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read this in the first semester of the year and really liked the irony in this essay, would have been crazy living through the irish famine and reading about how we could "just" let other people eat the “excess babies” to fix the problem
Loved A Modest Proposal which on its own would've received 5 stars, but honestly I am not sure I understood An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions and Enormities well enough to rate it properly.
challenging
Oh it’s satire… drops rock still giving it a 1 cause it made me sick
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The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are able to maintain their own children, (although I apprehend there cannot be so many, under the present distresses of the kingdom) but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty thousand, for those women who miscarry, or whose children die by accident or disease within the year. There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born. The question therefore is, How this number shall be reared, and provided for? which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them in handicraft or agriculture; we neither build houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate land: they can very seldom pick up a livelihood by stealing till they arrive at six years old; except where they are of towardly parts, although I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier; during which time they can however be properly looked upon only as probationers: As I have been informed by a principal gentleman in the county of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew above one or two instances under the age of six, even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the quickest proficiency in that art.
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Some works are exactly as long as they need to be while really getting the message across — I think is what has allowed Swift’s “A Model Proposal” to have survived the century.
It is shocking how relevant it still is while applying some absolutely dry and serious wit throughout — as Swift says:
It is shocking how relevant it still is while applying some absolutely dry and serious wit throughout — as Swift says:
Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither clothes, nor houshold furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the materials and instruments that promote foreign luxury
Clearly, eating the children of the poor was the only solution.
dark
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challenging
dark
sad
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adventurous
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emotional
mysterious
reflective
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