A Modest Proposal

Few satires have kept their edge like this short 1729 pamphlet, in which Jonathan Swift proposes, in the calm voice of a public-spirited economist, that Ireland’s starving poor sell their infants as food for wealthy tables. The horror is the point. By working out the numbers with straight-faced precision, Swift skewers the greed of absentee landlords, the indifference of English policy, and the fashion for treating human misery as an accounting problem. The essay never breaks character, which is what makes it land. Barely a few thousand words long, it remains a model of irony taught in classrooms around the world. This free PDF and EPUB edition preserves one of the sharpest pieces of political writing in English.