with dexterous strokes, representing them as the
confused reasoning of well-meaning but dull intellects, and dances with
lively mockery on the fragments. If the authors of such arguments knew
their own minds, they would be entirely on his side. He echoes the pet
prejudices of his readers as the props and mainstays of his thesis, and
boldly laughs away misgivings of which they are likely to be half
ashamed. He makes no parade of logic; he is only a plain freeholder like
the mass whom he addresses, though he knows twenty times as much as many
writers of more pretension. He never appeals to passion or imagination;
what he strives to enlist on his side is homely self-interest, and the
ordinary sense of what is right and reasonable. There is little
regularity of method in the development of his argument; that he leaves
to more anxious and elaborate masters of style. For himself he is
content to start from a bold and clear statement of his own opinion, and
proceeds buoyantly and discursively to engage and scatter his enemies as
they turn up, without the least fear of being able to fight his way back
to his original base. He wrote for a class to whom a prolonged
intellectual operation, however comprehensive and complete, was
distasteful. To persuade the mass of the freeholders was his object, and
for such an object there are no political tracts in the language at all
comparable to Defoe's. He bears some resemblance to Cobbett, but he had
none of Cobbett's brutality; his faculties were more adroit, and his
range of vision infinitely wider. Cobbett was a demagogue, Defoe a
popular statesman. The one was qualified to lead the people, the other
to guide them. Cobbett is contained in Defoe as the less is contained in
the greater.

King William obtained a standing army from Parliament, but not so large
an army as he wished, and it was soon afterwards still further reduced.
Meantime, Defoe employed his pen in promoting objects which were dear to
the King's heart. His _Essay on Projects_--which "relate to Civil Polity
as well as matters of negoce"--was calculated, in so far as it
advocated joint-stock enterprise, to advance one of the objects of the
statesmen of the Revolution, the committal of the moneyed classes to the
established Government, and against a dynasty which might plausibly be
mistrusted of respect for visible accumulations of private wealth.
Defoe's projects were of an extremely varied kind. The classification
was not