eign of King Charles II. in which we have seen lists of 180 members,
who received private pensions from the court; and if any body should
ask whether that parliament preserved the ballance of power in the
three branches of our constitution, in the due distribution some have
mentioned? I am not afraid to answer in the negative. And why, even
to this day, are gentlemen so fond of spending their estates to sit
in the House, that ten thousand pounds have been spent at a time to be
chosen, and now that way of procuring elections is at an end, private
briberies, and clandestine contrivances are made use of to get into
the House? No man would give a groat to sit, where he cannot get
a groat himself for sitting, unless there were either parties to
gratify, profits to be made, or interest to support. In this case
it is plain a people may be ruined by their representatives, and the
first law of nature, self-preservation, give the people a right to
resent public encroachments upon their valuable liberties.'

In the same volume is a tract entitled The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters, which contained reflexions against some ecclesiastics
in power, for breathing too much a spirit of perfection. He became
obnoxious to the ministry on this account, and was obliged to justify
himself by writing an explanation of it. Mr. De Foe in his preface to
the second volume of his works, collected by himself, takes occasion
to mention the severe hardships he laboured under, occasioned by
those Printers, more industrious than himself, who make a practice of
pirating every work attended with success. As an instance of this kind
of oppression, he mentions the True Born Englishman, by which, had he
enjoyed the full profit of his own labours, he must have gained near a
thousand pounds; for besides nine editions which passed under his own
inspection, this poem was twelve times pirated: but the insolence
of those fraudulent dealers did not stop here. A Printer of a bad
reputation collected a spurious and erroneous copy of several pieces
of De Foe, and entitled them The Works of the Author of the True Born
Englishman; and though he was then embroiled with the government for
one of the pamphlets which this collection contained, yet had this man
the impudence to print amongst them the same pamphlets, presuming so
far upon the partiality of the public resentment, that he should pass
with impunity for publishing that very thing for which the author
was to be