Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/250

 their revenues, he could not only improve the position of the parish priests on lines consonant with substantial justice, but could also economise half a million a year, which could be paid into the national exchequer. 'If anybody,' he said, 'cried sacrilege, I answer that if the same be employed to defend the Church of God against the Turk and the Pope, and the nations who adhere to them, it is not at all, or less, than to give three fourths of the same to the wives and children of the priests, which were not in being when their allowances were set forth.' He enforced this argument still further by the remark that the unnecessary multiplicity of parishes led, amongst other disadvantages, to an unnecessary multiplicity of sermons. There were in England 10,000 parishes, in each of which there must be about 100 sermons a year preached. This was equal to one million sermons a year, and 'it were a strange miracle,' he said, 'if these sermons composed by so many men, and of so many minds and methods, should produce uniformity upon the discomposed understandings of above eighty millions of hearers.'

The first two series of the 'Essays on Political Arithmetick' were published during the life of the author, but the third part, which is the work more generally known as 'The Political Arithmetick,' was posthumous and did not appear till 1691. The general object of the book was to show 'the weight and importance of the English Crown.' It had probably been commenced after the disaster at Chatham and the Plague and Fire, at a moment of great national despondency, but it was not completed till a far later date, when the superiority of France instead of that of Holland had become the object of national apprehension. The publication of such a book was impossible at a period when the King of England was the pensioner of Louis XIV., the sworn foe of Holland, and money was desired, not to reform the public services, but to supply the pleasures of the Court and to stifle inquiry. Nor was the free manner in which such subjects as