Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/407

Rh ; and then we must be content with such conditions, as our allies, out of their great concern for our safety and interest, will please to choose. They have no farther occasion for fighting, they have gained their point, and they now tell us it is our war; so that, in common justice, it ought to be our peace.

All we can propose by the desperate steps of pawning our land or malt tax, or erecting a general excise, is only to raise a fund of interest for running us annually four millions farther in debt, without any prospect of ending the war so well as we can do at present. And when we have sunk, the only unengaged revenues we had left, our incumbrances must of necessity remain perpetual.

We have hitherto lived upon expedients, which, in time, will certainly destroy any constitution, whether civil or natural; and there was no country in Christendom had less occasion for them than ours. We have dieted a healthy body into a consumption, by plying it with physick instead of food. Art will help us no longer, and if we cannot recover by letting the remains of nature work, we must inevitably die.

What arts have been used to possess the people with a strong delusion, that Britain must infallibly be ruined, without the recovery of Spain to the house of Austria! making the safety of a great and powerful kingdom, as ours was then, to depend upon an event, which, after a war of miraculous successes, proves