lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of
being devoured alive by a rat?" It drove him also to the great
principle, still too slowly struggling into recognition in this country,
that "all government without the consent of the governed is the very
definition of slavery." It inspired his _Proposal for the Universal Use
of Irish Manufactures_, in which the advice to "burn everything that
came from England except the coals and the people," might serve as the
motto of the Sinn Fein movement. And it inspired also that other "Modest
Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from being a burden to
their Parents and Country, and making them beneficial to the Public.
Fatten them up for the Dublin market; they will be delicious roast,
baked, or boiled."

As wave after wave of indignation passed over him, his wrath at
oppression extended to all mankind. In _Gulliver's Travels_ it is the
human race that lies before him, how much altered for the worse by being
flayed! But it is not pity he feels for the victim now. In man he only
sees the littleness, the grossness, the stupidity, or the brutal
degradation of Yahoos. Unlike other satirists--unlike Juvenal or Pope or
the author of _Penguin Island_, who comes nearest to his manner--he
pours his contempt, not upon certain types of folly or examples of vice,
but upon the race of man as a whole. "I heartily hate," he wrote to
Pope soon after _Gulliver_ was published, "I heartily hate and detest
that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas,
and so forth." The philanthropist will often idealise man in the
abstract and hate his neighbour at the back door, but that was not
Swift's way. He has been called an inverted hypocrite, as one who makes
himself out worse than he is. I should rather call him an inverted
idealist, for, with high hopes and generous expectations, he entered
into the world, and lacerated by rage at the cruelty, foulness, and