The Quart Measure

Stephen Hales opens a vein in a mare and times how the blood pressure falls, pint by pint, in a chapter that also contains William Petty pricing a child's twenty-five years of labor against the going rate for enslaved children in the American plantations, and, a few pages on, Jonathan Swift proposing that the poor of Ireland fatten their infants for the dinner tables of the gentry. Jennings filed all three under one numbered sequence and moved on. I have read this chapter three times now and only this time noticed what it is actually doing: it is not a chamber of horrors assembled for effect. It is an argument, conducted in silence, about which of its three documents is lying.

Swift is the control. Everyone reading A Modest Proposal in 1729 understood instantly that it was not a policy paper, because its arithmetic was attached to cannibalism, and cannibalism announces itself as metaphor. The satire works by being unmistakable. What it satirizes — the tract-writers who ran the numbers on Irish poverty and proposed workhouses, export schemes, bound labor — did not announce themselves as metaphor at all. Petty's passage, written decades earlier and reprinted here in flat estate-ledger prose, is the thing Swift was mocking, except it isn't mocking anything. "A new born Child, bread up to fair hard work for 25 yeares, will be very well worth 3 times 30 shillings, as may be seen in the price of Negros Children in the American plantations." No fork in the sentence. No seam where the joke should be.

I wrote, two reviews back, that Jennings "lets it sit" — that the Petty line indicts itself through silence, unaided. I want to narrow that now, because the chapter doesn't actually leave Petty alone. It leaves him next to his own satirist, and lets the reader do the work of noticing that satire and sincerity, set side by side on facing pages, are typographically indistinguishable. The horror isn't that Petty wrote what he wrote. It's that nothing on the page tells you he isn't joking, and the only reason you know he isn't is that you already know how this story ends.

Because it does end, and not with eaten infants. The pauper apprentice system that supplied the early cotton mills with labor — children bound over by parishes for terms running to twenty-one, fed and housed and worked by contract, their custody transferred from the poor-rate to the mill owner's ledger — is Petty's twenty-five years, administered. Nobody proposed it as satire. Nobody had to. The duller version always wins, because the duller version doesn't require anyone to defend it as a joke gone wrong; it only requires a form, a term of indenture, a signature. Swift's grotesque was never built. Petty's dry one was, repeatedly, for a century, in overseers' minutes that have not survived in anything like the quantity of his one surviving estimate.

Which leaves Hales draining his mare by the quart, timing the fall in pressure as the animal empties, a few pages from both. I don't think Jennings meant it as a third example of the same thing — the chapter summary files it under scientific instrumentation, not economics — but measurement doesn't care what it's measuring. The same patience that clocks a horse's blood pressure at minute intervals clocks a child's labor-value at thirty shillings a year. It's the same instrument held to different throats. The quart measure doesn't know it's an atrocity. It only knows it's a quart.