A Modest Proposal

I thought Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal was very clever and well written. Though sometimes I had trouble understanding what he was trying to say because I have problems comprehending things written in old english such as this. Swift starts out by painting the scene of a poor household in Dublin and introduces us to the problem that the entire paper revolves around; poverity in Dublin. He then goes into giving statistic and facts about how many people are in the kingdom and how many children there are who can not be cared for and asked the question; what should be done with these children? He then talks about how he met a man who told him that children taste delicious and in my opinion gets off topic for a couple paragraphs and rants about how children should be eaten, women should be bred, children's skin should be used as gloves and boots and even the elderly or executed should be sold and eaten. However he then gets back on topic and clearly states all the advantages to his proposal which is where I think, if the piece wasn't satirical, would be the important part of the paper. He explains how eating children will help by lowering the population of those who are not helping to bring income home, poor tenants would then have something valuable and marriages would improve, tavern food would improve, and there would be more money to circulate among less people. After giving his final arguments for his idea Swift then changes the attention to the ideas that others have offered and says they are no better than his idea of eating children. He also says he does not want to hear about other people's plans unless there is a realistic attempt to put them into action. He then again proposes his idea and ends the paper with painting an imagine of suffering children again. In my opinion the paper was very effective. I like his use of satire to insult the ideas of all others in Dublin and make the point that no real action is being taken and something needs to change. He also makes you feel sympathtic for the children that he is also proposing be eaten because they are worthless which takes a lot of talent to do.