INTRODUCTION


It is sometimes thought, and very often said, that political writing,
after its special day is done, becomes more dead than any other kind
of literature, or even journalism. I do not know whether my own
judgment is perverted by the fact of a special devotion to the
business, but it certainly seems to me that both the thought and the
saying are mistakes. Indeed, a rough-and-ready refutation of them is
supplied by the fact that, in no few cases, political pieces have
entered into the generally admitted stock of the best literary things.
If they are little read, can we honestly say that other things in the
same rank are read much more? And is there not the further plea, by no
means contradictory, nor even merely alternative, that the best
examples of them are, as a rule, merged in huge collected 'Works,' or,
in the case of authors who have not attained to that dignity, simply
inaccessible to the general? At any rate my publishers have consented
to let me try the experiment of gathering certain famous things of the
sort in this volume, and the public must decide.

I do not begin very early, partly because examples of the Elizabethan
political pamphlet, or what supplied its place, will be given in
another volume of the series exclusively devoted to the pamphlet
literature of the reigns of Eliza and our James, partly for a still
better reason presently to be explained. On the other hand, though
another special volume is devoted to Defoe, the immortal _Shortest Way
with the Dissenters_ is separated from the rest of his work, and given
here. Most of the contents, however, represent authors not otherwise