ABSTRACT
Gulliver's sarcasm expresses the paradox made familiar by Montaigne that savages and even cannibals are less savage than their conquerors, a paradox also eloquently invoked by those liberal churchmen who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries challenged the self-justifying arguments of the conquerors of America. Gulliver's praise of British colonists is a sudden and complete reversal of his previous cynical disillusion, and expresses the total opposite of Swift's own view. It is moreover possible to feel that part of the compassion for the 'harmless People', like the pity for the Irish, exists in order to highlight Swift's loathing for the oppressor rather than as a sign of tenderness for the oppressed, and that this emphasis is experienced even more clearly in the passage from the last chapter of Gulliver's Travels than in the Irish tracts. The Houyhnhnm Assembly in Gulliver's Travels was similarly given to debating 'Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth'.
