MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. 93

 

 

ings, sham actions, and malicious prosecutions I speak of, are practised upon
me, since I am pushing at a party daily in lampoons, ballads, and clandestine
scandals; and that I must expect no other till I lay down this paper and all

other scribbles of such a nature... .. I have frequently answered this, as
to all the papers cried about in my name, assuring the world they have none
of them been wrote byme..... As to laying down the pen, or discontinuing

the subject I am upon, though I claim a privilege to be judge when I ought
to go backward or forward, yet to answer the proposal as to a cessation of pen
and ink debates, I shall make them a fair offer, which he that gives himself
the trouble to move me in it may make use of to the other party. Whenever
he will demonstrate they are inclined to peace, whenever the high-church party
will cease tacking of bills, invading the toleration, raising ecclesiastical alarms
against the dissenters and low-church ; will cease preaching up division, perse-
cution, and ruin of their protestant brethren; when all the crowd of high-
church advocates, Rehearsers, Observers, Leflectors, Whippers, Drivers [names
of periodicals and signatures of writers of that period] will declare a truce ;—
when these conditions may be observed I fairly promise to be so far a contri-
butor to the public peace, as to lay this [the Review] down, and turn the paper
to the innocent discourses of trade and the matters of history, first proposed.
Indeed, I must do so of course; for the peace will be then made, the end
answered, and consequently the argument useless.”

Such was De Foe’s popularity at this time, that he had to warn the publie
that printers, to make their pamphlets sell, affixed his name to things he “had
no concern in, erying them about the streets as mine ; nay, and at last are come
to that height of injury as to print my name to every scandalous trifle. . . .
I entreat my friends once for all, that whenever they meet with a penny or half-
penny paper, sold or cried about in the streets, they would conclude them not
mine. I never write penny papers, this excepted [the Review], nor ever shall,
unless my name is publicly set to them.”

In two years of comparative retirement, during a portion of which he
was compelled entirely to cease from labour on account of severe affliction,
upwards of thirty very considerable works proceeded from his pen, in addition
to the Review; now issued three times a week He also published the second
volume of his collected writings. It would be impossible to give even the
title-pages of these works here, but two of the opinions, in his “Giving Alms
no Charity,” are so pointed that we cannot avoid quoting them.

On vagrancy he says:—‘“No man that has limbs and his senses need beg;
and those that have not ought to be put in a condition not to want it, so that
begging is a mere scandal in the general. In the able, ’tis a scandal upon their
industry; and in the impotent, ’tis a scandal upon the country.”

His theory of population differs widely from the popular Malthusian theory
of the English political economists of the present day, and both in language
and sentiment corresponds with the principles so ably expounded by our fellow-
citizen, Henry C. Carey. “TI cannot but note that the glory, the strength, the
riches, the trade and all that is valuable in a nation as to its figure in the