ion will be, Whether you will join with
those who must in the end run the same fate with you? If Protestants
of all sorts, in their behaviour to one another, have been to blame,
they are upon more equal terms, and, for that very reason, it is
fitter for them now to be reconciled. Our disunion is not only a
reproach, but a danger to us. Those who believe in modern miracles
have more right, or at least more excuse, to neglect all secular
caution; but for us, it is as justifiable to have no religion as
wilfully to throw away the human means of preserving it.--I am, Dear
Sir, your most affectionate humble Servant, T.W.

II.--'THE SHORTEST WAY WITH THE DISSENTERS'

BY DANIEL DEFOE

(_Defoe wrote an enormous number of pamphlets; for great part of his
life he might almost have been described as a pamphleteer pure and
simple. In the vast lists of publications which his biographers and
bibliographers have compiled, partly by industry and partly by
imagination, by far the larger number of entries is of the pamphlet
kind. Indeed, as most people know, Defoe did not take to the
composition of the fiction which has made his name famous till very
late in life. Born in the year 1661, he began pamphleteering when he
was scarcely of age, and continued in that way (with occasional
excursions into work larger in scale, but not very different in style
or matter) for nearly forty years before the publication of _Robinson
Crusoe_. His two most famous and most effective pamphlets were the
so-called _Legion Letter_ and _The Shortest Way with the Dissenters_
(given here), to which may perhaps be added the _Reasons against War
with France_. All these, with many others, appeared within the
compass of the years 1700-1702. The three together touched upon the
three most burning questions of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries--parliamentary factiousness, an aggressive policy
abroad, and toleration at home. Little or no annotation is required
for their comprehension, but the reader may amuse himself if he likes
by meditating whether the _Shortest Way_ is irony or not. My own
opinion is that it is not; being a simple statement of the actual
views of the other side. The anecdotic history of the piece--how it
was taken for serious by both sides, was prosecuted by Government, the
author proclaimed, and a reward offered for his detection; how, the
printer and publisher being arrested, Defoe surrendered, was tried,
pleaded guilty