length. But the Government would not take this view; he had
represented virulent partisans as being supreme in the Queen's counsels,
and his design was manifest "to blacken the Church party as men of a
persecuting spirit, and to prepare the mob for what further service he
had for them to do." Finding that they would not listen to him, Defoe
surrendered himself, in order that others might not suffer for his
offence. He was indicted on the 24th of February. On the 25th, the
_Shortest Way_ was brought under the notice of the House of Commons, and
ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. His trial came on in July. He
was found guilty of a seditious libel, and sentenced to pay a fine of
200 marks to the Queen, stand three times in the pillory, be imprisoned
during the Queen's pleasure, and find sureties for his good behaviour
for seven years.

Defoe complained that three Dissenting ministers, whose poor he had fed
in the days of his prosperity, had refused to visit him during his
confinement in Newgate. There was, doubtless, a want of charity in their
action, but there was also a want of honesty in his complaint. If he
applied for their spiritual ministrations, they had considerable reason
for treating his application as a piece of provoking effrontery. Though
Defoe was in prison for this banter upon the High-fliers, it is a
mistake to regard him as a martyr, except by accident, to the cause of
Toleration as we understand it now, and as the Dissenters bore the brunt
of the battle for it then. Before his trial and conviction, while he lay
in prison, he issued an exposition of his views of a fair Toleration in
a tract entitled _The Shortest Way to Peace and Union_. The toleration
which he advised, and which commended itself to the moderate Whigs with
whom he had acted under King William and was probably acting now, was a
purely spiritual Toleration. His proposal, in fact, was identical with
that of Charles Leslie's in the _New Association_, one of the pamphlets
which he professed to take off in his famous squib. Leslie had proposed
that the Dissenters should be excluded from all civil employments, and
should be forced to remain content with liberty of worship. Addressing
the Dissenters, Defoe, in effect, urged them to anticipate forcible
exclusion by voluntary withdrawal. Extremes on both sides should be
industriously crushed and discouraged, and the extremes on the
Dissenting side were those who, not being content to worship