Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/221

N° 39. . The dissenters took liberty of conscience and employments from the late king James, as an acknowledgment of his dispensing power; which makes a king of England as absolute as the Turk. The whigs, under the late king, perpetually declared for keeping up a standing army in times of peace; which has, in all ages, been the first and great step to the ruin of liberty. They were besides discovering every day their inclinations to destroy the rights of the church, and declared their opinion in all companies against the bishops sitting in the house of peers; which was exactly copying after their predecessors of 1641. I need not say, their real intentions were to make the king absolute; but whatever be the designs of innovating men, they usually end in a tyranny; as we may see by a hundred examples in Greece, and in the later commonwealths of Italy mentioned by Machiavel.

In the third place, the whigs accuse us of a design to bring in the pretender; and to give it a greater air of probability, they suppose the queen to be a party in this design; which, however, is no very extraordinary supposition in those, who have advanced such singular paradoxes concerning Greg and Guiscard. Upon this article their charge is general, without ever offering to produce an instance. But I verily think and believe, it will appear no paradox, that if ever he be brought in, the whigs are his men. For first, it is an undoubted truth, that a year or two after the Revolution, several leaders of that party had their pardons sent them by the late king James; and had entered upon measures to restore him, on account of some disobligation they received from king William. Besides, I would ask, Rh