res whom Gulliver saw in his
travels seem real, life-like, and living, made the fantastic
extravagance of the "Drapier's Letters" strike home with all the force
of truth to the minds of an excited populace.

Many biographers and historians have expressed a blank and utter
amazement at the effect which Swift's letters produced. They have
chosen to regard it as a mere historical curiosity, a sort of political
paradox and puzzle. They have described the Irish people at the time
as under the spell of something like sorcery. Even in our own days,
Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons, treated
the convulsion caused by Swift's letters and Wood's halfpence as an
outbreak of national frenzy, called up by the witchery of style
displayed in the "Drapier's Letters." To some of us it is, on the
other hand, a matter of surprise to see how capable writers, and
especially how a man of Mr. Gladstone's genius and political knowledge,
could for a moment be thus deceived. {246} One is almost inclined to
think that Mr. Gladstone could not have been reading the "Drapier's
Letters" recently, when he thus spoke of the effect which they
produced, and thus was willing to explain it. [Sidenote: 1724--The
drapier's victory] Any one who reads the letters with impartial
attention will see that from first to last the anger that burns in
them, the sarcasm that withers and scorches, the passionate eloquence
which glows in even their most carefully measured sentences, are
directed against Wood and his halfpence only because the patent, the
bribe by which it was purchased, and the manner in which it was forced
on Ireland, represented the injustice of the whole system of Irish
administration, and the wrongs of many generations. "It would be very
hard if all Ireland," Swift declares with indignation, "should be put
into one scale, and this sorry fellow Wood into the other." "I have a
pretty good shop of Irish stuffs and silks," the Drapier declares, "and
instead of taking Mr. Wood's bad copper, I intend to truck with my
neighbors, the butchers and bakers and brewers, and the rest, goods for
goods; and the little gold and silver I have, I will keep by me like my
heart's blood till better times, or until I am just ready to starve."
"Wood's contract?" he asks. "His contract with whom? Was it with the
Parliament or people of Ireland?" The reader who believes that such a
passage as that, and scores of similar passages, were ins