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usually spent in determining between right and wrong, and what degree of expense? Whether advocates and orators had liberty to
plead in causes manifestly known to be unjust, vexatious, or oppressive? Whether party, in religion or politics, were observed to be of
any weight in the scale of justice? Whether those pleading orators were persons educated in the general knowledge of equity, or only
in provincial, national, and other local customs? Whether they or their judges had any part in penning those laws, which they assumed
the liberty of interpreting, and glossing upon at their pleasure? Whether they had ever, at different times, pleaded for and against the
same cause, and cited precedents to prove contrary opinions? Whether they were a rich or a poor corporation? Whether they received
any pecuniary reward for pleading, or delivering their opinions? And particularly, whether they were ever admitted as members in the
lower senate?"
He fell next upon the management of our treasury; and said, "he thought my memory had failed me, because I computed our taxes at
about five or six millions a-year, and when I came to mention the issues, he found they sometimes amounted to more than double; for
the notes he had taken were very particular in this point, because he hoped, as he told me, that the knowledge of our conduct might be
useful to him, and he could not be deceived in his calculations. But, if what I told him were true, he was still at a loss how a kingdom
could run out of its estate, like a private person." He asked me, "who were our creditors; and where we found money to pay them?" He
wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and expensive wars; "that certainly we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very
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Gulliver's Travels
bad neighbours, and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings." He asked, what business we had out of our own islands,
unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet?" Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a
mercenary standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a free people. He said, "if we were governed by our own consent, in the
persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my
opinion, whether a private man's house might not be better defended by himself, his children, and family, than by half-a-dozen
rascals, picked up at a venture in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred times more by cutting their throats?"
He laughed at my "odd kind of arithmetic," as he was pleased to call it, "in reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation
drawn from the several sects among us, in religion and politics." He said, "he knew no reason why those, who entertain opinions
prejudicial to the public, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any
government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet,
but not to vend them about for cordials."
He observed, "that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I had mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this
entertainment was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time it employed; whether it ever went so high as
to affect their fortunes; whether mean, vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not arrive at great riches, and sometimes
keep our very nobles in dependence, as well as habituate them to vile companions, wholly take them from the improvement of their
minds, and force them, by the losses they received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon others?"
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting "it was only a heap
of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy,
perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce."
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the
answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never
forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: "My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you
have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best
explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe
among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly
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