Still puzzled why lawyers injure others for hire, the master needs money explained. Gulliver describes metals, wages, and how the rich live on the poor's labour while the masses scrape daily pay. England, he says, could feed itself three times over yet ships away necessities to import disease, folly, and vice, forcing crowds into begging, theft, gaming, scribbling, and worse. The master cannot imagine costly meats or thirst in a fertile land.
Gulliver answers with global trade so absurd a gentlewoman's breakfast circles the earth three times, then describes wine as reason suspended and bodies inflamed. He turns to medicine: humans eat against nature, breed five hundred maladies, and pay physicians who cure by vomiting filth made from serpents, toads, and dead men's flesh, then purge through the wrong orifice. Imaginary illnesses get imaginary cures; when a patient improves after a death sentence, the doctor gives a seasonable dose to protect his reputation. At mention of a minister, the master demands the species.
Gulliver paints the chief minister: no joy or grief, only greed; truth spoken to be disbelieved, lies to be believed; praise means you are forlorn; promises are the worst mark. Three paths to power: sell a woman, betray a predecessor, or rage against court corruption you plan to join. The palace breeds pages in insolence, lying, and bribery; a decayed wench or footman finally governs. When the master compliments Gulliver's birth, Gulliver denies nobility: idle luxury, diseased heirs, pale skin as status, and lords who enact and void law without appeal.
Coming Up in Chapter 34
The master will sit Gulliver at a distance, an honour never offered before, and say humans use their pittance of reason only to worsen corruption. Yahoo food fights and hidden stones will be offered as the mirror he cannot answer.
