on, whether a private man's
house might not be better defended by himself, his children, and family,
than by half-a-dozen rascals, picked up at a venture in the streets for
small wages, who might get a hundred times more by cutting their
throats?"

He laughed at my "odd kind of arithmetic," as he was pleased to call it,
"in reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation drawn from the
several sects among us, in religion and politics." He said, "he knew no
reason why those, who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public,
should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them.
And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was
weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be allowed to keep
poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials."

He observed, "that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I had
mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment was
usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time it
employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes;
whether mean, vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not
arrive at great riches, and sometimes keep our very nobles in dependence,
as well as habituate them to vile companions, wholly take them from the
improvement of their minds, and force them, by the losses they received,
to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon others?"

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our
affairs during the last century; protesting "it was only a heap of
conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments,
the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness,
cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could
produce."

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the
sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers
I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently,
delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the
manner he spoke them in: "My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most
admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that
ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying
a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by
those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and