Gulliver’s Travels – Book [PDF]

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Gulliver’s Travels – Book Book

he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army in the midst of peace: Swift wrote often and vociferously against the policy of maintaining a standing army in England, a practice forbidden by the Bill of Rights in 1689. The Hanoverian king, George I, still had an army of mercenary retainers in Germany, and many of the English were none too ready to have those mercenaries imported to England’s shores.

He added, that nature was degenerated in these latter declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births in comparison of those in ancient times: Throughout the Travels Swift comments on a long-ranging dispute between proponents of ancient versus modern learning and science.

He addressed the matter head-on in his Battle of the Books (1704) and A Tale of a Tub (1704), and generally, he sympathized with the ancient position that in physical size, ethical integrity, and humanistic resources the past superseded the present. But for Swift the dispute was really not resolvable; it was more fertile ground for satire than for argument.