Organic

Week 3 – TDA reading

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift (1667—1745)

This essay by Jonathan Swift has long been regarded as a classic of English literature; it has intrigued generations of college students. Swift both loved and hated his native Ireland, where he was born into Anglo-Irish aristocracy At the time this essay was written, in 1729, the Irish had long suffered from British exploitation, corrupt Irish politicians, and absentee landlords in your first reading, begin with this question: What exactly is this author’s opinion?

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they, see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, oil in rags and importuning every passenger for art aims. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their. time strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants, who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbados

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance, and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation. . . But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the children of professed beggars; it is of a much greater extent, and shall take in

the whole number of infants at a certain age who are born of parents in effect as little able to support them as those who demand our charity in the streets.

As to my own...