"O turn your precepts into laws; Redeem the woman's ruin'd cause; Retrieve lost empire to our sex, That men may bow their rebel necks."
This fact that Swift had a _theory_ on the subject of the proper mode of treating and educating women, which theory was in antagonism to the ideas of his time, explains much both in his conduct as a man and in his habits as a writer.
For the first six years of his exile in Ireland after the death of Queen Anne, Swift had published nothing of any consequence, and had kept aloof from politics, except when they were brought to his door by local quarrels. In 1720, however, he again flashed forth as a political luminary, in a character that could hardly have been anticipated--that of an Irish patriot. Taking up the cause of the "scoundrel-island," to which he belonged by birth, if not by affection, and to which fate had consigned him in spite of all his efforts, he made that cause his own. Virtually saying to his old Whig enemies, then in power on the other side of the water, "Yes, I am an Irishman, and I will show you what an Irishman is," he constituted himself the representative of the island, and hurled it, with all its pent-up mass of rage and wrongs, against Walpole and his administration. First, in revenge for the commercial wrongs of Ireland came his _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Everything Wearable that comes from England_; then, amidst the uproar and danger excited by this proposal, other and other defiances in the same tone; and lastly, in 1723, on the occasion of the royal patent to poor William Wood to supply Ireland, without her own consent, with a hundred and eight thousand pounds' worth of copper half-pence of English manufacture, the unparalleled _Drapier's Letters_, which blasted the character of the coppers and asserted the nationality of Ireland. All Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant, blessed the Dean of St. Patrick's; associations were formed for the defence of his person; and, had Walpole and his Whigs succeeded in bringing him to trial, it would have been at the expense of an Irish rebellion. From that time till his death Swift was the true King of Ireland; only when O'Connell arose did the heart of the nation yield equal veneration to any single chief; and even at this day the grateful Irish, forgetting his gibes against them, and forgetting his continual habit of distinguishing between the Irish population as a whole and the English and Protestant part of it to which he belonged himself, cherish his memory with loving enthusiasm, and speak of him as the "great Irishman." Among the phases of Swift's life this of his having been an Irish patriot and agitator deserves to be particularly remembered.