A Modest Proposal & Other Short Pieces

" A Modest Proposal"", by Jonathan Swift, is a biting satire about life in 18th Century Ireland, in which the author seeks to find ""a fair, cheap, and easy method"" to transform the sick and starving children of Ireland into productive members of society. Swift's proposal, hardly modest, is to fatten up undernourished poor children and then sell them to more well-to-do families as food. By presenting this outrageous concept as an interrelated string of seemingly logical arguments, Swift leads the reader to understand that his proposal could "