Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for
cordials.”
He observed, “that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I
had mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment
was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time
it employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes;
whether mean, vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not
arrive at great riches, and sometimes keep our very nobles in
dependence, as well as habituate them to vile companions, wholly take
them from the improvement of their minds, and force them, by the losses
they received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon
others?”
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of
our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of
conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments,
the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy,
perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and
ambition, could produce.”
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the
sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the
answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me
gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget,
nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have
made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly
proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients
for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted,
and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting,
confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an
institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but
these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by
corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one
perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among
you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that
priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their
conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love
of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,”
continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in
travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped
many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own
relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted
from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most
pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to
crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
CHAPTER VII.
The author’s love of his country. He makes a proposal of much advantage
to the king, which is rejected. The king’s great ignorance in politics.
The learning of that country very imperfect and confined. The laws, and
military affairs, and parties in the state.
Nothing but an extreme love of truth could have hindered me from
concealing this part of my story. It was in vain to discover my
resentments, which were always turned into ridicule; and I was forced
to rest with patience, while my noble and beloved country was so
injuriously treated. I am as heartily sorry as any of my readers can
possibly be, that such an occasion was given: but this prince happened
to be so curious and inquisitive upon every particular, that it could
not consist either with gratitude or good manners, to refuse giving him
what satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in
my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and
gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the
strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable
partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so
much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties
and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and
beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavour
in those many discourses I had with that monarch, although it
unfortunately failed of success.
But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly
secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether
unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other
nations: the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices,
and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we, and the politer
countries of Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed,
if so remote a prince’s notions of virtue and vice were to be offered
as a standard for all mankind.
To confirm what I have now said, and further to show the miserable
effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage, which
will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself further into
his majesty’s favour, I told him of “an invention, discovered between
three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap
of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in
a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up
in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder.
That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of
brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or
lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its
force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy
whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the
ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of
the sea, and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts
and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste
before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of
iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were
besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces,
burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all
who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which were cheap
and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could
direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size proportionable to
all other things in his majesty’s kingdom, and the largest need not be
above a hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged
with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter down the
walls of the strongest town in his dominions in a few hours, or destroy
the whole metropolis, if ever it should pretend to dispute his absolute
commands.” This I humbly offered to his majesty, as a small tribute of
acknowledgment, in turn for so many marks that I had received, of his
royal favour and protection.
The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those
terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. “He was amazed, how so
impotent and grovelling an insect as I” (these were his expressions)
“could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to
appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I
had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines;
whereof,” he said, “some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been
the first contriver. As for himself, he protested, that although few
things delighted him so much as new discoveries in art or in nature,
yet he would rather lose half his kingdom, than be privy to such a
secret; which he commanded me, as I valued any life, never to mention
any more.”
A strange effect of narrow principles and views! that a prince
possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love, and esteem;
of strong parts, great wisdom, and profound learning, endowed with
admirable talents, and almost adored by his subjects, should, from a
nice, unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception,
let slip an opportunity put into his hands that would have made him
absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his
people! Neither do I say this, with the least intention to detract from
the many virtues of that excellent king, whose character, I am
sensible, will, on this account, be very much lessened in the opinion
of an English reader: but I take this defect among them to have risen
from their ignorance, by not having hitherto reduced politics into a
science, as the more acute wits of Europe have done. For, I remember
very well, in a discourse one day with the king, when I happened to
say, “there were several thousand books among us written upon the art
of government,” it gave him (directly contrary to my intention) a very
mean opinion of our understandings. He professed both to abominate and
despise all mystery, refinement, and intrigue, either in a prince or a
minister. He could not tell what I meant by secrets of state, where an
enemy, or some rival nation, were not in the case. He confined the
knowledge of governing within very narrow bounds, to common sense and
reason, to justice and lenity, to the speedy determination of civil and
criminal causes; with some other obvious topics, which are not worth
considering. And he gave it for his opinion, “that whoever could make
two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground
where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do
more essential service to his country, than the whole race of
politicians put together.”
The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in
morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be
allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may
be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all
mechanical arts; so that among us, it would be little esteemed. And as
to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never
drive the least conception into their heads.
No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in
their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty. But indeed few
of them extend even to that length. They are expressed in the most
plain and simple terms, wherein those people are not mercurial enough
to discover above one interpretation: and to write a comment upon any
law, is a capital crime. As to the decision of civil causes, or
proceedings against criminals, their precedents are so few, that they
have little reason to boast of any extraordinary skill in either.
They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of
mind: but their libraries are not very large; for that of the king,
which is reckoned the largest, does not amount to above a thousand
volumes, placed in a gallery of twelve hundred feet long, whence I had
liberty to borrow what books I pleased. The queen’s joiner had
contrived in one of Glumdalclitch’s rooms, a kind of wooden machine
five-and-twenty feet high, formed like a standing ladder; the steps
were each fifty feet long. It was indeed a moveable pair of stairs, the
lowest end placed at ten feet distance from the wall of the chamber.
The book I had a mind to read, was put up leaning against the wall: I
first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face
towards the book, began at the top of the page, and so walking to the
right and left about eight or ten paces, according to the length of the
lines, till I had gotten a little below the level of my eyes, and then
descending gradually till I came to the bottom: after which I mounted
again, and began the other page in the same manner, and so turned over
the leaf, which I could easily do with both my hands, for it was as