Toleration as we understand it now, and as the Dissenters bore the brunt
of the battle for it then. Before his trial and conviction, while he lay
in prison, he issued an exposition of his views of a fair Toleration in
a tract entitled _The Shortest Way to Peace and Union_. The toleration
which he advised, and which commended itself to the moderate Whigs with
whom he had acted under King William and was probably acting now, was a
purely spiritual Toleration. His proposal, in fact, was identical with
that of Charles Leslie's in the _New Association_, one of the pamphlets
which he professed to take off in his famous squib. Leslie had proposed
that the Dissenters should be excluded from all civil employments, and
should be forced to remain content with liberty of worship. Addressing
the Dissenters, Defoe, in effect, urged them to anticipate forcible
exclusion by voluntary withdrawal. Extremes on both sides should be
industriously crushed and discouraged, and the extremes on the
Dissenting side were those who, not being content to worship after their
own fashion, had also a hankering after the public service. It is the
true interest of the Dissenters in England, Defoe argued, to be governed
by a Church of England magistracy; and with his usual paradoxical
hardihood, he told his co-religionists bluntly that "the first reason of
his proposition was that they were not qualified to be trusted with the
government of themselves." When we consider the active part Defoe
himself took in public affairs, we shall not be surprised that offence
was given by his countenancing the civil disabilities of Dissenters, and
that the Dissenting preachers declined to recognise him as properly
belonging to their body. It was not, indeed, as a Dissenter that Defoe
was prosecuted by the violent Tories then in power, but as the suspected
literary instrument of the great Whig leaders.

This, of course, in no way diminishes the harsh and spiteful impolicy of
the sentence passed on Defoe. Its terms were duly put in execution. The