comfortless house and for the cost of his own installation into his
office. The money he was to have received (£1,000) to defray these
expenses, from the last administration, was now, on its fall, kept back
from him. Swift had these encumbrances to pay off and he had his Chapter
to see to. He did both in characteristic fashion. By dint of almost
penurious saving he accomplished the former and the latter he managed
autocratically and with good sense. His connection with Oxford and
Bolingbroke had been of too intimate a nature for those in power to
ignore him. Indeed, his own letters to Knightley Chetwode[1] show us
that he was in great fear of arrest. But there is now no doubt that the
treasonable relations between Harley and St. John and the Pretender were
a great surprise to Swift when they were discovered. He himself had
always been an ardent supporter of the Protestant succession, and his
writings during his later period in Ireland constantly emphasize this
attitude of his--almost too much so.

The condition of Ireland as Swift found it in 1714, and as he had known
of it even before that time, was of a kind to rouse a temper like his to
quick and indignant expression. Even as early as the spring of 1716 we
find him unable to restrain himself, and in his letter to Atterbury of
April 18th we catch the spirit which, four years later, showed itself in
"The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures" and the
"Drapier's Letters," and culminated in 1729 in the terrible "Modest
Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen
to their Parents." To Atterbury he wrote:

"I congratulate with England for joining with us here in the fellowship
of slavery. It is not so terrible a thing as you imagine: we have long
lived under it: and whenever you are disposed to know how to behave
yourself in your new condition, you need go no further than me for a