himself in the _Review_ to exhort, persuade, entreat, and in the most
moving terms he was capable of, prevail on all people in general to
STUDY PEACE."

Under cover of this profession of impartiality, Defoe issued most
effective attacks upon the High-Church party. In order to promote peace,
he said, it was necessary to ascertain first of all who were the enemies
of peace. On the surface, the questions at stake in the elections were,
the privileges of the Dissenters and the respective rights of the Lords
and the Commons in the matter of Money Bills. But people must look
beneath the surface. "King James, French power, and a general turn of
affairs was at the bottom, and the quarrels between Church and
Dissenters only a politic noose they had hooked the parties on both
sides into." Defoe lashed the Tackers into fury by his exhortations to
the study of peace. He professed the utmost good-will to them
personally, though he had not words-strong enough to condemn their
conduct in tacking the Occasional Bill to a Money Bill when they knew
that the Lords would reject it, and so in a moment of grave national
peril leave the army without supplies. The Queen, in dissolving
Parliament, had described this tacking as a dangerous experiment, and
Defoe explained the experiment as being "whether losing the Money Bill,
breaking up the Houses, disbanding the Confederacy, and opening the
door to the French, might not have been for the interest of the
High-Church." Far be it from him to use Billingsgate language to the
Tackers, but "the effect of their action, which, and not their motive,
he had to consider, would undoubtedly be to let in the French, depose
the Queen, bring in the Prince of Wales, abdicate the Protestant
religion, restore Popery, repeal the Toleration, and persecute the
Dissenters." Still it was probable that the Tackers meant no harm.
_Humanum est errare_. He was certain that if he showed them their error,