ffice. They would collect
the customs, and gauge the beer barrels. Our Navigation Laws would be
virtually repealed. Every merchant ship that cleared out from the
Thames or the Severn would be manned by Zealanders and Hollanders and
Frieslanders. To our own sailors would be left the hard and perilous
service of the royal navy. For Hans, after filling the pockets of his
huge trunk hose with our money by assuming the character of a native,
would, as soon as a pressgang appeared, lay claim to the privileges of
an alien. The intruders would soon rule every corporation. They would
elbow our own Aldermen off the Royal Exchange. They would buy the
hereditary woods and halls of our country gentlemen. Already one of the
most noisome of the plagues of Egypt was among us. Frogs had made their
appearance even in the royal chambers. Nobody could go to Saint James's
without being disgusted by hearing the reptiles of the Batavian marshes
croaking all round him; and if this bill should pass, the whole country
would be as much infested by the loathsome brood as the palace already
was.

The orator who indulged himself most freely in this sort of rhetoric
was Sir John Knight, member for Bristol, a coarseminded and spiteful
Jacobite, who, if he had been an honest man, would have been a nonjuror.
Two years before, when Mayor of Bristol, he had acquired a discreditable
notoriety by treating with gross disrespect a commission sealed with the
great seal of the Sovereigns to whom he had repeatedly sworn allegiance,
and by setting on the rabble of his city to hoot and pelt the Judges.
[503] He now concluded a savage invective by desiring that the
Serjeant at Arms would open the doors, in order that the odious roll of
parchment, which was nothing less than a surrender of the birthright
of the English people, might be treated with proper contumely. "Let us
first," he said, "kick the bill out of the House; and then let us kick
the foreigners out of the kingdom."

On a division the motion for committing the bill was carried by a
hundred and sixty-three votes to a hundred and twenty-eight. [504] But
the minority was zealous and pertinacious; and the majority speedily
began to waver. Knight's speech, retouched and made more offensive, soon
appeared in print without a license. Tens of thousands of copies were
circulated by the post, or dropped in the streets; and such was the
strength of national prejudice that too many persons read this ribaldry
with