generous as to make me your wife, you may promise yourself all the obedience and tenderness with which gratitude can inspire a virtuous woman. Whatever gratifications you may promise yourself from an agreeable person; whatever compliances from an easy temper; whatever consolations from a sincere friendship, you may expect as the due of your generosity. What at present in your ill view you promise yourself from me, will be followed by distaste and satiety; but the transports of a virtuous love are the least part of its happiness. The raptures of innocent passion are but like lightning to the day; they rather interrupt than advance the pleasure of it. How happy then is that life to be, where the highest pleasures of sense are but the lowest parts of its felicity!

Now am I to repeat to you the unnatural request of taking me in direct terms. I know there stands between me and that happiness, the haughty daughter of a man who can give you suitably to your fortune. But if you weigh the attendance and behaviour of her who comes to you in partnership of your fortune, and expects an equivalent, with that of her who enters your house as honoured and obliged by that permission, whom of the two will you choose? You, perhaps, will think fit to spend a day abroad in the common entertainments of men of sense and fortune; she will think herself ill used in that absence, and contrive at home an expense proportioned to the appearance which you make in the world. She is in all things to have a regard to the fortune which she brought you; I, to the fortune to which you introduce me. The commerce between you two will eternally have the air of a bargain; between us, of a friendship: joy will ever enter into the room with you, and kind wishes attend my benefactor when he leaves it. Ask yourself how would

you be pleased to enjoy for ever the pleasure of having laid an immediate obligation on a grateful mind? Such will be your case with me. In the other marriage, you will live in a constant comparison of benefits, and never know the happiness of conferring or receiving any.

'It may be you will, after all, act rather in the prudential way, according to the sense of the ordinary world. I know not what I think or say, when that melancholy reflection comes upon me; but shall only add more, that it is in your power to make me your grateful wife, but never your abandoned mistress.'

T

No. 200. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1711.

Vincit amor patriæ.·

VIRG. EN. vi. 823.

The noblest motive is the public good.

THE ambition of princes is many times as hurtful to themselves as their people. This cannot be doubted of such as prove unfortunate in their wars, but it is often true too of those who are celebrated for their successes. If a severe view were to be taken of their conduct, if the profit and loss by their wars could be justly balanced, it would be rarely found that the conquest is sufficient to repay the cost.

As I was the other day looking over the letters of my correspondents, I took this hint from that of Philarithmus; which has turned my present thoughts pon political arithmetic, an art of greater use than

entertainment. My friend has offered an Essay towards proving that Lewis XIV. with all his acquisitions, is not master of more people than at the beginning of his wars; nay, that for every subject he had acquired, he had lost three that were his inheritance. If Philarithmus is not mistaken in his calculations, Lewis must have been impoverished by his ambition.

The prince, for the public good, has a sovereign property in every private person's estate; and consequently his riches must increase or decrease in proportion to the number and riches of his subjects. For example; if sword or pestilence should destroy all the people of this metropolis, God forbid there should be room for such a supposition! but if this should be the case, the queen must needs lose a great part of her revenue, or at least what is charged upon the city must increase the burden upon the rest of her subjects. Perhaps the inhabitants here are not above a tenth part of the whole; yet as they are better fed, and clothed, and lodged, than her other subjects, the customs and excises upon their consumption, the imposts upon their houses, and other taxes, do very probably make a fifth part of the whole revenue of the crown. But this is not all; the consumption of the city takes off a great part of the fruits of the whole island; and as it pays such a proportion of the rent or yearly value of the lands in the country, so it is the cause of paying such a proportion of taxes upon those lands. The loss, then, of such a people must needs be sensible to the prince, and visible to the whole kingdom.

On the other hand, if it should please God to drop from heaven a new people equal in number and riches to the city, I should be ready to think their excises, customs, and house-rent would raise as great a re

venue to the crown as would be lost in the former case. And as the consumption of this new body would be a new market for the fruits of the country, all the lands, especially those most adjacent, would rise in their yearly value, and pay greater yearly taxes to the public. The gain in this case would be as sensible as the former loss.

Whatsoever is assessed upon the general, is levied upon individuals. It were worth the while then to consider what is paid by, or by means of, the meanest subjects, in order to compute the value of every subject to the prince.

For my own part, I should believe that seveneighths of the people are without property in themselves, or the heads of their families, and forced to work for their daily bread; and that of this sort there are seven millions in the whole island of Great Britain and yet one would imagine that seveneighths of the whole people should consume at least three-fourths of the whole fruits of the country. If this is the case, the subjects without property pay three-fourths of the rents, and consequently enable the landed men to pay three-fourths of their taxes. Now if so great a part of the land-tax were to be divided by seven millions, it would amount to more than three shillings to every head. And, thus as the poor are the cause, without which the rich could not pay this tax, even the poorest subject is, upon this account, worth three shillings yearly to the prince.

Again; one would imagine the consumption of seven-eighths of the whole people should pay twothirds of all the customs and excises. And if this sum too should be divided by seven millions, viz. the number of poor people, it would amount to more than seven shillings to every head; and therefore

with this and the former sum every poor subject, without property, except of his limbs or labour, is worth at least ten shillings yearly to the sovereign. So much then the queen loses with every one of her old, and gains with every one of her new subjects.

When I was got into this way of thinking, I presently grew conceited of the argument, and was just preparing to write a letter of advice to a member of parliament, for opening the freedom of our towns and trades, for taking away all manner of distinctions between the natives and foreigners, for repealing our laws of parish settlements, and removing every other obstacle to the increase of the people. But as soon as I had recollected with what inimitable eloquence my fellow-labourers had exaggerated the mischiefs of selling the birth-right of Britons for a shilling*; of spoiling the pure British blood with foreign mixtures; of introducing a confusion of languages and religions, and of letting in strangers to eat the bread out of the mouths of our own people, I became so humble as to let my project fall to the ground, and leave my country to increase by the ordinary way of generation.

As I have always at heart the public good, so I am ever contriving schemes to promote it; and I think I may without vanity pretend to have contrived some as wise as any of the castle-builders. I had no sooner given up my former project, but my head was presently full of draining fens and marshes, banking out the sea, and joining new lands to my country; for since it is thought impracticable to increase the people to the land, I fell immediately to

* This is an ironical allusion to some of the popular arguments that had been urged in the year 1708, when a bill was brought in for the naturalization of foreign protestants; which, on account of the odium raised against it, did not pass into a law.