Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 10.djvu/218

210 it. They add some other circumstances, of the arts by which it was obtained, and the person by whom it was inserted. Surely such people do not consider, that the penal laws against dissenters, were made wholly ineffectual, by the connivance and mercy of the government; so that all employments of the state, lay as open to them as they did to the best and most legal subjects. And what progress they would have made, by the advantages of a lace conjunction, is obvious to imagine; which I take to be a full answer to that objection.

I remember, upon the transmission of that bill with the test-clause inserted, the dissenters and their partizans, among other topicks, spoke much of the good effects produced by the lenity of the government: that the presbyterians were grown very inconsiderable in their number and quality, and would daily come into the church, if we did not fright them from it by new severities. When the act was passed, they presently changed their style, and raised a clamour through both kingdoms, of the great numbers of considerable gentry who were laid aside, and could no longer serve their queen and country; which hyperbolical way of reckoning, when it came to be melted down into truth, amounted to about fifteen country justices, most of them of the lowest size, for estate, quality, or understanding. However, this puts me in mind of a passage told me by a great man, although I know not whether it be any where recorded: That a complaint was made to the king and council of Sweden, of a prodigious swarm of Scots, who, under the condition of pedlars, infested that kingdom to such a degree, as, if not suddenly prevented, might in time prove dangerous to the state, by