British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, protectorates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It originated with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the world population at the time, by 1920, it covered 35,500,000 km2, 24% of the Earth's total land area; as a result, its political, legal and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" was used to describe the British Empire, because its expanse around the globe meant that the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, in the process established large overseas empires.
Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England and following union between England and Scotland in 1707, Great Britain, the dominant colonial power in North America, it became the dominant power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The independence of the Thirteen Colonies in North America in 1783 after the American War of Independence caused Britain to lose some of its oldest and most populous colonies. British attention soon turned towards Asia and the Pacific. After the defeat of France in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain emerged as the principal naval and imperial power of the 19th century. Unchallenged at sea, British dominance was described as Pax Britannica, a period of relative peace in Europe and the world during which the British Empire became the global hegemon and adopted the role of global policeman.
In the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to transform Britain. The British Empire expanded to include most of India, large parts of Africa and many other territories throughout the world. Alongside the formal control that Britain exerted over its own colonies, its dominance of much of world trade meant that it controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. During the 19th century, Britain's population increased at a dramatic rate, accompanied by rapid urbanisation, which caused significant social and economic stresses. To seek new markets and sources of raw materials, the British government under Benjamin Disraeli initiated a period of imperial expansion in Egypt, South Africa, elsewhere. Canada and New Zealand became self-governing dominions. By the start of the 20th century and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Subsequent military and economic tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied upon its empire.
The conflict placed enormous strain on the military and manpower resources of Britain. Although the British Empire achieved its largest territorial extent after World War I, Britain was no longer the world's pre-eminent industrial or military power. In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East and Southeast Asia were occupied by Japan. Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige helped to accelerate the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence as part of a larger decolonisation movement in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire; the Suez Crisis confirmed Britain's decline as a global power. The transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997 marked for many the end of the British Empire. Fourteen overseas territories remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states.
The United Kingdom is now one of 16 Commonwealth nations, a grouping known informally as the Commonwealth realms, that share a monarch Queen Elizabeth II. The foundations of the British Empire were laid when Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead a voyage to discover a route to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after the European discovery of America, but he made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland, mistakenly believing that he had reached Asia, there was no attempt to found a colony. Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but nothing was heard of his ships again. No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. In the meantime, the 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals had declared "that this realm of England is an Empire".
The subsequent Protestant Reformation turned Catholic Spain into implacable enemies. In 1562, the English Crown encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa with the aim of breaking into the Atlantic slave tr
Sawrey Gilpin
Sawrey Gilpin was an English animal painter and etcher who specialised in paintings of horses and dogs. He was made a Royal Academician. Gilpin was born in Carlisle in Cumbria, the seventh child of Captain John Bernard Gilpin, a soldier and amateur artist, Matilda Langstaffe, he was the younger brother of the Rev. William Gilpin, a clergyman and schoolmaster who wrote of several influential works on picturesque scenery; as a child Gilpin learnt to draw from his father. Having shown an early predilection for art, he was sent to London at the age of fourteen to study under the marine painter Samuel Scott in Covent Garden. Gilpin, preferred sketching the passing market carts and horses, it soon became evident that animals horses, were his speciality. Gilpin left Scott in 1758, devoted himself to animal painting from on; some of his sketches were shown to the Duke of Cumberland, much impressed by them, employed Gilpin to draw from his stud at Newmarket and at Windsor, where he was ranger of the Great Park.
He afforded the artist considerable material assistance in his profession. Gilpin lived at Knightsbridge in London for some years, he became one of the best painters of horses that the country had produced, was as successful in other areas of animal art. He sometimes attempted historical pictures on a larger scale in which horses were prominent, but with rather less success, he was purely an animal painter, required the assistance of others to paint landscapes and figures. Gilpin first exhibited with the Incorporated Society of Artists in 1762, continued to show pictures there of horses, up to 1783. In 1768, 1770-1, he exhibited a series of pictures illustrating "Gulliver's visit to the Houyhnhnms", one of, engraved in mezzotint by Valentine Green. In 1773 he became a director of the society, in 1774 president, he exhibited at the Royal London from 1786 until his death. He was elected an associate of the academy in 1795, Royal Academician in 1797. Gilpin married Elizabeth Broom. After his wife's death Gilpin lived in Bedfordshire with his friend Samuel Whitbread.
He returned to London and spent his last years with his daughters at Brompton, where he died on 8 March 1807. His pupils included George Garrard; the latter married his eldest daughter Matilda. Many of his pictures of horses and sporting scenes were engraved, notably The Death of the Fox, engraved by John Scott, he made some etchings of horses and cattle, made many illustrations for the works, both published and unpublished, of his brother William. His portrait is included in the series of drawings by George Dance, engraved by William Daniell, now in the National Portrait Gallery. There are works by Gilpin in the collections of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Tate Britain, the Royal Academy, in London and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Cross, David A. Sawrey Gilpin R. A.: Rival of Stubbs, Armitt Library Journal, vol. 1 1998 pp. 64–85 Gilbey, Sir Walter. Animal painters of England from the year 1650, volume 1 p190 ff. 20 paintings by or after Sawrey Gilpin at the Art UK site Sawrey Gilpin online Paintings by Gilpin in British public collections Profile on Royal Academy of Arts Collections
Eugenics
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior. The definition of eugenics has been a matter of debate since the term was coined by Francis Galton in 1883; the concept predates the term. Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed it as a social philosophy—a philosophy with implications for social order; that definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits. Alternatively, by 2014, gene selection was made possible through advances in genome editing, leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics known as "neo-eugenics", "consumer eugenics", or "liberal eugenics". While eugenic principles have been practiced as early as ancient Greece, the contemporary history of eugenics began in the early 20th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, spread to many countries, including the United States and most European countries.
In this period, eugenic ideas were espoused across the political spectrum. Many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock; such programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed "fit" to reproduce, negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. Those deemed "unfit to reproduce" included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges on different IQ tests, criminals and "deviants," and members of disfavored minority groups; the eugenics movement became associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials attempted to justify their human rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U. S. eugenics programs. In the decades following World War II, with the institution of human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies, although some Western countries, the United States and Sweden among them, continued to carry out forced sterilizations.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, with new assisted reproductive technology procedures available, such as gestational surrogacy, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, cytoplasmic transfer, fear has emerged about the possible revival of a more potent form of eugenics after decades of promoting human rights. The State of California Legislature and Governor passed a form of negative eugenics into law via SB 1095, resulting in a State law requiring the screening for "any disease" "detectable in the blood" prior to birth; the bill, still law in California, has been regarded as a form of scientific racism, though its proponents continue to claim that it is necessary. A system was proposed by California Senator Skinner to compensate victims of the well-documented examples of prison sterilizations resulting from California's eugenics programs, but this did not pass by the bill's 2018 deadline in the Legislature. A major criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether negative or positive policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the genetic selection criteria are determined by whichever group has political power at the time.
Furthermore, negative eugenics in particular is criticized by many as a violation of basic human rights, which include the right to reproduce. Another criticism is that eugenics policies lead to a loss of genetic diversity, thereby resulting in inbreeding depression due to a loss of genetic variation, yet another criticism of contemporary eugenics policies is that they propose to permanently and artificially disrupt millions of years of evolution, that attempting to create genetic lines "clean" of "disorders" can have far-reaching ancillary downstream effects in the genetic ecology, including negative effects on immunity and species resilience. The concept of positive eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class. In Sparta, every Spartan child was inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia, which determined if the child was fit to live or not. In the early years of ancient Rome, a Roman father was obliged by law to kill his child if they were physically disabled.
Among the ancient Germanic tribes, people who were cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices" were put to death by being drowned in swamps. The first formal negative eugenics, a legal provision against the birth of inferior human beings, was promulgated in Western European culture by the Christian Council of Agde in 506, which forbade marriage between cousins; this idea was promoted by William Goodell who advocated the castration and spaying of the insane. The idea of a modern project of improving the human population through a statistical understanding of heredity used to encourage good breeding was developed by Francis Galton and was linked to Darwinism and his theory of natural selection. Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin's theory of
A Tale of a Tub
A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, arguably his most difficult satire and his most masterly. The Tale is a prose parody divided into sections each delving into the morals and ethics of the English. Composed between 1694 and 1697, it was published in 1704, it was long regarded as a satire on religion, has famously been attacked for that, starting with William Wotton. The "tale" presents a consistent satire of religious excess, while the digressions are a series of parodies of contemporary writing in literature, theology, Biblical exegesis, medicine; the overarching parody is of enthusiasm and credulity. At the time it was written and religion were still linked in England, the religious and political aspects of the satire can hardly be separated. "The work made Swift notorious, was misunderstood by Queen Anne herself who mistook its purpose for profanity." It "effectively disbarred its author from proper preferment within the church", but is considered one of Swift's best allegories by himself.
It was enormously popular, but Swift believed it damaged his prospect of advancement in the Church of England. A Tale of a Tub is divided between various forms of digression and sections of a "tale"; the "tale", or narrative, is an allegory of three brothers, Peter and Jack, as they attempt to make their way in the world. Each brother represents one of the primary branches of Christianity in the West; this part of the book is a pun on "tub", which Alexander Pope says was a common term for a Dissenter's pulpit, a reference to Swift's own position as a clergyman. Peter stands in for the Roman Catholic Church. Jack represents the various dissenting Protestant churches such as Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists and Anabaptists; the third brother, middle born and middle standing, is Martin, whom Swift uses to represent the'via media' of the Church of England. The brothers have inherited three wonderfully satisfactory coats by their father, they have his will to guide them. Although the will says that the brothers are forbidden from making any changes to their coats, they do nearly nothing but alter their coats from the start.
In as much as the will represents the Bible and the coat represents the practice of Christianity, the allegory of the narrative is supposed to be an apology for the Anglican church's refusal to alter its practice in accordance with Puritan demands and its continued resistance to ally with the Roman church. From its opening, the book alternates between Tale. However, the digressions overwhelm the narrative, both in their length and in the forcefulness and imaginativeness of writing. Furthermore, after Chapter X, the labels for the sections are incorrect. Sections called "Tale" are Digressions, those called "Digression" are Digressions. A Tale of a Tub is an enormous parody with a number of smaller parodies within it. Many critics have followed Swift's biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis in arguing that there is no single, consistent narrator in the work. One difficulty with this position, however, is that if there is no single character posing as the author it is at least clear that nearly all of the "personae" employed by Swift for the parodies are so much alike that they function as a single identity.
In general, whether a modern reader would view the book as consisting of dozens of impersonations or a single one, Swift writes the Tale through the pose of a Modern or New Man. See the abridged discussion of the "Ancients and Moderns", for more on the nature of the "modern man" in Swift's day. Swift's explanation for the title of the book is that the Ship of State was threatened by a whale and the new political societies, his book is intended to be a tub that the sailors of state might toss over the side to divert the attention of the beast. Hobbes was controversial in the Restoration, but Swift's invocation of Hobbes might well be ironic; the narrative of the brothers is a faulty allegory, Swift's narrator is either a madman or a fool. The book is not one that could occupy the Leviathan, or preserve the Ship of State, so Swift may be intensifying the dangers of Hobbes's critique rather than allaying them to provoke a more rational response; the digressions individually frustrate readers. Each digression has its own topic, each is an essay on its particular sidelight.
In his biography of Swift, Ehrenpreis argued that each digression is an impersonation of a different contemporary author. This is the "persona theory," which holds that the Tale is not one parody, but rather a series of parodies, arising out of chamber performance in the Temple household. Prior to Ehrenpreis, some critics had argued that the narrator of the Tale is a character, just as the narrator of a novel would be. Given the evidence of A. C. Elias about the acrimony of Swift's departure from the Temple household, evidence from Swift's Journal to Stella about how uninvolved in the Temple household Swift had been, the number of repeated observations about himself by the Tale's author, it seems reasonable to propose that the digressions reflect a single type of man, if not a particular character. In any case, the digressions are each readerly tests.
Tasmania
Tasmania is an island state of Australia. It is located 240 km to the south of the Australian mainland, separated by Bass Strait; the state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, the surrounding 334 islands. The state has a population of around 526,700 as of March 2018. Just over forty percent of the population resides in the Greater Hobart precinct, which forms the metropolitan area of the state capital and largest city, Hobart. Tasmania's area is 68,401 km2, of which the main island covers 64,519 km2, it is promoted as a natural state, protected areas of Tasmania cover about 42% of its land area, which includes national parks and World Heritage Sites. Tasmania was the founding place of the first environmental political party in the world; the island is believed to have been occupied by indigenous peoples for 30,000 years before British colonisation. It is thought Aboriginal Tasmanians were separated from the mainland Aboriginal groups about 10,000 years ago when the sea rose to form Bass Strait.
The Aboriginal population is estimated to have been between 3,000 and 7,000 at the time of colonisation, but was wiped out within 30 years by a combination of violent guerrilla conflict with settlers known as the "Black War", intertribal conflict, from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. The conflict, which peaked between 1825 and 1831, led to more than three years of martial law, cost the lives of 1,100 Aboriginals and settlers; the island was permanently settled by Europeans in 1803 as a penal settlement of the British Empire to prevent claims to the land by the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. The island was part of the Colony of New South Wales but became a separate, self-governing colony under the name Van Diemen's Land in 1825. 75,000 convicts were sent to Van Diemen's Land before transportation ceased in 1853. In 1854 the present Constitution of Tasmania was passed, the following year the colony received permission to change its name to Tasmania.
In 1901 it became a state through the process of the Federation of Australia. The state is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642. Tasman named the island Anthony van Diemen's Land after his sponsor Anthony van Diemen, the Governor of the Dutch East Indies; the name was shortened to Van Diemen's Land by the British. It was renamed Tasmania in honour of its first European discoverer on 1 January 1856. Tasmania was sometimes referred to as "Dervon," as mentioned in the Jerilderie Letter written by the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly in 1879; the colloquial expression for the state is "Tassie". Tasmania is colloquially shortened to "Tas," when used in business names and website addresses. TAS is the Australia Post abbreviation for the state; the reconstructed Palawa kani language name for Tasmania is Lutriwita. The island was adjoined to the mainland of Australia until the end of the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago.
Much of the island is composed of Jurassic dolerite intrusions through other rock types, sometimes forming large columnar joints. Tasmania has the world's largest areas of dolerite, with many distinctive mountains and cliffs formed from this rock type; the central plateau and the southeast portions of the island are dolerites. Mount Wellington above Hobart is a good example. In the southern midlands as far south as Hobart, the dolerite is underlaid by sandstone and similar sedimentary stones. In the southwest, Precambrian quartzites were formed from ancient sea sediments and form strikingly sharp ridges and ranges, such as Federation Peak or Frenchmans Cap. In the northeast and east, continental granites can be seen, such as at Freycinet, similar to coastal granites on mainland Australia. In the northwest and west, mineral-rich volcanic rock can be seen at Mount Read near Rosebery, or at Mount Lyell near Queenstown. Present in the south and northwest is limestone with caves; the quartzite and dolerite areas in the higher mountains show evidence of glaciation, much of Australia's glaciated landscape is found on the Central Plateau and the Southwest.
Cradle Mountain, another dolerite peak, for example, was a nunatak. The combination of these different rock types contributes to scenery, distinct from any other region of the world. In the far southwest corner of the state, the geology is wholly quartzite, which gives the mountains the false impression of having snow-capped peaks year round. Evidence indicates the presence of Aborigines in Tasmania about 42,000 years ago. Rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia about 10,000 years ago and by the time of European contact, the Aboriginal people in Tasmania had nine major nations or ethnic groups. At the time of the British occupation and colonisation in 1803, the indigenous population was estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000. Historian Lyndall Ryan's analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7,000 spread throughout the island's nine nations. J. B. Plomley and Rhys Jones, settled on a figure of 3,000 to 4,000, they engaged in fire-stick farming, hunted game including kangaroo and wallabies, caught seals, mutton-birds and fish and lived as nine separate "nations" on the island, which they knew as "Trouwunna".
The first reported sighting of Tasmania by a European was on 24 November 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who landed at today's Blackman Bay. More than a century in 1772, a French expedition le
Glumdalclitch
Glumdalclitch is the name Gulliver gives his "nurse" in Book II of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In Book I, Gulliver travels to the land of Lilliput. Leaving there, he travels to the land of Brobdingnag. In Lilliput, Gulliver was a giant, in Brobdingnag, he is a dwarf, with the proportions reversed; when he comes ashore, he is captured by a giant farmer, who perceives Gulliver only as an animal, a freak of nature resembling a man-shaped mouse. He takes Gulliver home and gives him to his nine-year-old daughter, a child "not above forty feet high, being little for her age." She makes Gulliver her pet, creates a small travel case for him, is amused to play with him as if he were a doll. Gulliver grows fond of the girl, gives her the pet name of Glumdalclitch, or "little nurse" in the Brobdingian language. Glumdalclitch is a skilled seamstress with a talent for making dolls' clothes. Although Gulliver admires the wardrobe that she makes for him, he finds that the finest Brodingnagian fabric is coarse and irritates his skin.
The farmer takes Gulliver about as a freak show. Gulliver grows proud of the stunts that he performs for Glumdalclitch's amusement; when the Queen of Brobdingnag takes Gulliver into her court, he has Glumdalclitch brought to court with him. The prideful Gulliver thinks of himself as being honored and promoted by moving to court, but never ceases to love and seek the approval of the little girl who first helped him. Indeed, he remembers her fondly after returning to England. While Book I is narrowly allegorical, Book II of Gulliver's Travels is less a roman a clef and more a political and philosophical discussion. While Glumdalclitch could represent Swift's memories of the young Stella from his time living with William Temple at Moor Park, she does not stand in for any identifiable historical person. If one does take Glumdalclitch as the young Stella and the entire episode as an encoding of the time at Moor Park it is a poignant story indeed. Swift, like Gulliver, delighted in performing for Stella, was shown about by her "father", found the living too coarse for his sensibilities, left her company for a "promotion" to London and court life, mourned her absence for the rest of his life.
In television and film adaptations, the character has been played by Sherry Alberoni, Ági Szirtes, Kate Maberly, voiced by Janet Waldo. The character was reimagined in the 2010 film adaptation as a child and treats Gulliver as a baby doll to keep with the comedy themes, it was a family nickname for the novelist Jane Octavia Brookfield. Glumdalclitch is the subject of an eponymous novel by Leo Sonderegger published in 2000 as a sequel to Gulliver's Travels, where she is named "Wendeling"
A Modest Proposal
A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, For making them Beneficial to the Publick referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. The essay suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies; this satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general. In English writing, the phrase "a modest proposal" is now conventionally an allusion to this style of straight-faced satire; this essay is held to be one of the greatest examples of sustained irony in the history of the English language. Much of its shock value derives from the fact that the first portion of the essay describes the plight of starving beggars in Ireland, so that the reader is unprepared for the surprise of Swift's solution when he states: "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, baked, or boiled.
He uses methods of argument throughout his essay which lampoon the then-influential William Petty and the social engineering popular among followers of Francis Bacon. These lampoons include appealing to the authority of "a knowing American of my acquaintance in London" and "the famous Psalmanazar, a native of the island Formosa". In the tradition of Roman satire, Swift introduces the reforms he is suggesting by paralipsis: Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither clothes, nor household furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury: Of curing the expensiveness of pride, vanity and gaming in our women: Of introducing a vein of parsimony and temperance: Of learning to love our country, wherein we differ from Laplanders, the inhabitants of Topinamboo: Of quitting our animosities and factions, nor acting any longer like the Jews, who were murdering one another at the moment their city was taken: Of being a little cautious not to sell our country and consciences for nothing: Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants.
Lastly, of putting a spirit of honesty and skill into our shop-keepers, who, if a resolution could now be taken to buy only our native goods, would unite to cheat and exact upon us in the price, the measure, the goodness, nor could yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing and earnestly invited to it. Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients,'till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice. George Wittkowsky argued that Swift's main target in A Modest Proposal was not the conditions in Ireland, but rather the can-do spirit of the times that led people to devise a number of illogical schemes that would purportedly solve social and economic ills. Swift was attacking projects that tried to fix population and labour issues with a simple cure-all solution. A memorable example of these sorts of schemes "involved the idea of running the poor through a joint-stock company". In response, Swift's Modest Proposal was "a burlesque of projects concerning the poor" that were in vogue during the early 18th century.
A Modest Proposal targets the calculating way people perceived the poor in designing their projects. The pamphlet targets reformers who "regard people as commodities". In the piece, Swift adopts the "technique of a political arithmetician" to show the utter ridiculousness of trying to prove any proposal with dispassionate statistics. Critics differ about Swift's intentions in using this faux-mathematical philosophy. Edmund Wilson argues that statistically "the logic of the'Modest proposal' can be compared with defence of crime in which he argues that crime takes care of the superfluous population". Wittkowsky counters that Swift's satiric use of statistical analysis is an effort to enhance his satire that "springs from a spirit of bitter mockery, not from the delight in calculations for their own sake". Charles K. Smith argues that Swift's rhetorical style persuades the reader to detest the speaker and pity the Irish. Swift's specific strategy is twofold, using a "trap" to create sympathy for the Irish and a dislike of the narrator who, in the span of one sentence, "details vividly and with rhetorical emphasis the grinding poverty" but feels emotion for members of his own class.
Swift's use of gripping details of poverty and his narrator's cool approach towards them create "two opposing points of view" that "alienate the reader unconsciously, from a narrator who can view with'melancholy' detachment a subject that Swift has directed us, rhetorically, to see in a much less detached way."Swift has his proposer further degrade the Irish by using language ordinarily reserved for animals. Lewis argues. Once the children have been commodified, Swift's rhetoric can turn "people into animals meat, from meat, into tonnage worth a price per pound". Swift uses the proposer's serious tone to highlight the absurdity of his proposal. In mak
. New International Encyclopedia. 1905.