The Great Debate About Humanity — Gulliver's Travels

About three months before Gulliver leaves, his master represents their district at a grand Houyhnhnm assembly. The only debate their country ever held resumes: whether Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth. Speakers call them filthy, destructive, invasive brutes who suck cows, kill cats, and trample oats, arguing they arrived ages ago from mud or sea foam and should have been replaced by asses long ago. Gulliver's master offers a different expedient borrowed from Gulliver himself. He presents Gulliver as a wonderful Yahoo: artificial skins, human speech, governing Yahoos who castrate Houyhnhnms for service. He proposes castrating young Yahoos instead, which would in an age end the whole species without destroying life, while the nation cultivates asses. What the master reports stops there; he conceals one particular relating personally to Gulliver, whose unhappy effect Gulliver will soon feel. The chapter then sketches Houyhnhnm learning and life: no letters, no physicians, poetry inimitable, rude oak, and, straw houses, hoof, work dexterous enough to thread a needle, calm burials where a widow excuses her lateness because her husband retired to his first mother that morning, and a language with no word for evil except the epithet Yahoo. Gulliver breaks off, promising a future volume, and turns to his own sad catastrophe.