In such troubled waters, and at such a critical juncture, it was given to Swift to act as pilot to the ship of State. His papers to "The Examiner" must bear witness to the skill with which he accomplished the task set before him. His appeal to the people of England for confidence in the ministry, should be an appeal not alone on behalf of its distinguished and able members, but also on behalf of a policy by which "the crooked should be made straight and the rough places plain." Such was to be the nature of his appeal, and he made it in a series of essays that turned every advantage with admirable effect to the side of his clients. Not another man then living could have done what he did; and we question if either Harley or St. John ever realized the service he rendered them. The later careers of these two men furnish no doubtful hints of what might have happened at this period had Swift been other than the man he was. But Swift's "Examiners" did much more than preserve Harley's head on his shoulders; they brought the nation to a calmer sense of its position, and tutored it to a juster appreciation of the men who were using it for selfish ends. Let us make every allowance for purely special pleadings; for indulgence in personal feeling against the men who had either disappointed, injured, or angered him; for the party man affecting or genuinely feeling party bitterness, for the tricks and subterfuges of the paid advocate appealing to the passions and weaknesses of those whose favour he was seeking to win; allowing for these, there are yet left in these papers a noble spirit of wide-eyed patriotism, and a distinguished grasp of the meaning of national greatness and national integrity.