![]() ![]() As the original essay indicated, he blamed these appalling conditions on English colonial policies and hoped that Ireland would be given its freedom someday. Although no one at the time knew the exact population of the country, Swift did not believe that it was growing very rapidly at all, but that the death rate was probably higher than the birth rate. ![]() ![]() He knew that the reality was the exact opposite, and the true situation in the country was extreme poverty for most of the population, hunger, famine and mass emigration to America. In my opinion, during the 1720s, Swift and his supporters were part of a serious debate about the true conditions in Ireland, which their English rulers often imagined to be a rich and prosperous country with a rapidly growing population. ![]() They would have offered further proof of my main thesis that even though Swift’s essay was intended only to be satire, he had a very serious political purpose. Neither of the articles would have changed my basic conclusions that Ireland was suffering from extreme poverty, hunger and poverty because of England’s colonial policies. I used two 20th Century sources about the demographic and economic conditions of Ireland at the time Swift write “A Modest Proposal”, and in my opinion these would have strengthened the paper overall by placing it in a more detailed historical context. ![]()
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