when he should be busy over his journal and his ledger,
he was glancing at some of the causes which conduced
to his own failure as a merchant. And when he
cautions the beginner against going too fast, and
holds up to him as a type and exemplar the carrier’s
waggon, which “keeps wagging and always goes
on,” and “as softly as it goes”
can yet in time go far, we may be sure that he was
thinking of the over-rashness with which he had himself
embarked in speculation.
There can be no doubt that eager and active as Defoe
was in his trading enterprises, he was not so wrapt
up in them as to be an unconcerned spectator of the
intense political life of the time. When King
James aimed a blow at the Church of England by removing
the religious disabilities of all dissenters, Protestant
and Catholic, in his Declaration of Indulgence, some
of Defoe’s co-religionists were ready to catch
at the boon without thinking of its consequences.
He differed from them, he afterwards stated, and “as
he used to say that he had rather the Popish House
of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungaria,
than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both
Protestants and Papists by overrunning Germany,”
so now “he told the Dissenters he had rather
the Church of England should pull our clothes off by
fines and forfeitures, than the Papists should fall
both upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull
our skins off by fire and faggot.” He probably
embodied these conclusions of his vigorous common sense
in a pamphlet, though no pamphlet on the subject known
for certain to be his has been preserved. Mr.
Lee is over-rash in identifying as Defoe’s a
quarto sheet of that date entitled “A Letter
containing some Reflections on His Majesty’s
declaration for Liberty of Conscience.”
Defoe may have written many pamphlets on the stirring
events of the time, which have not come down to us.
It may have been then that he acquired, or made a valuable
possession by practice, that marvellous facility with
his pen which stood him in such stead in after-life.
It would be no wonder if he wrote dozens of pamphlets,
every one of which disappeared. The pamphlet then
occupied the place of the newspaper leading article.
The newspapers of the time were veritable chronicles
of news, and not organs of opinion. The expression
of opinion was not then associated with the dissemination
of facts and rumours. A man who wished to influence
public opinion wrote a pamphlet, small or large, a
single leaf or a tract of a few pages, and had it
hawked about the streets and sold in the bookshops.
These pamphlets issued from the press in swarms, were
thrown aside when read, and hardly preserved except
by accident. That Defoe, if he wrote any or many,
should not have reprinted them when fifteen years afterwards
he published a collection of his works, is intelligible;
he republished only such of his tracts as had not
lost their practical interest. If, however, we
indulge in the fancy, warranted so far by his describing
himself as having been a young “author”
in 1683, that Defoe took an active part in polemical
literature under Charles and James, we must remember
that the censorship of the press was then active, and
that Defoe must have published under greater disadvantages
than those who wrote on the side of the Court.
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