Tories, however, nothing could be done;
and, as they were not to be gratified, they must be appeased; and
the conduct of the Minister, if it could not be vindicated, was to be
plausibly excused.

Early in the next year he published a "Proposal for Correcting,
Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue," in a Letter to the
Earl of Oxford; written without much knowledge of the general nature
of language, and without any accurate inquiry into the history of other
tongues. The certainty and stability which, contrary to all experience,
he thinks attainable, he proposes to secure by instituting an academy;
the decrees of which every man would have been willing, and many would
have been proud, to disobey, and which, being renewed by successive
elections, would in a short time have differed from itself.

Swift now attained the zenith of his political importance: he published
(1712) the "Conduct of the Allies," ten days before the Parliament
assembled. The purpose was to persuade the nation to a peace; and
never had any writer more success. The people, who had been amused with
bonfires and triumphal processions, and looked with idolatry on the
General and his friends, who, as they thought, had made England the
arbitress of nations, were confounded between shame and rage, when they
found that "mines had been exhausted, and millions destroyed," to secure
the Dutch or aggrandise the Emperor, without any advantage to ourselves;
that we had been bribing our neighbours to fight their own quarrel;
and that amongst our enemies we might number our allies. That is now no
longer doubted, of which the nation was then first informed, that the
war was unnecessarily protracted to fill the pockets of Marlborough;
and that it would have been continued without end, if he could have
continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not yet know
what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which would have
appointed him General for life, had it not become ineffectual by the
resolution of Lord Cowper, who refused the seal.

"Whatever is received," say the schools, "is received in proportion to
the recipient." The power of a political treatise depends much upon the
disposition of the people; the nation was then combustible, and a spark
set it on fire. It is boasted, that between November and January eleven
thousand were sold: a great number at that time, when we were not yet
a nation of readers. To its propagation certainly no