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In Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, how do the little people deal with Gulliver's large appetite? What qualities do they reveal?

At first, the Lilliputians consider starving Gulliver because they recognize that it is going to be very costly to feed him; however, they then consider how difficult his carcass will be to get rid of if he dies, and they fear the contagion that could spread around the kingdom as a result.  They decide initially to feed him while they figure out what they want to do with him in the long term, bringing him several cows, dozens of sheep, a large quantity of bread and wine, etc., each morning.  Eventually, they figure out that Gulliver's body is the equivalent of 1728 of theirs, and so he will require 1728 times more food each day than each of them.  Swift, therefore, encourages his audience to consider the Lilliputians' "Ingenuity" in addition to "the prudent and exact Economy of so great a Prince."  It is clear that they also have some skill in Mathematics, and they are very practical and unemotional in this sense: they opt to keep Gulliver alive because it is ultimately the lesser of two evils. 

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