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Did Swift Write "A Discourse on Hereditary" Right?

The fact that the rare anonymous pamphlet entitled A Discourse on Hereditary Right is filed under Swift's name in the National Library of Ireland is hardly a guarantee of its authenticity.2 The librarians themselves admit frankly that the catalog to the National Library Swift Collection cannot pretend to any great bibliographical authority: whether through generosity or hopefulness, the National Library has been rather free with its Swift attributions. Among the many spurious works classified as Swiftian are to be found A Letter to a Young Poet; A Discription [sic] how all states and degrees of men, women and children spend Sunday in Dublin, from the hours of six in the morning, untill nine at night; A Complete Key to a Tale of a Tub; A Letter from Martin Gulliver, to George Faulkner, Printer; and David Bindon's Some Reasons Shewing the Necessity the People of Ireland are under for Continuing to Refuse Mr Wood's Coin.3 Even if Hereditary Right had been examined and judged to be as spurious as these works, one might still have expected it to attract some attention simply as an unusual piece of Swiftiana. The neglect of this pamphlet may well result from the circumstances of its publication: it was first (and, it appears, also last) printed in 1775, long after Swift's death, and it appeared anonymously. The publisher, William Hay, gave his reasons for omitting the author's name in a brief and aggressive preface: "To affix his celebrated Name, relate how it was preserved, and inform the Reader, that it had the sanction of the Author's indorsement, would beget a suspicion of it's [sic] being a spurious, manufactured Catch-penny" (HR, p. 5). This is highly disingenuous, to say the least. He continues in a similar vein: