we were yesterday, and to-morrow they will be
like us. If foreigners misbehave in their several stations and
employments, I have nothing to do with that; the laws are open to
punish them equally with natives, and let them have no favour.

But when I see the town full of lampoons and invectives against
Dutchmen, only because they are foreigners, and the king reproached
and insulted by insolent pedants, and ballad-making poets, for
employing foreigners, and for being a foreigner himself, I confess
myself moved by it to remind our nation of their own original, thereby
to let them see what a banter is put upon ourselves in it; since
speaking of Englishmen _ab origine_, we are really all foreigners
ourselves.

I could go on to prove it is also impolitic in us to discourage
foreigners; since it is easy to make it appear that the multitudes of
foreign nations who have taken sanctuary here, have been the greatest
additions to the wealth and strength of the nation; the essential
whereof is the number of its inhabitants; nor would this nation ever
have arrived to the degree of wealth and glory it now boasts of, if
the addition of foreign nations, both as to manufactures and arms,
had not been helpful to it. This is so plain, that he who is ignorant
of it, is too dull to be talked with.

The Satire therefore I must allow to be just, till I am otherwise
convinced; because nothing can be more ridiculous than to hear our
people boast of that antiquity, which if it had been true, would have
left us in so much worse a condition than we are in now: whereas we
ought rather to boast among our neighbours, that we are part of
themselves, of the same original as they, but bettered by our climate,
and like our language and manufactures, derived from them, and
improved by us to a perfection greater than they can pretend to.

This we might have valued ourselves upon without vanity; but to disown
our descent from them, talk big of our ancient families, and long
originals, and stand at a distance from foreigners, like the
enthusiast in religion, with a Stand off, I am more holy than thou:
this is a thing so ridiculous, in a nation derived from foreigners, as
we are, that I could not but attack them as I have done.

And whereas I am threatened to be called to a public account for this
freedom; and the publisher of this has been newspapered into gaol
already for it; tho' I see nothing in it for which the government can
be displeased; yet if