Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, Volume II

# Museum Catalog Note

This volume of Pigs' Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude collects radical political writings selected by "the Poor Man's Advocate" over twenty years. The publication aims to educate working people about their rights, importance, and social condition. Volume II opens with an opening poem celebrating liberation from tyranny and the awakening of popular consciousness against corrupt institutions. The principal text is an excerpt from Cato's Letters arguing that private citizens have both the right and capacity to judge government, using classical examples (Cincinnatus, Greece, Rome) to demonstrate how popular participation produces virtue and prosperity while tyranny breeds misery. A satirical dream narrative follows, depicting animal societies divided by monarchs whose "Satellites" oppress passive subjects through endless, pointless wars—a transparent allegory of contemporary European political folly and warmongering. The material is reformist, drawing on Enlightenment political philosophy and Biblical authority to construct arguments for popular sovereignty and against hereditary aristocratic rule.