THE POCKET LIBRARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Edited by GEORGE SAINTSBURY A collection, in separate volumes, partly of extracts from long books, partly of short pieces, by the same writer, on the same subject, or of the same class. Vol I.--Tales of Mystery. II.--Political Verse. III.--Defoe's Minor Novels. IV.--Political Pamphlets. V.--Seventeenth Century Lyrics. VI.--Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets. POLITICAL PAMPHLETS EDITED BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY LONDON PERCIVAL AND CO. 1892 CONTENTS I. LETTER TO A DISSENTER. (By George Savile, Marquess of Halifax) II. THE SHORTEST WAY WITH THE DISSENTERS. (By Daniel Defoe) III. THE DRAPIER'S LETTERS. (By Jonathan Swift) To the Tradesmen, Shop-Keepers, Farmers, and Common-People in general, of the Kingdom of Ireland; concerning the Brass half-pence coined by Mr. Wood A Letter to Mr. Harding the Printer, upon occasion of a Paragraph in his News-Paper of August 1, 1724, relating to Mr. Wood's Half-pence IV. SECOND LETTER ON A REGICIDE PEACE. (By the Right Honourable Edmund Burke) V. PETER PLYMLEY'S LETTERS. (By Sydney Smith) VI. LETTER TO THE JOURNEYMEN AND LABOURERS OF ENGLAND, WALES, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND. LETTER TO JACK HARROW. (By William Cobbett) VII. FIRST LETTER OF MALACHI MALAGROWTHER. (By Sir Walter Scott) INTRODUCTION It is sometimes thought, and very often said, that political writing, after its special day is done, becomes more dead than any other kind of literature, or even journalism. I do not know whether my own judgment is perverted by the fact of a special devotion to the business, but it certainly seems to me that both the thought and the saying are mistakes. Indeed, a rough-and-ready refutation of them is supplied by the fact that, in no few cases, political pieces have entered into the generally admitted stock of the best literary things. If they are little read, can we honestly say that other things in the same rank are read much more? And is there not the further plea, by no means contradictory, nor even merely alternative, that the best examples of them are, as a rule, merged in huge collected 'Works,' or, in the case of authors who have not attained to that dignity, simply inaccessible to the general? At any rate my publishers have consented to let me try the experiment of gathering certain famous things of the sort in this volume, and the public must decide.