he argued; “for if you do, then you stand convicted of valuing your liberties more than your religion, which ought to be your first and highest concern.”  Such scraps of rhetorical logic were but as straws in the storm of anti-warlike passion that was then raging.  Nor did Defoe succeed in turning the elections by addressing “to the good people of England” his Six Distinguishing Characters of a Parliament Man, or by protesting as a freeholder against the levity of making the strife between the new and the old East India Companies a testing question, when the very existence of the kingdom was at stake.  His pamphlets were widely distributed, but he might as soon have tried to check a tempest by throwing handfuls of leaves into it.  One great success, however, he had, and that, strangely enough, in a direction in which it was least to be anticipated.  No better proof could be given that the good-humoured magnanimity and sense of fair-play on which English people pride themselves is more than an empty boast than the reception accorded to Defoe’s True-Born Englishman.  King William’s unpopularity was at its height.  A party writer of the time had sought to inflame the general dislike to his Dutch favourites by “a vile pamphlet in abhorred verse,” entitled The Foreigners, in which they are loaded with scurrilous insinuations.  It required no ordinary courage in the state of the national temper at that moment to venture upon the line of retort that Defoe adopted.  What were the English, he demanded, that they should make a mock of foreigners?  They were the most mongrel race that ever lived upon the face of the earth; there was no such thing as a true-born Englishman; they were all the offspring of foreigners; what was more, of the scum of foreigners.

   “For Englishmen to boast of generation
   Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation. 
   A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
   In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.”

* * * * *

   And here begins the ancient pedigree
   That so exalts our poor nobility. 
   ’Tis that from some French trooper they derive,
   Who with the Norman bastard did arrive;
   The trophies of the families appear,
   Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear
   Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear. 
   These in the herald’s register remain,
   Their noble mean extraction to explain,
   Yet who the hero was no man can tell,
   Whether a drummer or colonel;
   The silent record blushes to reveal
   Their undescended dark original.

* * * * *

   “These are the heroes that despise the Dutch
   And rail at new-come foreigners so much;
   Forgetting that themselves are all derived
   From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
   A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
   Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled