But to say this of Swift is not to say that he was a journalist. The journalist is the man of the hour writing for the hour in harmony with popular opinion. Both his text and his heads are ready-made for him. He follows the beaten road, and only essays new paths when conditions have become such as to force him along them. Such a man Swift certainly was not. Journalism was not his way to the goal. If anything, it was, as Epictetus might have said, but a tavern by the way-side in which he took occasion to find the means by which the better to attain his goal. If Swift's contributions to the literature of his day be journalism, then did journalism spring full-grown into being, and its history since his time must be considered as a history of its degeneration. But they were much more than journalism. That they took the form they did, in contributions to the periodicals of his day, is but an accident which does not in the least affect the contributions themselves. These, in reality, constitute a criticism of the social and political life of the first thirty years of the English eighteenth century. From the time of the writing of "A Tale of a Tub" to the days of the Drapier's Letters, Swift dissected his countrymen with the pitiless hand of the master-surgeon. So profound was his knowledge of human anatomy, individual and social, that we shudder now at the pain he must have inflicted in his unsparing operations. So accurate was his judgment that we stand amazed at his knowledge, and our amazement often turns to a species of horror as we see the cuticle flapped open revealing the crude arrangement beneath. Nor is it to argue too nicely, to suggest that our present sympathy for the past pain, our amazement, and our horror, are, after all, our own unconscious tributes to the power of the man who calls them up, and our confession of the lasting validity of his criticism.