In which a cool-headed projector, surveying the swarms of impoverished mothers and children that burden a suffering kingdom, proposes with shocking arithmetic that infants be turned into a profitable commodity, thereby easing poverty, enriching landlords, and delighting the tables of the wealthy. With feigned reasonableness and savage irony, he praises the supposed economic, social, and moral benefits of this monstrous scheme, exposing instead the cruelty, indifference, and hypocrisy of a society that treats its poorest people as expendable.