Gulliver opens with an apology he does not quite mean. Only love of truth makes him tell how his noble country was injuriously treated, though he eluded many questions and gave every point a more favourable turn than strict truth would allow, hiding the frailties of his political mother as any partial historian would. To confirm the king's narrowness, he offers what he thinks is a generous tribute: the secret of gunpowder, a heap that kindles like a mountain, tubes that drive iron balls through ranks and walls, chains that cut masts and bodies, hollow balls that rip pavements and dash out brains, all from cheap ingredients he can teach the king's workmen to build at Brobdingnag scale until the strongest town falls in hours. The king is struck with horror. He is amazed that so impotent and grovelling an insect could entertain such inhuman ideas in so familiar a manner, as if blood and desolation were ordinary; some evil genius must have first contrived them. He would rather lose half his kingdom than learn the secret and commands Gulliver, on pain of life, never to mention it again. Gulliver calls this a strange effect of narrow principles and short views, blaming the king's secluded ignorance while Swift's irony runs underneath. When Gulliver boasts of thousands of books on government, the king despises mystery and secrets of state without a rival nation involved, confines governing to common sense, justice, lenity, and speedy causes, and prefers the person who can make two ears of corn grow where one grew before to the whole race of politicians. Their learning runs to morality, history, poetry, and useful mathematics; no law may exceed twenty, two words; commenting on a law is capital crime. Gulliver reads from a ladder, machine twenty, five feet high, turning folio pages like pasteboard, and finds a moral treatise arguing that men were once giants and nature has degenerated, a complaint he thinks as ill, grounded in Brobdingnag as in England. Their army of tradesmen and farmers, commanded without pay by nobility chosen by ballot, drills in a field twenty miles square; twenty, five thousand foot and six thousand horse brandish swords until the air looks like ten thousand lightning flashes. Gulliver wonders why an isolated kingdom needs armies until their histories answer: the same disease afflicts all mankind, nobility contending for power, people for liberty, king for dominion, civil wars ended by the present king's grandfather and a militia kept in strict duty since. The chapter ends with two civilizations facing each other: one offers destruction as gratitude, the other would rather stay ignorant than master it.
Coming Up in Chapter 16
Having failed to impress the king with European 'innovations,' Gulliver will face more challenges to his assumptions about civilization and progress. The cultural clash between his values and Brobdingnagian wisdom continues to deepen Gulliver still expects liberty without knowing how. The king wants a woman of his size to propagate the breed; Gulliver would rather die than leave posterity in cages like tame canaries.
