Quitting their habitations to beg was a regular thing at a later time of the year. It was in the course of these bad years, in 1729, that Swift wrote his ‘Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country.’ The scheme to use the tender babes as delicate morsels of food for the rich, was a somewhat extreme flight of irony, not so finished as in Swift’s other satires, but the circumstances out of which the proposal grew were more real than usual. “It is a melancholy object,” says the Dean of St Patrick’s, “to those who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.” Having ventilated his project for the children, he proceeds to show that “their elders are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected.” All the while there was a considerable export of corn from Ireland. In the beginning of 1730, two ships laden with barley were stopped at Drogheda by a fierce mob and were compelled to unload[438]. The interval between those years of epidemic typhus in Ireland and the next, 1740-41, was filled, we may be sure, with at least an average amount of the endemial fever. Rutty specially mentions it in Dublin in the autumn and winter of 1734-35: “We had the low fever, called nervous (and sometimes petechial from the spots that frequently attended, although probably not essential).” He then adds: “It is no new thing with us for this low kind of fever to prevail in the winter season;” and gives figures from the Dublin Bills of Mortality for forty years. He mentions the petechial fever as being frequent next in January and February, 1736, corresponding to a bad time of it in Huxham’s Plymouth annals. In 1738 and 1739 the type of the Dublin fever was relapsing, in part at least, the same type having been seen at Edinburgh shortly before. * * * * * The economics of Ireland, at this time, gave occasion to Berkeley’s _Querist_, a series of weekly essays written in 1737 and 1738, and collected in 1740, on the eve of the next great famine and mortality[439]. A few of the bishop’s sarcasms, in the form of queries, will serve to show how anomalous was the economic condition of the country, and how easily a crisis of famine and pestilence could arise. “169. Whether it is possible the country should be well improved while our beef is exported, and our labourers live upon potatoes? “173. Whether the quantities of beef, butter, wool and leather, exported from this island, can be reckoned the superfluities of a country, where there are so many natives naked and famished?