The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume IX | Page 3

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. "The 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 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