by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at
the destruction of Irish manufactures. At least, one would never gather
from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern
Irish demand for self-government. Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense
in which Washington was an American patriot. Like Washington, he had no
quarrel with English civilization. He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn
Feiner. He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was
Colonial Nationalism. As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood,
and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond. While not a Separatist, he
had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from
London. In his _Short View of the State of Ireland_, published in 1728, he
preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by
Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day. He declared that one of the
causes of a nation's thriving--

... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent,
for otherwise they are not a free people. And, therefore, all
appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to
another country are so many grievous impoverishments.

He said of the Irish:

We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by
doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the
nature of their disease.

In the _Drapier's Letters_ he denied the right of the English Parliament
to legislate for Ireland. He declared that all reason was on the side of
Ireland's being free, though power and the love of power made for
Ireland's servitude. "The arguments on both sides," he said in a passage
which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between
England and Ireland, were "invincible":

For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is
slavery. But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue
one single man in his shirt.

It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the
gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift's passionate
championship of the "one single man in his shirt." One wishes very
earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern
Conservative party. Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as
Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may
infer from M