ale emigration, in starvation and even death, in revolt, and in
fostering among those who remained, and among those whom circumstances
exiled, the dangerous spirit of resentment and rebellion which is the
outcome of the sense of injustice. It has also served, even to this day,
to give vitality to those associations that have from time to time
arisen in Ireland for the object of realizing that country's
self-government.

It may be argued that the people of Ireland of that time justified
Swift's petition when he prayed to be removed from "this land of slaves,
where all are fools and all are knaves"; but that is no justification
for the injustice. The injustice from which Ireland suffered was a fact.
Its existence was resented with all the indignation with which an
emotional and spiritual people will always resent material obstructions
to the free play of what they feel to be their best powers.

There were no leaders at the time who could see this, and seeing it,
enforce its truth on the dull English mind to move it to saner methods
of dealing with this people. Nor were there any who could order the
resentment into battalions of fighting men to give point to the demands
for equal rights with their English fellow-subjects.

Had Swift been an Irishman by nature as he was by birth, it might have
been otherwise; but Swift was an Irishman by accident, and only became
an Irish patriot by reason of the humanity in him which found indignant
and permanent expression against oppression. Swift's indignation
against the selfish hypocrisy of his fellow-men was the cry from the
pain which the sight of man's inhumanity to man inflicted on his
sensitive and truth-loving nature. The folly and baseness of his
fellow-creatures stung him, as he once wrote to Pope, "to perfect rage
and resentment." Turn where he would, he found either the knave as the
slave driver, or the slave as a fool, and the latter became even a
willing sacrifice. His indignation at the one was hardly greater than
his contempt for the other, and his different feelings found trenchant
expression in such writings as the "Drapier's Letters," the "Modest
Proposal," and "Gulliver's Travels."

It has been argued that the _saeva indignatio_ which lacerated his heart
was the passion of a mad man. To argue thus seems to us to misunderstand
entirely the peculiar qualities of Swift's nature. It was not the mad
man that made the passion; it was rather the passion that made the man