he beginner against going too fast, and holds up to him as a type and
exemplar the carrier's waggon, which "keeps wagging and always goes on,"
and "as softly as it goes" can yet in time go far, we may be sure that
he was thinking of the over-rashness with which he had himself embarked
in speculation.

There can be no doubt that eager and active as Defoe was in his trading
enterprises, he was not so wrapt up in them as to be an unconcerned
spectator of the intense political life of the time. When King James
aimed a blow at the Church of England by removing the religious
disabilities of all dissenters, Protestant and Catholic, in his
Declaration of Indulgence, some of Defoe's co-religionists were ready to
catch at the boon without thinking of its consequences. He differed from
them, he afterwards stated, and "as he used to say that he had rather
the Popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungaria,
than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestants and
Papists by overrunning Germany," so now "he told the Dissenters he had
rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and
forfeitures, than the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the
Dissenters, and pull our skins off by fire and faggot." He probably
embodied these conclusions of his vigorous common sense in a pamphlet,
though no pamphlet on the subject known for certain to be his has been
preserved. Mr. Lee is over-rash in identifying as Defoe's a quarto sheet
of that date entitled "A Letter containing some Reflections on His
Majesty's declaration for Liberty of Conscience." Defoe may have written
many pamphlets on the stirring events of the time, which have not come
down to us. It may have been then that he acquired, or made a valuable
possession by practice, that marvellous facility with his pen which
stood him in such stead in after-life. It would be no wonder if he wrote
dozens of pamphlets, every one of which disappeared. The pamphlet then
occupied the place of the newspaper leading article. The newspapers of
the time were veritable chronicles of news, and not organs of opinion.
The expression of opinion was not then associated with the dissemination
of facts and rumours. A man who wished to influence public opinion wrote
a pamphlet, small or large, a single leaf or a tract of a few pages, and
had it hawked about the streets and sold in the bookshops. These
pamphlets issued from the press in swarms, were thrown as