Summary

The speaker in “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift begins by presenting the problem of poverty in Ireland. He describes women beginning on the streets with their many children because of whom they are unable to work. The speaker argues that the growing number of poor children is a real source of poverty for the kingdom and claims that he has a proposal to make all the children of poor families useful.

He believes that children become a burden for their families after they are a year old when more money are required to support them. He then calculates how many children are born to poor families each year, a hundred and twenty thousand.  These children cannot be put to work until the age of six, and even then they are not very productive.

The narrator’s proposal is inspired by an American friend. He claims that small children can be cooked and eaten. The narrator believes that about twenty thousand children should be saved each year for breeding purposes and that the rest of them could be bought by rich families and eaten.

The speaker believes that most children would be purchased in March, as this is when most Roman Catholic children are born. In this way, the country will also reduce ...