round and complete.  If a prince sends forces into a nation, where the people are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to death or make slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous way of living.

There you have “Kultur” wars, and “white man’s burden” wars, and wars for “places of strategic importance,” satirized as though by a twentieth-century humanitarian.  When the Morning Post begins to write leaders in the same strain, we shall begin to believe that Swift was a Tory in the ordinary meaning of the word.

As for Swift’s Irish politics, Mr. Charles Whibley, like other Conservative writers, attempts to gloss over their essential Nationalism by suggesting that Swift was merely a just man righteously indignant at the destruction of Irish manufactures.  At least, one would never gather from the present book that Swift was practically the father of the modern Irish demand for self-government.  Swift was an Irish patriot in the sense in which Washington was an American patriot.  Like Washington, he had no quarrel with English civilization.  He was not an eighteenth-century Sinn Feiner.  He regarded himself as a colonist, and his Nationalism was Colonial Nationalism.  As such he was the forerunner of Grattan and Flood, and also, in a measure, of Parnell and Redmond.  While not a Separatist, he had the strongest possible objection to being either ruled or ruined from London.  In his Short View of the State of Ireland, published in 1728, he preached the whole gospel of Colonial Nationalism as it is accepted by Irishmen like Sir Horace Plunkett to-day.  He declared that one of the causes of a nation’s thriving—­

... is by being governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free people.  And, therefore, all appeals for justice, or applications for favour or preferment, to another country are so many grievous impoverishments.

He said of the Irish: 

    We are in the condition of patients who have physic sent to them by
    doctors at a distance, strangers to their constitution and the
    nature of their disease.

In the Drapier’s Letters he denied the right of the English Parliament to legislate for Ireland.  He declared that all reason was on the side of Ireland’s being free, though power and the love of power made for Ireland’s servitude.  “The arguments on both sides,” he said in a passage which sums up with perfect irony the centuries-old controversy between England and Ireland, were “invincible”: 

    For in reason all government without the consent of the governed is
    slavery.  But, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue
    one single man in his shirt.

It would be interesting to know how the modern Tory, whose gospel is the gospel of the eleven men well armed, squares this with Swift’s passionate championship of the “one single man in his shirt.”  One wishes very earnestly that the Toryism of Swift were in fact the Toryism of the modern Conservative party.  Had it been so, there would have been no such thing as Carsonism in pre-war England; and, had there been no Carsonism, one may infer from Mr. Gerard’s recent revelations, there might have been no European war.