Gulliver's Travels (Swift)/Part 2/Chapter 7
from the Collection “Gulliver's Travels. Part 2”
The division of this summary into sections is editorial.
In the kingdom of Brobdingnag, Gulliver reflected on his conversations with its giant king. Although he had tried to present England favourably, the king’s questions had led to judgments that offended his patriotism.
Gulliver admitted that he had evaded questions and distorted the truth to defend his country. He blamed the king’s opinions on his isolation from the customs of Europe.
An offer of devastating weapons
Hoping to gain further favour, Gulliver told the king about gunpowder and the destruction it could cause. Cannon could break walls, sink ships and slaughter soldiers; explosive shells could tear apart a besieged city. Gulliver offered to direct the manufacture of powder and enormous cannon, which could subdue any town or even the capital if it resisted the king.
The king was horrified that so small a creature could describe such bloodshed without emotion. He said he would rather lose half his kingdom than know the secret, and ordered Gulliver never to mention it again on pain of death.
Gulliver found the refusal inexplicable: despite praising the king’s wisdom and virtues, he considered it a needless scruple to reject a means of gaining absolute power over his people.
The king’s view of government
Gulliver attributed this supposed defect to the kingdom’s ignorance of politics as a science. When he had mentioned the thousands of English books on government, however, the king had taken them as evidence of poor understanding. Gulliver recalled the king’s attitude to political cunning:
He professed both to abominate and despise all mystery, refinement, and intrigue, either in a prince or a minister.
The king valued reason, justice, mercy and swift legal decisions. In his view, someone who made land produce twice as much food did more for humanity and the country than all politicians together.
Books, laws and human weakness
Gulliver described the kingdom’s learning as limited to morality, history, poetry and mathematics, the last applied to practical pursuits such as farming and crafts. Laws were written in plain language and could contain no more words than the alphabet’s twenty-two letters; writing a commentary on one was a capital crime.
The king’s library held fewer than a thousand giant volumes. To read them, Gulliver used a movable staircase in Glumdalclitch’s room, walking back and forth along each line and descending as he reached the bottom of a page.
Among his reading was an old moral treatise belonging to Glumdalclitch’s governess. Its author lamented human weakness and argued that people had once been much larger, citing enormous bones as evidence. Gulliver reflected that such complaints about nature might be as poorly founded among Europeans as among the giants.
A disciplined militia and a history of conflict
The kingdom’s army consisted of farmers and tradesmen commanded without pay by nobles and gentry. Gulliver watched the militia of the capital, Lorbrulgrud, exercise outside the city. The sight of its cavalry drawing and brandishing their swords astonished him:
It looked as if ten thousand flashes of lightning were darting at the same time from every quarter of the sky.
Gulliver wondered why a country inaccessible to foreigners needed an army. Conversation and history showed him that nobles had struggled for power, the people for liberty and kings for absolute rule. These conflicts had caused civil wars; the present king’s grandfather had ended the last one through a general settlement, after which the militia was established by common consent.