Paragraph 10: Swift’s narrator recommends that most of the one-year-old children of
poor Irish mothers be used as food, with just a fraction being allowed to grow to maturity
so that they can have children to raise to be sold and butchered at one year of age. As we
do with animals, we can use one male to fertilize more than one female:
I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and
twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved
for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males […].