speaking to them of
the impossibility of office-holders being independent of the
government under which they held their offices. "Blazing stars," he
said, "are much more frequently seen than such heroical virtues." As
the Irish people were governed by such men he advised them strongly
to choose a parliamentary representative from among themselves. He

insisted on the value of their collected voice, their unanimity of effort, a
consciousness of their understanding of what they wished to bring
about. "Be independent" is the text of all his writings to the people of
Ireland. It is idle to appeal to England's clemency or England's justice.
It is vain to evolve social schemes and Utopian dreams. The remedy lay
in their own hands, if the people only realized it.
"Violent zeal for truth," Swift noted in one of his "Thoughts on
Religion," "has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition,
or pride." Examining Swift's writings on behalf of Ireland by the
criterion provided in this statement, we must acquit him entirely of
misusing any of these qualities. If he were bitter or scornful, he was
certainly not petulant. No one has written with more justice or coolness;
the temper is hot but it is the heat of a conscious and collected
indignation. If he wrote or spoke in a manner somewhat overbearing, it
was not because of ambition, since he was now long past his youth and
his mind had become settled in a fairly complacent acceptance of his
position. If he had pride, and he undoubtedly had, it was nowhere
obtruded for personal aggrandizement, but rather by way of
emphasizing the dignity of citizenship, and the value of self-respect.
Assuredly, in these Irish tracts, Swift was no violent zealot for truth.
Indeed, it is a high compliment to pay him, to say that we wonder he
restrained himself as he did.
Swift, however, had his weakness also, and it lay, as weaknesses
generally lie, very close to his strength. Swift's fault as a thinker was
the outcome of his intellectuality--he was too purely intellectual. He set
little store on the emotional side of human nature; his appeal was
always to the reason. He hated cant, and any expression of emotion
appealed to him as cant. He could not bear to be seen saying his prayers;
his acts of charity were surreptitious and given in secret with an
affectation of cynicism, so that they might veil the motive which
impelled them. It may have been pride or a dislike to be considered
sentimental; but his attitude owed its spring to a genuine faith in his
own thought. If Swift had one pride more than another, it lay in a
consciousness of his own superiority over his fellow-mortals. It was the
pride of intellect and a belief that man showed himself best by

following the judgements of the reason. His disgust with people was
born of their unreasonable selfishness, their instinctive greed and
rapacity, their blind stupidity, all which resulted for them in so much
injustice. Had they been reasonable, he would have argued, they would
have been better and happier. The sentiments and the passions were
impulsive, and therefore unreasonable. Swift seemed to have no faith in
their elevation to a higher intellectual plane, and yet he often roused
them by his very appeals to reason. His eminently successful "Drapier's
Letters" are a case in point. Yet