freedom led him to join with them, and,
carried away by the tide of popular
excitement, he armed and followed the Duke of
Monmouth's standard. "This was all very
well for a patriot, but it was not very
well for a tradesman. Nor was it the only
time during his commercial career that he
grasped the sword df shouldered the gun
as a rebel and a revolutionist. A short
time previous to the flight of James the
Second from the country he had endeavoured
to betray, and the temper and character
of whose people he so egregiously
misunderstood, Defoe, unable to confine his
attention to his business, threw in his lot with the
Revolution. No sooner did the news of
the landing and advance of the Prince of
Orange arrive in London, than Defoe, then
in his twenty- eventh year, mounted his
horse, and rode out, well armed and equipped,
to meet the army of liberation at Henley-
on-Thames. Though he had no occasion
to fight for the cause he had adopted, he
was ready to do so, and marched back with
the army towards the capital. On the 18th
of December, the Prince of Orange made
his triumphal entry into London, and
Defoe, full of the greatness of the occasion,
narrates, "that it was with inexpressible
joy that he heard delivered, at the bar of
the House of Lords, in a message from the
Commons, by Mr. Hampden, of
Buckinghamshire, 'that it is inconsistent with the
constitution of this Protestant kingdom to
be governed by a Popish prince.' " And
Defoe not only offered his sword when it
might have been needed, but for years
afterwards gave his time, his intellect, and
his pen to the cause he had at heart,
writing and publishing a series of tracts
and pamphlets in support of the principles
of the Revolution.

After a time his commercial affairs
began, as was not at all extraordinary
under the circumstances, to be seriously
disordered; and in 1692 an angry creditor
took out a commission of bankruptcy
against him. This, however, was soon
superseded on the petition of other
creditors, who had faith in Defoe's probity, by
whose means a composition was effected.
Ten years afterwards, when Defoe had
made many enemies by his writings among
the Jacobite party, and even among his
own friends, by a satire entitled The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a
political opponent bore striking testimony
to his commercial integrity. "I must do
one piece of justice to the man," says
Turchin, in a Dialogue between a
Dissenter and Observator, "though I love him
no better than you do. It is this; that
meeting a gentleman in a coffee-house when
I, and everybody else, were railing at him,
the gentleman took us up with this short
speech. Gentlemen, said he, I know this
Defoe as well as any of you, for I was one
of his creditors, who compounded with him,
and discharged him fully. Several years
afterwards he sent for me, and though he
was clearly discharged, he paid me all the
remainder of the debt, voluntarily and of
his own accord, and he told me that so far
as God should enable him, he intended to
do the same with everybody. When he
had done, he desired me to set my hand to
a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily
did, and found a great many names in the
paper before me; and I think myself bound
to own it, though I am no friend to the
book he wrote, no more than you are."

The hosiery business had not prospered
with Defoe the soldier; neither did that of
a trade in skins and furs, in which he
afterwards became interested. His thoughts
were on affairs of state, and not in his
ledger and daybook. To aid him to pay
his way in the world, he accepted, about the
year 1700, the office of secretary to a
company established near Tilbury in Essex, for
the manufacture of bricks and pantiles.
He ultimately became owner of this concern,
and devoted to its interest as much
time as he could spare from the cause, by
no means assured in that day, of religious
liberty. Had he left off writing, and attended
solely to his bricks and pantiles he
might have become a rich, a prosperous,
and contented citizen; and left a fortune,
though possibly not a name, behind him.
But Defoe was a born political genius, and
was never happy but when he had the pen
in his hand, using it in defence of the
right, in denunciation of the wrong,
sometimes earnestly, sometimes jestingly, but
always forcibly. He had the art of placing
himself so exactly in the position of his
fictitious characters, as to make the world
believe them to be real. His unlucky
satire, A Short Way with the Dissenters, in
which he assumed the part of an intolerant
persecutor who would serve the Dissenters
of England as Torquemada did the religious
malcontents of Spain, deceived both parties.
The high Tories of the time at first believed
the book to be genuine, and were never
weary of chanting its praises. The
Dissenters also believed it to be the true
utterances of a persecutor who meant what he
said, and were equally loud in its
condemnation. But when it came to be known
that Defoe was the author, its real object was