Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a territory of land that would render our dominions round and complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living. There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for "places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a twentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word. As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from London. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the causes of a nation's thriving-- ... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments. He said of the Irish: