ne," wrote Swift, "that the sea was not the Duke of Marlborough's
element, otherwise the whole force of the war would infallibly have been
bestowed there, infinitely to the advantage of his country." Whether Swift
and the Tories were right in their attack on Marlborough and the war is a
question into which I do not propose to enter. I merely wish to emphasize
the fact that _The Conduct of the Allies_ was, from the modern Tory point
of view, not merely a pacifist, but a treasonable, document. Were anything
like it to appear nowadays, it would be suppressed under the Defence of
the Realm Act. And that Swift was a hater of war, not merely as a party
politician, but as a philosopher, is shown by the discourse on the causes
of war which he puts into the mouth of Gulliver when the latter is trying
to convey a picture of human society to his Houyhnhnm master:

Sometimes the quarrel between two princes is to decide which of
them shall dispossess a third of his dominions, where neither of
them pretends to any right. Sometimes one prince quarrelleth with
another for fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a war
is entered upon because the enemy is too strong, and sometimes
because he is too weak. Sometimes our neighbours want the things
which we have, or have the things which we want; and we both fight
till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable
cause of a war to invade a country after the people have been
wasted by famine, destroyed by pestilence or embroiled by factions
among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into war with our
nearest ally, when one of his towns lies convenient for us, or a
territory of land that would render our dominions round and
complete. If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people
are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or
make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from
their barbarous way of living.

There you have "Kultur" wars, and "white man's burden" wars, and wars for
"places of strategic importance," satirized as though by a
twentieth-century humanitarian. When the _Morning Post_ begins to write
leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a
Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word.

As for Swift's Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other
Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism