To make these children less of a burden, Swift proposes a radical form of political arithmetic as a solution-raising infants as if they were another food source. These children belonged to the impotent poor class and were at least a temporary burden on society. Unfortunately, not all poor or abandoned children could join the workforce and become useful members of society immediately after being found, usually because they were too young or too uneducated. Making children above the age of four useful was fairly easy, and many were forced into apprenticeships arranged by the local parish or a charity sponsored their entry into the workforce.
There were two aims underpinning essays and pamphlets that tried to “solve” the overpopulation issue: getting children off the streets and making them useful members of society. Calling every well-meaning government official, budding philanthropist, and cynical politician: it’s time to write a pamphlet. The idea that reproduction could be harnessed for the economic gain of a nation naturally leads to an examination of how to harness the existing children that are currently being “burthens” on society. Sussman goes on to examine the various “colonial afterlives” of political arithmetic in her article, one of which is “the idea that biological reproduction could be aligned with national productivity” (113). This practice reappears in the theories of Thomas Malthus and concerns over “redundant ” or “surplus” populations after the eighteenth century.
According to Charlotte Sussman, political arithmetic is “the process of calculating the financial worth of a population” (96) that was practiced in the eighteenth century. However, it is also a perverse example of the political arithmetic that was applied to poor or abandoned children during the eighteenth century. Ī Modest Proposal is a satirical essay directed at mercantilist policies that were harming Ireland’s peasant population during the eighteenth century. Title page of the 1729 publication of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
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