first and highest concern." Such scraps of rhetorical logic were but as
straws in the storm of anti-warlike passion that was then raging. Nor
did Defoe succeed in turning the elections by addressing "to the good
people of England" his _Six Distinguishing Characters of a Parliament
Man_, or by protesting as a freeholder against the levity of making the
strife between the new and the old East India Companies a testing
question, when the very existence of the kingdom was at stake. His
pamphlets were widely distributed, but he might as soon have tried to
check a tempest by throwing handfuls of leaves into it. One great
success, however, he had, and that, strangely enough, in a direction in
which it was least to be anticipated. No better proof could be given
that the good-humoured magnanimity and sense of fair-play on which
English people pride themselves is more than an empty boast than the
reception accorded to Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_. King William's
unpopularity was at its height. A party writer of the time had sought to
inflame the general dislike to his Dutch favourites by "a vile pamphlet
in abhorred verse," entitled _The Foreigners_, in which they are loaded
with scurrilous insinuations. It required no ordinary courage in the
state of the national temper at that moment to venture upon the line of
retort that Defoe adopted. What were the English, he demanded, that they
should make a mock of foreigners? They were the most mongrel race that
ever lived upon the face of the earth; there was no such thing as a
true-born Englishman; they were all the offspring of foreigners; what
was more, of the scum of foreigners.

"For Englishmen to boast of generation
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction."