Thus late in life did Defoe lay the first stone of his literary reputation.  He was now in the thirty-eighth year of his age, his controversial genius in full vigour, and his mastery of language complete.  None of his subsequent tracts surpass this as a piece of trenchant and persuasive reasoning.  It shows at their very highest his marvellous powers of combining constructive with destructive criticism.  He dashes into the lists with good-humoured confidence, bearing the banner of clear common sense, and disclaiming sympathy with extreme persons of either side.  He puts his case with direct and plausible force, addressing his readers vivaciously as plain people like himself, among whom as reasonable men there cannot be two opinions.  He cuts rival arguments to pieces 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