beneath. Nor is it to argue too nicely, to suggest that our present sympathy for the past pain, our amazement, and our horror, are, after all, our own unconscious tributes to the power of the man who calls them up, and our confession of the lasting validity of his criticism.

This is not the power nor is it the kind of criticism that are the elements of the art of the journalist. Perhaps we should be glad that it is not; which is but to say that we are content with things as they exist. It requires a special set of conditions to precipitate a Swift. Happily, if we will have it so, the conditions in which we find ourselves ask for that kind of journalist whose function is amply fulfilled when he has measured the movements of the hour by the somewhat higher standards of the day. The conditions under which Swift lived demanded a journalist of an entirely different calibre; and they got him. They obtained a man who dissolved the petty jealousies of party power in the acid of satire, and who distilled the affected fears for Church and State in the alembic of a statesmanship that establishes a nation's majesty and dignity on the common welfare of its free people. When Swift, at the beginning of the November of 1710, was called in to assist the Tory party by undertaking the work of "The Examiner," he found a condition of things so involved and so unstable, that it required the very nicest appreciation, the most delicate handling, and the boldest of hearts to readjust and re-establish, without fearful consequences. Harley and St. John were safely housed, and, apparently, amply protected by a substantial majority. But majorities are often not the most trustworthy of supports. Apart from the over-confidence which they inspire, and apart from the danger of a too-enthusiastic following, such as found expression in the October Club, there was the danger which might come from the dissatisfaction of the people at large, should their temper be wrongly gauged; and at this juncture it was not easy to gauge. The popularity of

Marlborough and his victories, on the one hand, was undoubted. On the other, however, there was the growing opinion that those victories had been paid for at a price greater than England could afford. If she had gained reputation and prestige, these could not fill the mouths of the landed class, gradually growing poorer, and the members of this class were not of a disposition to restrain their feelings as they noted the growing prosperity of the Whig stockjobbers-a prosperity that was due to the very war which was beggaring them. If the landed man cried for peace, he was answered by the Whig stock-jobber that peace meant the ultimate repudiation of the National Debt, with the certainty of the reign of the Pretender. If the landed man spoke for the Church, the Whig speculator raised the shout of "No Popery!" The war had transformed parties into factions, and the ministry stood between a Scylla of a peaceat-any-price, on the one side, and a Charybdis of a war-atany-price on the other; or, if not a war, then a peace so one-sided that it would be almost impossible to bring it about.

In such troubled waters, and at such a critical juncture, it was given to Swift to act as pilot to the ship of State. His papers to "The Examiner" must bear witness to the skill with which he accomplished the task set before him. His appeal to the people of England for confidence in the ministry, should be an appeal not alone on behalf of its distinguished and able members, but also on behalf of a policy by which "the crooked should be made straight and the rough places plain." Such was to be the nature of his appeal, and he made it in a series of essays that turned every advantage with admirable effect to the side of his clients. Not another man then living could have done what he did; and we question if either Harley or St. John ever realized the service he rendered them. The later careers of these two men furnish no doubtful hints of what

might have happened at this period had Swift been other than the man he was.

But Swift's "Examiners" did much more than preserve Harley's head on his shoulders; they brought the nation to a calmer sense of its position, and tutored it to a juster appreciation of the men who were using it for selfish ends. Let us make every allowance for purely special pleadings; for indulgence in personal feeling against the men who had either disappointed, injured, or angered him; for the party man affecting or genuinely feeling party bitterness; for the tricks and subterfuges of the paid advocate appealing to the passions and weaknesses of those whose favour he was seeking to win; allowing for these, there are yet left in these papers a noble spirit of wide-eyed patriotism, and a distinguished grasp of the meaning of national greatness and national integrity.

The pamphleteers whom he opposed, and who opposed him, were powerless against Swift. Where they pried with the curiosity and meanness of petty dealers, Swift's insight seized on the larger relations, and insisted on them. Where they "bantered," cajoled, and sneered, arousing a very mild irritation, Swift's scornful invective, and biting satire silenced into fear the enemies of the Queen's chosen ministers. Where their jejune "answers " gained a simper, Swift's virility of mind, range of power, and dexterity of handling, compelled a homage. His Whig antagonists had good reason to dread him. He scoffed at them for an existence that was founded, not on a devotion to principles, but on a jealousy for the power others enjoyed. bulk of the Whigs appears rather to be linked to a certain set of persons, than any certain set of principles." To these persons also he directed his grim attention. Somers, Cowper, Godolphin, Marlborough, and Wharton were each drawn with iron stylus and acid. To Wharton he gave special care (he had some private scores to pay off), and in

"The

the character of Verres, he etched the portrait of a profligate, an unscrupulous governor, a scoundrel, an infidel to his religion and country, a reckless, selfish, low-living blackguard. In the Letter to Marcus Crassus, Marlborough is addressed in language that the simplest farm-labourer could understand. The letter is a lay sermon on the vice of avarice, and every point and illustration are taken from Marlborough's life with such telling application that Marlborough himself must have taken thought as he read it. "No man," Swift finely concludes, "of true valour and true understanding, upon whom this vice has stolen unawares ; when he is convinced he is guilty, will suffer it to remain in his breast an hour."

But these attentions to the Whigs as a party and as individuals were, after all, but the by-play of the skilled orator preparing the minds of his hearers for the true purpose in hand. That purpose may originally have been to fix the ministry in the country's favour; but Swift having fulfilled it, and so discharged his office, turned it, as indeed he could not help turning it, and as later in the Drapier's Letters he turned another purpose, to the persuasion of an acceptance of those broad principles which so influenced political thought during the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. It is with these principles in his mind that Dr. Johnson confessed that Swift "dictated for a time the political opinions of the English nation." He recalled the nation to a consideration of the Constitution; he attributed to the people (because, of course, they had elected the new ministry into power) an appreciation of what was best for the protection of their ancient privileges and rights. The past twenty years had been a period of mismanagement, in which the Constitution had been ignored; "but the body of the people is wiser; and by the choice they have made, shew they do understand our Constitution, and would bring it back to the old form." "The nation has groaned under

the intolerable burden of those who sucked her blood for gain. We have carried on wars, that we might fill the pockets of stock-jobbers. We have revised our Constitution, and by a great and united national effort, have secured our Protestant succession, only that we may become the tools of a faction, who arrogate to themselves the whole merit of what was a national act. We are governed by upstarts, who are unsettling the landmarks of our social system, and are displacing the influence of our landed gentry by that of a class of men who find their profit in our woes." The rule of the tradesman must be replaced by the rule of those whose lives are bound up with the land of their country. The art of government was not "the importation of nutmegs, and the curing of herrings;" but the political embodiment of the will of "a Parliament freely chosen, without threatening or corruption," and "composed of landed men" whose interests being in the soil would be at one with the interests of those who lived on the soil. Whigs and Tories may dispute as they will among themselves as to the best side from which to defend the country; but the men of the true party are the men of the National party-they "whose principles in Church and State, are what I have above related; whose actions are derived from thence, and who have no attachment to any set of ministers, further than as these are friends to the Constitution in all its parts; but will do their utmost to save their Prince and Country, whoever be at the Helm."1

In this spirit and in such wise did Swift temper his time and champion the cause of those men who had chosen him. This was a kind of "examining" to which neither the Whigs nor the Tories had been accustomed. It shed quite a new light on matters, which the country at large was not slow to appreciate. Throughout the length and breadth of the

1. "Examiner," No. 44, p. 290.