An Essay on Projects | Page 8

must lie; it is none of my
business.
I wish they would search into it whose power can punish it. But this,
with submission, I presume to say: The king is thereby defrauded and
horribly abused, the true intent and meaning of Acts of Parliament
evaded, the nation involved in debt by fatal deficiencies and interests,
fellow-subjects abused, and new inventions for taxes occasioned.
The last chapter in this book is a proposal about entering all the seamen
in England into the king's pay--a subject which deserves to be enlarged
into a book itself; and I have a little volume of calculations and
particulars by me on that head, but I thought them too long to publish.
In short, I am persuaded, was that method proposed to those gentlemen
to whom such things belong, the greatest sum of money might be raised
by it, with the least injury to those who pay it, that ever was or will be
during the war.
Projectors, they say, are generally to be taken with allowance of
one-half at least; they always have their mouths full of millions, and
talk big of their own proposals. And therefore I have not exposed the
vast sums my calculations amount to; but I venture to say I could
procure a farm on such a proposal as this at three millions per annum,
and give very good security for payment--such an opinion I have of the
value of such a method; and when that is done, the nation would get

three more by paying it, which is very strange, but might easily be
made out.
In the chapter of academies I have ventured to reprove the vicious
custom of swearing. I shall make no apology for the fact, for no man
ought to be ashamed of exposing what all men ought to be ashamed of
practising. But methinks I stand corrected by my own laws a little, in
forcing the reader to repeat some of the worst of our vulgar
imprecations, in reading my thoughts against it; to which, however, I
have this to reply:
First, I did not find it easy to express what I mean without putting down
the very words--at least, not so as to be very intelligible.
Secondly, why should words repeated only to expose the vice, taint the
reader more than a sermon preached against lewdness should the
assembly?--for of necessity it leads the hearer to the thoughts of the
fact. But the morality of every action lies in the end; and if the reader
by ill-use renders himself guilty of the fact in reading, which I designed
to expose by writing, the fault is his, not mine.
I have endeavoured everywhere in this book to be as concise as
possible, except where calculations obliged me to be particular; and
having avoided impertinence in the book, I would avoid it too, in the
preface, and therefore shall break off with subscribing myself,
Sir, Your most obliged, humble servant D. F.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION.

Necessity, which is allowed to be the mother of invention, has so
violently agitated the wits of men at this time that it seems not at all
improper, by way of distinction, to call it the Projecting Age. For
though in times of war and public confusions the like humour of
invention has seemed to stir, yet, without being partial to the present, it
is, I think, no injury to say the past ages have never come up to the
degree of projecting and inventing, as it refers to matters of negotiation
and methods of civil polity, which we see this age arrived to.
Nor is it a hard matter to assign probable causes of the perfection in this
modern art. I am not of their melancholy opinion who ascribe it to the
general poverty of the nation, since I believe it is easy to prove the
nation itself, taking it as one general stock, is not at all diminished or

impoverished by this long, this chargeable war, but, on the contrary,
was never richer since it was inhabited.
Nor am I absolutely of the opinion that we are so happy as to be wiser
in this age than our forefathers; though at the same time I must own
some parts of knowledge in science as well as art have received
improvements in this age altogether concealed from the former.
The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human
knowledge, is a sufficient proof of what I say, especially in conducting
armies and in offensive engines. Witness the now ways of rallies,
fougades, entrenchments, attacks, lodgments, and a long et cetera of
new inventions which want names, practised in sieges and
encampments; witness the new forts of bombs and unheard-of mortars,
of seven to ten ton