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Truly the Lilliputians are a plague on all human interests, real patriotism, and capacity: always mischievous, always incapable, just the same now as when, in the eighteenth century, their type forced a peaceful and neutral Power into war because they refused to yield their fleet to them; always seeing things that do not exist, and foreboding perils that would never have come but for their dwarfish interference.
It was also commanded that six hundred persons should act as his servants; that three hundred tailors were to make for him a suit of clothes; and that six professors from the University were to teach him the language of the country. When Gulliver could speak the language, he learned a great deal about the land in which he now found himself. It was called Lilliput, and the people, Lilliputians.
His love of liberty is thus expressed: I believe in the absolute freedom of every human being so long as the rights of others are left undisturbed. Conformity too often cuts down our stature and makes us Lilliputians, no longer units but unities. Help me to stand alone and I will help you to right the universe.
Each day we had a conference with one side or the other, the Government having asked us to remain and see things settled. While each side was fencing for an advantage, a good-sized schooner sailed into the harbour, brought up alongside the steamer, and was seen to begin unloading dry fish. A dash was made for her by the boats as before; only this time it was the attack of Lilliputians on Gulliver.
Romantic episodes there may be, but their true place is in the theatre of time of which they are the movers, not the Lilliputians of life who are slowly worked on and moulder by them, and whose small doings are the material of most novels. We know of few novelists who have touched at all successfully on the less known characters. This accomplishment seems to need the great poet himself.
The reader may please to observe, that, in the last article of the recovery of my liberty, the emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1724 Lilliputians.
Yet more remarkable is the skill of the author in maintaining the probability of the allegory. When living among the Lilliputians, Gulliver insensibly adopts their ideas of size. He admires as much as they the prowess of the horseman who clears his shoe at a single leap.
Some time after, asking a friend at court, how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me, that his majesty's mathematicians having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded, from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians.
Hercules got up, swept them all into the lion's skin which he used as a cloak, and went on his way, shaking out his small tormentors from their prison as though they were so many ants. It seems fairly certain that Swift derived the initial scene in his story of Gulliver's adventures among the Lilliputians from this legend.
Somewhere in the tangle of refuse boughs the swampers' axes click-clocked, saws uttered their grating, rhythmic snarl, and great trees at intervals shivered, groaned, and fell with soft, rushing, cracking sweeps into the deep snow, and the swampers swarmed upon them like Lilliputians attacking a giant enemy. She began to take on culpability.
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