The pen of Defoe was never plied more busily than while he was in prison. He wrote more church defiances during his year of confinement in Newgate than in any other year of his chequered life. Other persons were equally busy, and in all forms of pamphlet, tract, and broadsheet, the press poured forth its volumes of contention. All classes of society seemed to catch the contagion. Dean Swift, in London at the time, declared that the contention between Church and Dissent was so universal, that the dogs in the streets took it up, and the cats debated the question by night on the tops of the houses; yea, the very ladies were so split asunder into High Church and Low Church, and were so warm in their disputes, as to have no time to say their prayers. It was in the midst of this excitement that Samuel Wesley’s letter was published by Clavel, and that his controversy with Palmer took place. But besides having Palmer for an antagonist, Wesley was attacked by his old schoolfellow, the redoubtable Daniel Defoe. This was in a pamphlet published in 1704, and which was probably written in Newgate prison. It was entitled “More Short Ways with the Dissenters.” The Queen having been obliged to dismiss her High Church Cabinet, on account of the storm that had been raised by their attempts to pass the “Occasional Conformity Bill,” and thereby to suppress the Dissenters, Defoe alleges that now another scheme was being concocted for the accomplishment of the self—same purpose. The “new attempt struck at the root of the Dissenters’ interest. It would effectually destroy the succession of them in the nation; for it was intended to prevent them educating their children in their own opinions.”