_Watchman_ avowed his conviction that national education and a
concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of
any true political amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that
by the time the seventh number was published its predecessors were
being "exposed in sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece."

And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this
immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid
the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which
each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again
and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which
tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The
paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in
places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are
passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary
manner--the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth
century--in a very interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV
containing an effective article like this when No. III. had opened with
an "Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient
Germans, introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and
Politics of present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about
Napoleon and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good
proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content
to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for its
connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian sugar. It
was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind that on
13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid
farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his
periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does
not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge,