When Swift's friends were out of power, Oxford no longer at Court and Bolingbroke in exile, he returned to Ireland, and after visiting several parts of the country, and making himself acquainted with the exact condition of the people, he took up the cause of Ireland with a vigour rarely exhibited by any patriot. The last twenty-five years of his sane life were given to his country, during which time he devoted almost all his energy to Irish concerns. His stern sense of justice prompted him to lay bare the wrongs of his native land with the cool calculation of a banker examining accounts, or that of a surgeon cutting open a tumour. His letters, pamphlets, and sermons are full of allusions to the miseries and disabilities of the Irish. In writing to Pope, he disclaims the title of Patriot, and gives us exactly his motive. "What I do," he says, "is owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live." It is said that he was a disappointed, mortified man. I allow he was. Swift was ill-used as well as his country. Was he therefore not to resent the injuries offered her because wrongs were heaped on himself, or, after remaining quiet under the disappointments of years, are we to suppose that at the end of that period his own private grievances ceased to be intolerable, and that the public provocations which became urgent had no effect upon him? About 1720, a narrow, exclusive clique governed Ireland in avowed contempt of all phases of Irish opinion. The need of reform had occupied the attention only of an insignificant handful. None had yet succeeded in rousing a national spirit to resist the people's wrongs, an over-insistence of which wrongs was looked upon as veiled Jacobitism. No doubt Swift's first motive was opposition to Walpole and his party. He looked back with bitterness to the fall of his friends. He disliked the cant of the Whigs and their travesty of liberty; from that moment his real interest in Ireland began. Swift scorned Jacobitism, and had a righteous contempt for "divine right and absolute prerogative." He justified the Revolution; was opposed to a Popish successor; had a mortal antipathy to a standing army in time of peace; desired that parliaments should be annual; disliked the monied interest in opposition to the territorial; feared the growth of the national debt; and dreaded further encroachments on the liberty of the subject. He believed the Whig government of Ireland to be founded on corruption. All these opinions went to swell the current of his indignation against Irish wrongs, and it was in consequence of them that he lashed the government with his scorpion pen.