Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/281

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CERTAIN ABUSES, ETC.
271

giving that denomination to our whole party; as if they would signify, that the kingdom could never be cleansed, until we were swept from the earth like rubbish. But, since that happy turn of times, when we were so miraculously preserved, by just an inch, from popery, slavery, massacre, and the pretender, I must own it is prudence in us still to go on with the same cry; which has ever since been so effectually observed, that the true political dirt is wholly removed, and thrown on its proper dunghills, there to corrupt and be no more heard of.

But to proceed to other enormities: every person who walks the streets, must needs observe an immense number of human excrements, at the doors and steps of waste houses, and at the sides of every dead wall; for which the disaffected party has assigned a very false and malicious cause: they would have it, that these heaps were laid there privately by British fundaments, to make the world believe that our Irish vulgar do daily eat and drink; and consequently that the clamour of poverty among us, must be false, proceeding only from jacobites and papists. They would confirm this, by pretending to observe, that a British anus, being more narrowly perforated than one of our own country, and many of these excrements, upon a strict view, appearing copple crowned, with a point like a cone or pyramid, are easily distinguished from the Hibernian, which lie much flatter, and with less continuity. I communicated this conjecture to an eminent physician, who is well versed in such profound speculations; and at my request, was pleased to make trial with each of his fingers, by thrusting them into the anus of several persons of both nations, and professed he could

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