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The concealed man’s honesty saves Gulliver from the Lilliputian state’s deceptions. The Lilliputian state has, according to the man’s account, distorted its previous perspective: where it once accepted Gulliver’s urine as necessary to save the palace, it now views it as disrespectful; where it once accepted Gulliver’s friendliness to the Blefluscans as a mere nuisance, it now considers that friendliness a capital crime. The state’s deceitful plot to blind and starve Gulliver proposes a particularly gruesome abuse of physical power. Gulliver professes ignorance about proceedings of state and thus does not strongly assert his own perspective on the emperor’s cruelty. Still, by unveiling the emperor’s plot to blind and then starve Gulliver and by including this account of the state’s extreme hypocrisy, Swift ensures that the reader’s perspective will not be as conflicted as Gulliver’s seems to be. Indeed, the Lilliputian state is revealed to be brutal and abusive towards its subjects. Gulliver’s reflection functions ironically. Through it, Swift darkly ridicules the brutality of European states by suggesting that the Lilliputian emperor’s horrific plot against Gulliver was “easy…punishment” in comparison to other government’s tactics.