pirit with the
_Review_, differing only in the greater openness of its attacks upon the
opposition of the Whigs to the Treaty of Commerce. Party spirit was so
violent that summer, after the publication of the terms of the Treaty of
Utrecht, that Defoe was probably glad to shelter himself under the
responsibility of another name, he had flaunted the cloak of impartial
advice till it had become a thing of shreds and patches.

To prove that the balance of trade, in spite of a prevailing impression
to the contrary, not only might be, but had been, on the side of
England, was the chief purpose of _Mercator_. The Whig _Flying Post_
chaffed _Mercator_ for trying to reconcile impossibilities, but
_Mercator_ held stoutly on with an elaborate apparatus of comparative
tables of exports and imports, and ingenious schemes for the development
of various branches of the trade with France. Defoe was too fond of
carrying the war into the enemy's country, to attack prohibitions or the
received doctrine as to the balance of trade in principle; he fought the
enemy spiritedly on their own ground. "Take a medium of three years for
above forty years past, and calculate the exports and imports to and
from France, and it shall appear the balance of trade was always on the
English side, to the loss and disadvantage of the French." It followed,
upon the received commercial doctrines, that the French King was making
a great concession in consenting to take off high duties upon English
goods. This was precisely what Defoe was labouring to prove. "The French
King in taking off the said high duties ruins all his own manufactures."
The common belief was that the terms of peace would ruin English
manufacturing industry; full in the teeth of this, Defoe, as was his
daring custom, flung the paradox of the extreme opposite. On this
occasion he acted purely as a party writer. That he was never a
free-trader, at least in principle, will appear from the following
extract from his _Plan of the English Commerce_, published in 1728:--

"Seeing trade then is the fund of wealth and power, we
cannot wonder that we see the wisest Princes and States
anxious and concerned for the increase of the commerce and
trade of their subjects, and of the growth of the country;
anxious to propagate the sale of such goods as are the manufacture
of their own subjects, and that employs their own
people; especially of such as keep the money of their dominions