"for want of wit or from too much wit;" but lest he should be supposed
to allude to his own misfortunes, he does not say that he miscarried
himself, but that he "had seen in a few years' experience many young
tradesmen miscarry." At the same time it is fair to conjecture that when
Defoe warns the young tradesman against fancying himself a politician or
a man of letters, running off to the coffee-house when he ought to be
behind the counter, and reading Virgil and Horace when he should be busy
over his journal and his ledger, he was glancing at some of the causes
which conduced to his own failure as a merchant. And when he cautions
the 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,