Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/300

292 such a crowd of people as this, where there is no government at all; their unruliness quelled, and their passions cooled by a particular man, whose great qualities they had known before. Such an assembly must have risen suddenly from the earth, and the man of authority dropped from the clouds; for, without some previous form of government, no such crowd did ever yet assemble, or could possibly be acquainted with the merits and dignity of any particular man among them. But to pursue his scheme; this man of authority, who cools the crowd by degrees, and to whom they all appeal, must of necessity prove either an open, or clandestine tyrant. A clandestine tyrant I take to be a king of Brentford, who keeps his army in disguise, and whenever he happens either to die naturally, be knocked on the head, or deposed, the people "calmly take farther measures, and improve upon what was begun under his unlimited power." All this our author tells us, with extreme propriety, is what seems reasonable to common sense; that is, in other words, it seems reasonable to reason. This is what he calls giving an idea of the original of power, and the nature of civil institutions. To which I answer with great phlegm, that I defy any man alive to show me in double the number of lines, although writ by the same author, such a complicated ignorance in history, human nature, or politicks, as well as in the ordinary properties of thought or of style.

But it seems these profound speculations were only premised to introduce some quotations in favour of resistance. What has resistance to do with the succession of the house of Hanover, that the whig writers should perpetually affect to tack them together?