This came out when the people were starving in hundreds through famine, and the dead were left unburied before their own doors. English civilization was shamed by the sight. His sarcasm was never applied with more deadly seriousness of purpose. There is no strain in the language with which the state of matters is described: the very simplicity and matter-of-fact tone that are assumed, make the description all the more telling. With the calm deliberation of a statistician calculating the food supply of the country, Swift brings forward his suggestion. No work of Swift has been more grievously misunderstood. Some have esteemed it a heartless piece of ridicule, a callous laugh raised out of abject misery. The interpretation is as wrong as the Frenchman who took it as a grave and practical suggestion, and who fancied that Swift in sober earnest proposed that infants in Ireland should be used for food. In truth the ridicule is but a thin disguise. From beginning to end, it is laden with grave and torturing bitterness. Each touch, if calm and ghastly human, is added with the gravity of a surgeon who probes a wound to the quick. There is nothing like it in all literature. A MODEST 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 public. 1729._ It is a melancholy object 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. These mothers, instead of being able to work for an honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants; who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for the want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes. I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is, in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public, as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation. But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of infants at a certain age, who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them, as those who demand charity in our streets.