much more than Wood could do with his halfpence and farthings. The artistic skill which bade the creatures whom Gulliver saw in his travels seem real, life-like, and living, made the fantastic extravagance of the "Drapier's Letters" strike home with all the force of truth to the minds of an excited populace. Many biographers and historians have expressed a blank and utter amazement at the effect which Swift's letters produced. They have chosen to regard it as a mere historical curiosity, a sort of political paradox and puzzle. They have described the Irish people at the time as under the spell of something like sorcery. Even in our own days, Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons, treated the convulsion caused by Swift's letters and Wood's halfpence as an outbreak of national frenzy, called up by the witchery of style displayed in the "Drapier's Letters." To some of us it is, on the other hand, a matter of surprise to see how capable writers, and especially how a man of Mr. Gladstone's genius and political knowledge, could for a moment be thus deceived. {246} One is almost inclined to think that Mr. Gladstone could not have been reading the "Drapier's Letters" recently, when he thus spoke of the effect which they produced, and thus was willing to explain it. [Sidenote: 1724--The drapier's victory] Any one who reads the letters with impartial attention will see that from first to last the anger that burns in them, the sarcasm that withers and scorches, the passionate eloquence which glows in even their most carefully measured sentences, are directed against Wood and his halfpence only because the patent, the bribe by which it was purchased, and the manner in which it was forced on Ireland, represented the injustice of the whole system of Irish administration, and the wrongs of many generations. "It would be very hard if all Ireland," Swift declares with indignation, "should be put into one scale, and this sorry fellow Wood into the other." "I have a pretty good shop of Irish stuffs and silks," the Drapier declares, "and instead of taking Mr. Wood's bad copper, I intend to truck with my neighbors, the butchers and bakers and brewers, and the rest, goods for goods; and the little gold and silver I have, I will keep by me like my heart's blood till better times, or until I am just ready to starve." "Wood's contract?" he asks. "His contract with whom? Was it with the Parliament or people of Ireland?" The reader who believes that such a passage as that, and scores of similar passages, were inspired merely by disapproval of the introduction of one hundred and eight thousand pounds in copper coin, must have very little understanding of Swift's temper or Swift's purpose, or the condition of the times in which Swift lived. "I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or house-breakers, if they dare to force one farthing of their coin on me in the payment of a hundred pounds.