part in penning those laws, which they assumed the liberty of

interpreting, and glossing upon at their pleasure? Whether they had

ever, at different times, pleaded for and against the same cause, and

cited precedents to prove contrary opinions? Whether they were a rich

or a poor corporation? Whether they received any pecuniary reward for

pleading, or delivering their opinions? And particularly, whether they

were ever admitted as members in the lower senate?”

He fell next upon the management of our treasury; and said, “he thought

my memory had failed me, because I computed our taxes at about five or

six millions a year, and when I came to mention the issues, he found

they sometimes amounted to more than double; for the notes he had taken

were very particular in this point, because he hoped, as he told me,

that the knowledge of our conduct might be useful to him, and he could

not be deceived in his calculations. But, if what I told him were true,

he was still at a loss how a kingdom could run out of its estate, like

a private person.” He asked me, “who were our creditors; and where we

found money to pay them?” He wondered to hear me talk of such

chargeable and expensive wars; “that certainly we must be a quarrelsome

people, or live among very bad neighbours, and that our generals must

needs be richer than our kings.” He asked, what business we had out of

our own islands, unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to

defend the coasts with our fleet?” Above all, he was amazed to hear me

talk of a mercenary standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a

free people. He said, “if we were governed by our own consent, in the

persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were

afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion,

whether a private man’s house might not be better defended by himself,

his children, and family, than by half-a-dozen rascals, picked up at a

venture in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred times

more by cutting their throats?”

He laughed at my “odd kind of arithmetic,” as he was pleased to call

it, “in reckoning the numbers of our people, by a computation drawn

from the several sects among us, in religion and politics.” He said,

“he knew no reason why those, who entertain opinions prejudicial to the

public, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to

conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the

first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be

allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for

cordials.”

He observed, “that among the diversions of our nobility and gentry, I

had mentioned gaming: he desired to know at what age this entertainment

was usually taken up, and when it was laid down; how much of their time

it employed; whether it ever went so high as to affect their fortunes;

whether mean, vicious people, by their dexterity in that art, might not

arrive at great riches, and sometimes keep our very nobles in

dependence, as well as habituate them to vile companions, wholly take

them from the improvement of their minds, and force them, by the losses

they received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon

others?”

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of

our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of

conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments,

the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy,

perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and

ambition, could produce.”

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the

sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the

answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me

gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget,

nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have

made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly

proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients

for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted,

and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting,

confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an

institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but

these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by

corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one

perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among

you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that

priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their

conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love

of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,”

continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in

travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped

many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own

relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted

from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most

pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to

crawl upon the surface of the earth.”