It was no part of Defoe's art as a controversialist to seek to correct
popular prejudices; on the contrary, it was his habit to take them for
granted as the bases of his arguments, to work from them as premisses
towards his conclusion. He expressly avowed himself a prohibitionist in
principle.--

"I am far from being of their mind who say that all prohibitions
are destructive to trade, and that wise nations, the
Dutch, make no prohibitions at all."

"Where any nation has, by the singular blessing of God,
a produce given to their country from which such a manufacture
can be made as other nations cannot be without, and
none can make that produce but themselves, it would be distraction
in that nation not to prohibit the exportation of
that original produce till it is manufactured."

He had been taunted with flying in the face of what he had himself said
in King William's time in favour of prohibition. But he boldly
undertakes to prove that prohibition was absolutely necessary in King
William's time, and not only so, but that "the advantages we may make of
taking off a prohibition now are all founded upon the advantages we did
make of laying on a prohibition then: that the same reason which made a
prohibition then the best thing, makes it now the maddest thing a nation
could do or ever did in the matter of trade." In King William's time,
the balance of trade was against us to the extent of 850,000 l., in
consequence of the French King's laying extravagant duties upon the
import of all our woollen manufactures.

"Whoever thinks that by opening the French trade I