"A Modest Proposal", also known by its larger title: "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents or Country", is a satirical, and anonimous, essay written by Jonathan Swift and published in 1729. This essay is written at a time in Ireland when poverty is running rampant in the country and people, especially of Catholic families, are facing starvation, lack of job opportunities and overgrowth of their numbers by having uncontrolled numbers of children. What Swift, then, ironically proposes, is a quick way for poor Irish people to kill two birds with one stone; on the one hand, earn an extra income by selling their children to the richer people of England and Ireland, who might benefit also from having a new, and particularly tender, source of meat, and two, get rid of the extra population that cannot be fed and that are draining the resources also of the state. This particular excerpt shows that like all other of his countrymen, Swift is seeing the dire straights and difficult conditions that his people are going through, but unlike most of his countrymen, he does not think that the problem is overpopulation, but rather, an unequal distribution of resources, richess that are being retained by the richer aristocrats of the country. So, with this excerpt, what the author is doing is basically joking about the general believe that to reduce poverty, you need to get rid of the poor, and so, he proposes, sardonically, to relieve the issue by getting rid of the new young generations that will only add up to the poverty problem. He does this by also adding the benefits that the richer Irishmen and women would enjoy if they were to use children as a new foodstuff.
