A Modest Proposal
It doesn't take long to summarize the short "pamphlet" that is Swift's Modest Proposal. To remedy the problem of the poverty-stricken, oppressed and uneducated population of Catholics in Ireland, Swift's projector calmly and rationally proposes that thousands of the children should be killed and eaten. This will help both the overpopulated poor, who can't afford to care for their children anyway, and the rich, who will get a good meal out of the whole process. Even in his introduction he explains the reason for his 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."What follows is a very artful attempt to justify such a seemingly outrageous scheme. Yet throughout the discourse, the projector never loses his cool, but proceeds to logically lay out the ground work for such a proposal.The following reasons he uses to advance his plan are summarized below. First, eating the poor children will solve the problem of population among the papists, or the Catholics. Second, it will make the remaining papists richer, since they will have such valuable commodities to sell in exchange for rent credit, etc. Third, it will help the econ
Swift's dehumanizing satire strives to shed light on the horrible situation of English/Irish tensions in Ireland. On a basic level Swift indicts the English Protestants for their cruel and inhumane treatment of the papists, or poor Catholics, through both political and economic oppression. This is seen most clearly when his projector muses that England would be more than willing to eat the Irish even without such a proposal, saying, "...I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it."Yet perhaps even more criticism is heaped on the Irish for not recognizing the horror of their own situation, and not taking constructive steps to remedy the problem. The very fact that such an immodest proposal can be given and received with such seriousness proves that all peoples involved have lost even the thinnest shred of human decency and respect. On a larger lever, Swift successfully indicts the brutality of man as a whole. A Modest Proposal goes well beyond the limits of Europe, shedding a sickening light on allhumanity and the way in which we treat each other. To pick out a single metaphor from Swift's Modest Proposalwould be to undercut his message as a whole. The whole pamphlet, indeed, in its entirety, is one giant, metaphorical irony. The horror
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Approximate Word count = 864
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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