Humans (Europeans at least) according to Swift

A great paragraph from Gulliver’s Travel:

​His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

This paragraph is great satire by Jonathan Swift. I bolded the best parts for those too lazy to read. Gulliver tried to present his country, England, as best he could. But even so, humans suck so bad that it is painfully obvious that humans are pernicious odious vermin. 

I had a difficult time getting into the story. I fond it was best to just keep going and appreciate the funny parts as they arise. Now I'm in. I get Gulliver a lot better. He is a very intelligent person, but is naive and lacks the ability to make sense of his travels and experiences. I look forward to rereading Gulliver's Tarvels in the future.