The Fourth Book

In the fourth and final book, Gulliver suffers a mutiny at the hands of his crew and winds up on an island controlled by the Houyhnhnms. They are incredibly wise but highly dispassionate horse-people. On that island, humans are wild, second-class citizens called Yahoos. Gulliver finds great joy in this society of the wise Houyhnhnms, but eventually they figure out that Gulliver's just another Yahoo, and they exile him. Gulliver eventually does get back home to England, but now he's a changed man; he spends most of his time thinking about these experiences that he's had and refusing the company of people he now considers Yahoos (which are just other humans), and he'll even go to the stables to hang out with horses because he misses the company of the Houyhnhnms. So ends Gulliver's Travels. That's what happens in the book, which can seem like a lot of ridiculous nonsense, just like a crazy fairy story, but there's really more going on. Critics have literally filled books talking about the deeper meanings of all of his journeys and the people that Gulliver encounters. Each land that Gulliver visits is pretty clearly meant to represent some exaggerated human trait or philosophy that he observed at his time. The Lilliputians are small, and they're warlike. They fight over stupid things like cracking an egg. This is how we imagine Swift viewed England at the time. In the second book, the tables are turned, and Swift can't escape the association of his countrymen; in the land of peaceful giants, he's a quaint oddity from the land of angry, violent people. In the third book, the Laputians criticize this slavish devotion to science and reason without a sense behind it. The immortal, miserable Struldbrugs show that even having all the time in the world to think about stuff doesn't necessarily guarantee happiness. Then finally, the fourth book presents the hyper-rational Houyhnhnms, a race Gulliver desperately wants to be a part of but yet cannot. Gulliver's realization that he is, at least in part, a wild Yahoo is sobering for him; having seen the alternative - the way he could be living - he never really feels comfortable amongst his own people again.

A Modest Proposal

'A Modest Proposal' begins by deploring the sad fate of the poverty-stricken Irish who have to spend all their time trying to feed their large families. As a solution to the poverty in which these families are forced to live, by virtue of having so many mouths to feed, Swift suggests that these poor Irish families should fatten up their children and sell them to the rich English land owners. He argues that children could be sold into a meat market as early as the age of one, giving poor families some much needed income, while sparing them the expenses of raising so many children. With 100,000 Irish children out of the population being set aside for dinner, his solution, he reasons, will also help to resolve the issues of overpopulation and unemployment in Ireland, giving the Irish economy a much needed boost, while making it easier for England to deal with its unruly Irish subjects. Swift then goes on to offer statistical support for his proposal and specific data about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and the projected eating patterns of their consumers. He even suggests some recipes for preparing this delicious new meat, reasoning that, with innovative cooks generating ever more and delicious new dishes, it will expand and improve the culinary experience of the wealthy, resulting in a healthier and happier population as a whole. 'A Modest Proposal' ends with the argument that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive effects on Irish family morality: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will value their children in ways as yet unknown. His proposal, he argues, will, if implemented, do more to solve Ireland's complex social, political, and economic problems than any other measure that has yet been proposed.