A LETTER FROM CAPTAIN GULLIVER TO HIS COUSIN SYMPSON.
I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called ‘A Voyage round the world.’ But I do not remember I gave you power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted; therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce ev- ery thing of that kind; particularly a paragraph about her majesty Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious memo- ry; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human species. But you, or your interpolator, ought to have considered, that it was not my inclination, so was it not decent to praise any animal of our composition before my master Houyhnhnm: And besides, the fact was altogether false; for to my knowledge, being in England during some part of her majesty’s reign, she did govern by a chief minis- ter; nay even by two successively, the rst whereof was the lord of Godolphin, and the second the lord of Oxford; so that you have made me say the thing that was not. Likewise in the account of the academy of projectors, and several pas- sages of my discourse to my master Houyhnhnm, you have either omitted some material circumstances, or minced or changed them in such a manner, that I do hardly know my own work. When I formerly hinted to you something of this in a letter, you were pleased to answer that you were afraid of giving o ence; that people in power were very watchful over the press, and apt not only to interpret, but to pun- ish every thing which looked like an innuendo (as I think you call it). But, pray how could that which I spoke so many years ago, and at about ve thousand leagues distance, in another reign, be applied to any of the Yahoos, who now are said to govern the herd; especially at a time when I little thought, or feared, the unhappiness of living under them? Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures? And indeed to avoid so monstrous and detestable a sight was one prin- cipal motive of my retirement hither.
us much I thought proper to tell you in relation to yourself, and to the trust I reposed in you.
I do, in the next place, complain of my own great want of judgment, in being prevailed upon by the entreaties and false reasoning of you and some others, very much against my own opinion, to su er my travels to be published. Pray bring to your mind how o en I desired you to consid- er, when you insisted on the motive of public good, that the Yahoos were a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example: and so it has proved; for, instead of seeing a full stop put to all abuses and corrup- tions, at least in this little island, as I had reason to expect; behold, a er above six months warning, I cannot learn that my book has produced one single e ect according to my in-
tentions. I desired you would let me know, by a letter, when party and faction were extinguished; judges learned and upright; pleaders honest and modest, with some tincture of common sense, and Smith eld blazing with pyramids of law books; the young nobility’s education entirely changed; the physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in virtue, honour, truth, and good sense; courts and levees of great ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; wit, merit, and learning rewarded; all disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink. ese, and a thousand other reformations, I rmly counted upon by your encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deduc- ible from the precepts delivered in my book. And it must be owned, that seven months were a su cient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their na- tures had been capable of the least disposition to virtue or wisdom. Yet, so far have you been from answering my ex- pectation in any of your letters; that on the contrary you are loading our carrier every week with libels, and keys, and re ections, and memoirs, and second parts; wherein I see myself accused of re ecting upon great state folk; of de- grading human nature (for so they have still the con dence to style it), and of abusing the female sex. I nd likewise that the writers of those bundles are not agreed among them- selves; for some of them will not allow me to be the author of my own travels; and others make me author of books to which I am wholly a stranger.
to confound the times, and mistake the dates, of my sev- eral voyages and returns; neither assigning the true year, nor the true month, nor day of the month: and I hear the original manuscript is all destroyed since the publication of my book; neither have I any copy le : however, I have sent you some corrections, which you may insert, if ever there should be a second edition: and yet I cannot stand to them; but shall leave that matter to my judicious and candid read- ers to adjust it as they please.
I hear some of our sea Yahoos nd fault with my sea- language, as not proper in many parts, nor now in use. I cannot help it. In my rst voyages, while I was young, I was instructed by the oldest mariners, and learned to speak as they did. But I have since found that the sea Yahoos are apt, like the land ones, to become new- fangled in their words, which the latter change every year; insomuch, as I remem- ber upon each return to my own country their old dialect was so altered, that I could hardly understand the new. And I observe, when any Yahoo comes from London out of cu- riosity to visit me at my house, we neither of us are able to deliver our conceptions in a manner intelligible to the other.
If the censure of the Yahoos could any way a ect me, I should have great reason to complain, that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a mere ction out of mine own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints, that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhabitants of Utopia.
Brobdingrag (for so the word should have been spelt, and not erroneously Brobdingnag), and Laputa, I have never yet heard of any Yahoo so presumptuous as to dispute their be- ing, or the facts I have related concerning them; because the truth immediately strikes every reader with convic- tion. And is there less probability in my account of the Houyhnhnms or Yahoos, when it is manifest as to the latter, there are so many thousands even in this country, who only di er from their brother brutes in Houyhnhnmland, be- cause they use a sort of jabber, and do not go naked? I wrote for their amendment, and not their approbation. e united praise of the whole race would be of less consequence to me, than the neighing of those two degenerate Houyhnhnms I keep in my stable; because from these, degenerate as they are, I still improve in some virtues without any mixture of vice.
Do these miserable animals presume to think, that I am so degenerated as to defend my veracity? Yahoo as I am, it is well known through all Houyhnhnmland, that, by the instructions and example of my illustrious master, I was able in the compass of two years (although I confess with the utmost di culty) to remove that infernal habit of lying, shu ing, deceiving, and equivocating, so deeply rooted in the very souls of all my species; especially the Europeans.
I have other complaints to make upon this vexatious oc- casion; but I forbear troubling myself or you any further. I must freely confess, that since my last return, some corrup- tions of my Yahoo nature have revived in me by conversing with a few of your species, and particularly those of my own family, by an unavoidable necessity; else I should never have attempted so absurd a project as that of reforming the Ya- hoo race in this kingdom: But I have now done with all such visionary schemes for ever.