Big-endians and Little-endians

The Big-endians and Little-endians are the two warring religious factions in the empire of Lilliput, whose conflict over the proper end at which to break an egg serves as Jonathan Swift's most concentrated satire of the European religious wars and the trivial origins of devastating political schisms. The dispute, which has cost tens of thousands of lives and driven the two empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu into a prolonged and bloody war, began with a domestic accident: the present emperor's grandfather, while still a boy, cut his finger breaking an egg according to the ancient practice—that is, on the larger end. His father, the reigning emperor, responded by publishing an edict commanding all subjects, under great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. This decree provoked such resentment that six rebellions arose, during which one emperor lost his life and another his crown. The exiles from these civil commotions constantly fled to the neighboring empire of Blefuscu, whose monarchs fomented the unrest. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have, at various times, suffered death rather than submit to breaking their eggs at the smaller end. The books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. The Big-endian exiles found so much credit at the court of Blefuscu, and so much private assistance from their party at home, that a bloody war has been carried on between the two empires for six-and-thirty moons, with various success; during which time Lilliput has lost forty capital ships and a much greater number of smaller vessels, together with thirty thousand of its best seamen and soldiers, while the damage received by the enemy is reckoned somewhat greater. The Blefuscu navy, equipped with a numerous fleet, is preparing to make a descent upon Lilliput when Gulliver arrives. The Lilliputian emperor, placing great confidence in Gulliver's valor and strength, commands Reldresal, the principal secretary for private affairs, to lay this account before him. Gulliver, after capturing the entire Blefuscu fleet, refuses the emperor's demand to reduce Blefuscu to a province and destroy the Big-endian exiles, a refusal that becomes the first cause of the emperor's lasting enmity and the subsequent conspiracy against Gulliver. The Big-endian controversy is thus not merely a background detail but the engine of the plot's central political crisis and the moral pivot on which Gulliver's integrity is tested. The Big-endian and Little-endian schism is presented as a direct parallel to the religious wars of Europe, particularly the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. The Lilliputian emperor, standing upon the advantage he had gained by the seizure of their fleet, obliges the Blefuscu ambassadors to deliver their credentials and make their speech in the Lilliputian tongue, a gesture of political and linguistic domination that mirrors the imposition of religious orthodoxy. The Big-endian exiles, who have fled to Blefuscu, are the counterparts of the Huguenots or other religious refugees who fled persecution in one European state to find shelter in another, only to become instruments of foreign policy. The absurdity of the entire conflict is underscored by the text of the Lilliputian prophet Lustrog, whose fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (their Alcoran) states that "all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end." The question of which end is convenient, as Reldresal himself admits, seems to be left to every man's conscience or, at least, in the power of the chief magistrate to determine. The war, therefore, is fought over an ambiguity that the contending parties refuse to acknowledge. The Big-endian controversy is also the lens through which the King of Brobdingnag views the entire history of Europe. When Gulliver gives him an account of English affairs over the past century, the king is perfectly astonished, protesting that it is only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments—the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce. The king's verdict, delivered while stroking Gulliver gently, is that the bulk of his natives are "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." This judgment, which Gulliver reports with indignation, is the direct consequence of the Big-endian and Little-endian conflict, which the king sees as a microcosm of European folly. The Big-endian controversy thus functions as a structural and thematic key to the entire work: it is the cause of the war that Gulliver intervenes in, the reason for his fall from favor, and the ultimate evidence, in the Brobdingnagian king's eyes, of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of European civilization.