must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours, and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings. He asked what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet. Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army, in the midst of peace, and among á free people. He said, if we were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion, whether a private man's house, might not better be defended by himself, his children, and family, than by half a dozen rascals, picked up at a venture in the streets, for small wages, who might get a hundred times more, by cutting their throats. He laughed at my odd kind of arithmetick, (as he was pleased to call it) in reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation drawn from the several sects among us, in religion and politicks. He said, he knew no reason why those, who entertain opinions prejudicial to the publick, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government, to require the first, so it was weakness, not to enforce the second for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials. He observed, that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I had mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time it employed: whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes: whether mean vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not arrive at great riches, and sometimes keep our very nobles in dependance, as well as habituate them to vile companions; wholly take them from the improvement of their minds, and force them, by the losses they received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon others. * He was perfectly astonished, with the historical account I gave him of our affairs, during the last century; protesting it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce. His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made, with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyrick upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those, whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any Receiving a loss, is certainly not a good expression; it should be, the losses they sustained.' one one perfection is required, toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled, on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced, for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors, for their wisdom. As for yourself, continued the king, who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains* wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be, the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. CHAP. VII. The author's love of his country. He makes a proposal of much advantage to the king, which is rejected. The king's great ignorance in politicks. The learning of that country very imperfect and confined. The laws, and military affairs, and parties in the state. NOTHING but an extreme love of truth, could have hindered me from concealing this part of my * Instead of wringed, it should have been, wrung.' story. It was in vain to discover my resentments, which were always turned into ridicule; and I was forced to rest with patience, while my noble and beloved country, was so injuriously treated. I am as heartily sorry as any of my readers can possibly be, that such an occasion was given: but this prince happened to be so curious and inquisitive upon every particular, that it could not consist either with gratitude or good manners, to refuse giving him what satisfaction I was able. Yet thus much I may be allowed to say in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favourable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness of truth would allow. For I have always born that laudable partiality to my own country, which Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with so much justice, recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavour, in those many discourses I had with that monarch, although it unfortunately failed of success. But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the manners and customs, that most prevail in other nations the want of which knowledge, will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which, we, and the politer countries of Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a prince's notions of virtue and vice, were to be offered as a standard for all mankind. To confirm what I have now said, and farther to show the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall here insert a passage, which will hardly obtain belief. In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his majesty's favour, I told him of an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into a heap of which, the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, although it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. That a proper quantity of this powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron, according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron or lead, with such violence and speed, as nothing was able to sustain its force. That the largest balls thus discharged, would not only destroy whole ranks of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls to the ground, sink down ships, with a thousand men in each, to the bottom of the sea; and when linked together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging, divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all waste before them. That we often put this powder into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them by an engine into some city we were besieging, which would rip up the pavements, tear the houses to pieces, burst and throw splinters on every side, dashing out the brains of all who came near. That I knew the ingredients very well, which were cheap and common; I understood the manner of compounding them, and could direct his workmen how to make those tubes, of a size portionable to all other things in his majesty's kingdom, and the largest need not be above a hundred feet long; twenty or thirty of which tubes, charged with the proper quantity of powder and balls, would batter L 4 pro |