Chapter 1

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BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY

* * * * *

THE PROSE WORKS OF JONATHAN SWIFT

VOL. VII

LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS PORTUGAL ST. LINCOLN'S INN, W. C. CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY: A. H. WHEELER & CO.

_In 12 volumes, 5s. each._

~THE PROSE WORKS~

OF

~JONATHAN SWIFT, D. D.~

EDITED BY

~TEMPLE SCOTT~

VOL. I. A TALE OF A TUB AND OTHER EARLY WORKS. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With a biographical introduction by W. E. H. LECKY, M. P. With Portrait and Facsimiles.

VOL. II. THE JOURNAL TO STELLA. Edited by FREDERICK RYLAND, M. A. With two Portraits of Stella and a Facsimile of one of the Letters.

VOLS. III. & IV. WRITINGS ON RELIGION AND THE CHURCH. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portraits and Facsimiles of Title-pages.

VOL. V. HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL TRACTS--ENGLISH. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait and Facsimiles of Title-pages.

VOL. VI. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait, Reproductions of Wood's Coinage, and Facsimiles of Title-pages.

VOL. VII. HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL TRACTS--IRISH. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait and Facsimiles of Title-pages.

VOL. VIII. GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. Edited by G. RAVENSCROFT DENNIS. With Portrait, Maps and Facsimiles.

VOL. IX. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE "EXAMINER," "TATLER," "SPECTATOR," &c. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait.

VOL. X. HISTORICAL WRITINGS. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait.

VOL. XI. LITERARY ESSAYS. Edited by TEMPLE SCOTT. With Portrait. [_In the press._

VOL. XII. FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX TO COMPLETE WORKS. Together with an Essay on the Portraits of Swift, by the HON. SIR FREDERICK FALKINER, K. C. With two Portraits. [_In the press._

SOME PRESS OPINIONS

"An adequate edition of Swift--the whole of Swift, and nothing but Swift--has long been one of the pressing needs of students of English literature. Mr. Temple Scott, who is preparing the new edition of Swift's Prose Works, has begun well, his first volume is marked by care and knowledge. He has scrupulously collated his texts with the first or the best early editions, and has given various readings in the footnotes.... Mr. Temple Scott may well be congratulated on his skill and judgment as a commentator.... He has undoubtedly earned the gratitude of all admirers of our greatest satirist, and all students of vigorous, masculine, and exact English."--_Athenæum._

"The volume is an agreeable one to hold and to refer to, and the notes and apparatus are, on the whole, exact. A cheap and handy reprint, which we can conscientiously recommend."--_Saturday Review._

"From the specimen now before us we may safely predict that Mr. Temple Scott will easily distance both Roscoe and Scott. He deserves the gratitude of all lovers of literature for enabling Swift again to make his bow to the world in so satisfactory and complete a garb."--_Manchester Guardian._

"Mr. Temple Scott's introductions and notes are excellent in all respects, and this edition of Swift is likely to be one most acceptable to scholars."--_Notes and Queries._

"The new Bohn's Library edition of the prose works of Jonathan Swift is a venture which proves itself the more welcome as each instalment is issued.... This edition is likely long to remain the standard edition."--_Literary World._

"'Bohn's Libraries' need no push, and the magnificent edition of 'The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift,' edited by Mr. Temple Scott, is in every respect worthy of that great collection of classics. It is an ideal edition, edited by an ideal editor, beautifully printed, handsomely bound, and ridiculously cheap. I have no hesitation in saying that this edition supersedes all its forerunners."--_Star._

"We have nothing but praise for the editing, annotating, printing, and general production. Indeed, now that the set has advanced so far, we can safely pronounce the opinion that all other editions of Swift must give place to it, and that no serious student of the politics of the eighteenth century can afford to be without these volumes.... A superb edition."--_Irish Times._

"Edited with exhaustive care, and produced in excellent style. This is not only the best, it is the _only_ edition of Swift."--_Pall Mall Gazette._

"There could hardly be a more acceptable addition to Bohn's Standard Library than a new edition of Swift's Prose Works. The text is well printed, and the volume is of convenient size. The edition deserves to be popular, since Swift is a writer who will always be read, while this edition will bring him within reach of a number of new readers."--_Scotsman._

"The time is now ripe for a definite edition. This, of which the first volume lies before us, promises to fulfil all the conditions of a scholarly and satisfying work.... The edition is a genuine gain to English literature."--_Birmingham Post._

"The publishers of Bohn's Libraries will earn the thanks of a wide circle of readers by their undertaking to produce a popular and collected edition of the prose works of Swift.... So far as one may judge from a first instalment, the present edition seems to fulfil the requirements of popularity and accuracy as well as could be desired.... The edition promises to be one of the most valuable and welcome items in those classic 'Libraries' which have done so much to bring good literature, in worthy form, within the reach of the British public."--_Glasgow Herald._

"We are indebted to the proprietors of the Bohn Libraries for various literary enterprises, but it is questionable indeed if they have issued lately a work more acceptable, or likely to become more popular, than 'The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift.' No better edition of it could be desired. Mr. Temple Scott is editing the volumes with the greatest care."--_Belfast News Letter._

"No more welcome reprint has appeared for some time past than the new edition, complete and exact so far as it was possible to make it, of Swift's 'Journal to Stella.'"--_Morning Post._

"By far the most satisfactory text yet printed of the wonderful 'Journal to Stella.'"--_Newcastle Daily Chronicle._

"The 'Journal to Stella' has long stood in need of editing, far more than any other of Swift's works. It abounds in references to persons great and small, to political and social 'occurrents,' to ephemeral publications; and to identify and explain all these demands an editor steeped in the history, literature, broadsides and press news of the time of the Harley administration. Mr. Ryland's present edition will satisfy all but the few who dream of an ideal."--_Athenæum._

"The immortal 'Journal to Stella,' one of the works most indispensable to a knowledge of the life and literature of the early part of the eighteenth century. We know of no shape in which the Journal is published so convenient for perusal as this. The notes are short and serviceable, and there is a full index."--_Notes and Queries._

"At last we have a well-printed, carefully edited text of Swift's famous Journal in a single, handy, and cheap volume. The present edition will, we hope, encourage many timid souls, who have been awed by the formidable array of Scott, Sheridan, or Hawkesworth's editions, to make the acquaintance of the most interesting, charming, and tender journal that ever man kept for a woman's eye."--_St. James's Gazette._

"Mr. Dennis is quite justified in his boast of now first giving us a complete and trustworthy text [of 'Gulliver's Travels']."--_Manchester Guardian._

"The number of useless reprints of Gulliver, based on Hawkesworth's untrustworthy edition, and mostly expurgated besides, is so great that we owe double thanks to Mr. Dennis, since he has not shirked the trouble of collating the five earliest editions, and has given us again at last--as far as is possible in the present case--the complete and authentic text of the original."--PROF. MAX FÖRSTER in _Anglia_.

"An ideal text of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"--_Literary World._

"The best and most scholarly edition of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"--_University Correspondent._

* * * * *

THE PROSE WORKS

OF

JONATHAN SWIFT, D. D.

EDITED BY

TEMPLE SCOTT.

VOL. VII

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL TRACTS--IRISH

LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1905 CHISWICK PRESS. CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

INTRODUCTION

Swift took up his permanent residence in the Irish capital in 1714. The Harley Administration had fallen never to rise again. Harley himself was a prisoner in the Tower, and Bolingbroke a voluntary exile in France, and an open adherent of the Pretender. Swift came to Dublin to be met by the jeers of the populace, the suspicion of the government officials, and the polite indifference of his clerical colleagues. He had time enough now in which to reflect and employ his brain powers. For several years he kept himself altogether to his duties as Dean of the Cathedral of St. Patrick's, only venturing his pen in letters to dear friends in England--to Pope, Atterbury, Lady Howard. His private relations with Miss Hester Vanhomrigh came to a climax, also, during this period, and his peculiar intimacy with "Stella" Johnson took the definite shape in which we now know it.

He found himself in debt to his predecessor, Sterne, for a large and comfortless house and for the cost of his own installation into his office. The money he was to have received (£1,000) to defray these expenses, from the last administration, was now, on its fall, kept back from him. Swift had these encumbrances to pay off and he had his Chapter to see to. He did both in characteristic fashion. By dint of almost penurious saving he accomplished the former and the latter he managed autocratically and with good sense. His connection with Oxford and Bolingbroke had been of too intimate a nature for those in power to ignore him. Indeed, his own letters to Knightley Chetwode[1] show us that he was in great fear of arrest. But there is now no doubt that the treasonable relations between Harley and St. John and the Pretender were a great surprise to Swift when they were discovered. He himself had always been an ardent supporter of the Protestant succession, and his writings during his later period in Ireland constantly emphasize this attitude of his--almost too much so.

The condition of Ireland as Swift found it in 1714, and as he had known of it even before that time, was of a kind to rouse a temper like his to quick and indignant expression. Even as early as the spring of 1716 we find him unable to restrain himself, and in his letter to Atterbury of April 18th we catch the spirit which, four years later, showed itself in "The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures" and the "Drapier's Letters," and culminated in 1729 in the terrible "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents." To Atterbury he wrote:

"I congratulate with England for joining with us here in the fellowship of slavery. It is not so terrible a thing as you imagine: we have long lived under it: and whenever you are disposed to know how to behave yourself in your new condition, you need go no further than me for a director. But, because we are resolved to go beyond you, we have transmitted a bill to England, to be returned here, giving the Government and six of the Council power for three years to imprison whom they please for three months, without any trial or examination: and I expect to be among the first of those upon whom this law will be executed."

Writing to Archdeacon Walls[2] (May 5th, 1715) of the people in power, he said:

"They shall be deceived as far as my power reaches, and shall not find me altogether so great a cully as they would willingly make me."

At that time England was beginning to initiate a new method for what it called the proper government of Ireland. Hitherto it had tried the plan of setting one party in the country against another; but now a new party was called into being, known as the "English party." This party had nothing to do with the Irish national spirit, and any man, no matter how capable, who held by such a national spirit, was to be set aside. There was to be no Irish party or parties as such--there was to be only the English party governing Ireland in the interests of England. It was the beginning of a government which led to the appointment of such a man as Primate Boulter, who simply ruled Ireland behind the Lord Lieutenant (who was but a figurehead) for and on behalf of the King of England's advisers. Irish institutions, Irish ideas, Irish traditions, the Irish Church, Irish schools, Irish language and literature, Irish trade, manufactures, commerce, agriculture--all were to be subordinated to England's needs and England's demands. At any cost almost, these were to be made subservient to the interests of England. So well was this plan carried out, that Ireland found itself being governed by a small English clique and its Houses of Parliament a mere tool in the clique's hands. The Parliament no longer represented the national will, since it did really nothing but ratify what the English party asked for, or what the King's ministers in England instructed should be made law.

Irish manufactures were ruined by legislation; the commerce of Ireland was destroyed by the same means; her schools became practically penitentiaries to the Catholic children, who were compelled to receive a Protestant instruction; her agriculture was degraded to the degree that cattle could not be exported nor the wool sold or shipped from her own ports to other countries; her towns swarmed with beggars and thieves, forced there by the desolation which prevailed in the country districts, where people starved by the wayside, and where those who lived barely kept body and soul together to pay the rents of the absentee landlords.

Swift has himself, in the pamphlets printed in the present volume, given a fairly accurate and no exaggerated account of the miserable condition of his country at this time; and his writings are amply corroborated by other men who might be considered less passionate and more temperate.

The people had become degraded through the evil influence of a contemptuous and spendthrift landlord class, who considered the tenant in no other light than as a rent-paying creature. As Roman Catholics they found themselves the social inferiors of the ruling Protestant class--the laws had placed them in that invidious position. They were practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the autumn what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's support. Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless creatures, who herded together like wild beasts and became dangerous pests.

Swift knew all this. He had time, between the years 1714 and 1720, to find it out, even if he had not known of it before. But the condition was getting worse, and his heart filled, as he told Pope in 1728, with a "perfect rage and resentment" at "the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live."

He commenced what might be called a campaign of attack in 1720, with the publication of his tract entitled, "A Modest Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures." As has been pointed out in the notes prefixed to the pamphlets in the present volume, England had, apparently, gone to work systematically to ruin Irish manufactures. They seemed to threaten ruin to English industries; at least so the people in England thought. The pernicious legislation began in the reign of Charles II. and continued in that of William III. The Irish manufacturer was not permitted to export his products and found a precarious livelihood in a contraband trade. Swift's "Proposal" is one of retaliation. Since England will not allow Ireland to send out her goods, let the people of Ireland use them, and let them join together and determine to use nothing from England. Everything that came from England should be burned, except the people and the coal. If England had the right to prevent the exportation of the goods made in Ireland, she had not the right to prevent the people of Ireland from choosing what they should wear. The temper of the pamphlet was mild in the extreme; but the governing officials saw in it dangerous symptoms. The pamphlet was stigmatized as libellous and seditious, and the writer as attempting to disunite the two nations. The printer was brought to trial, and the pamphlet obtained a tremendous circulation. Although the jury acquitted the printer, Chief Justice Whitshed, who had, as Swift puts it, "so quick an understanding, that he resolved, if possible, to outdo his orders," sent the jury back nine times to reconsider their verdict. He even declared solemnly that the author's design was to bring in the Pretender. This cry of bringing in the Pretender was raised on any and every occasion, and has been well ridiculed by Swift in his "Examination of Certain Abuses and Corruptions in the City of Dublin." The end of Whitshed's persecution could have been foretold--it fizzled out in a _nolle prosequi_.

Following on this interesting commencement came the lengthened agitation against Wood's Halfpence to which we owe the remarkable series of writings known now as the "Drapier's Letters." These are fully discussed in the volume preceding this. But Swift found other channels in which to continue rousing the spirit of the people, and refreshing it to further effort. The mania for speculation which Law's schemes had given birth to, reached poor Ireland also. People thought there might be found a scheme on similar lines by which Ireland might move to prosperity. A Bank project was initiated for the purpose of assisting small tradesmen. But a scheme that in itself would have been excellent in a prosperous society, could only end in failure in such a community as peopled Ireland. Swift felt this and opposed the plan in his satirical tract, "The Swearer's Bank." The tract sufficed, for no more was heard of the National Bank after the House of Commons rejected it.

The thieves and "roughs" who infested Dublin came in next for Swift's attention. In characteristic fashion he seized the occasion of the arrest and execution of one of their leaders to publish a pretended "Last Speech and Dying Confession," in which he threatened exposure and arrest to the remainder of the gang if they did not make themselves scarce. The threat had its effect, and the city found itself considerably safer as a consequence.

How Swift pounded out his "rage and resentment" against English misgovernment, may be further read in the "Story of the Injured Lady," and in the "Answer" to that story. The Injured Lady is Ireland, who tells her lover, England, of her attractions, and upbraids him on his conduct towards her. In the "Answer" Swift tells the Lady what she ought to do, and hardly minces matters. Let her show the right spirit, he says to her, and she will find there are many gentlemen who will support her and champion her cause.

Then came the plain, pathetic, and truthful recital of the "Short View of the State of Ireland"--a pamphlet of but a few pages and yet terribly effective. As an historical document it takes rank with the experiences of the clergymen, Skelton and Jackson, as well as the more dispassionate writings of contemporary historians. It is frequently cited by Lecky in his "History of Ireland."

What Swift had so far left undone, either from political reasons or from motives of personal restraint, he completed in what may, without exaggeration, be called his satirical masterpiece--the "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents." Nothing comparable to this piece of writing is to be found in any literature; while the mere fact that it came into being must stand as one of the deadliest indictments against England's misrule. Governments and rulers have been satirized time and again, but no similar condition of things has existed with a Swift living at the time, to observe and comment on them. The tract itself must be read with a knowledge of the Irish conditions then prevailing; its temper is so calm and restrained that a reader unacquainted with the conditions might be misled and think that the author of "Gulliver's Travels" was indulging himself in one of his grim jokes. That it was not a joke its readers at the time well knew, and many of them also knew how great was the indignation which raged in Swift's heart to stir him to so unprecedented an expression of contempt. He had, as he himself said, raged and stormed only to find himself stupefied. In the "Modest Proposal" he changed his tune and

... with raillery to nettle, Set your thoughts upon their mettle.

Swift has been censured for the cold-blooded cynicism of this piece of writing, but these censurers have entirely misunderstood both his motive and his meaning. We wonder how any one could take seriously a proposal for breeding children for food purposes, and our wonder grows in reflecting on an inability to see through the thin veil of satire which barely hid an impeachment of a ruling nation by the mere statement of the proposal itself. That a Frenchman should so misunderstand it (as a Frenchman did) may not surprise us, but that any Englishman should so take it argues an utter absence of humour and a total ignorance of Irish conditions at the time the tract was written. But history has justified Swift, and it is to his writings, rather than to the many works written by more commonplace observers, that we now turn for the true story of Ireland's wrongs, and the real sources of her continued attitude of hostility towards England's government of her.

It has been well noted by one of Swift's biographers, that for a thousand readers which the "Modest Proposal" has found, there is perhaps only one who is acquainted with Swift's "Answer to the Craftsman." It may be that the title is misleading or uninviting; but there is no question that this tract may well stand by the side of the "Modest Proposal," both for force of argument and pungency of satire. In its way and within the limits of its more restricted argument it is one of the ablest pieces of writing Swift has given us on behalf of Irish liberty.