Extract

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food.

The children of the Irish poor might be fattened and sold as delicacies for English tables: so runs the argument, delivered with the calm arithmetic of an economist improving the commonwealth. Jonathan Swift published this pamphlet in 1729, and its savagery has never been exceeded in the English language. The voice is what makes it lethal: reasonable, methodical, entirely without passion, a projector who has calculated the cost per child and the profit per serving. Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, watched famine devour his adopted country and answered with an irony so absolute it became a mirror. The proposal reveals the logical endpoint of treating human beings as economic units. It is the coldest fire ever set to a page.