But these attentions to the Whigs as a party and as individuals were, after all, but the by-play of the skilled orator preparing the minds of his hearers for the true purpose in hand. That purpose may originally have been to fix the ministry in the country's favour; but Swift having fulfilled it, and so discharged his office, turned it, as indeed he could not help turning it, and as later in the Drapier's Letters he turned another purpose, to the persuasion of an acceptance of those broad principles which so influenced political thought during the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. It is with these principles in his mind that Dr. Johnson confessed that Swift "dictated for a time the political opinions of the English nation." He recalled the nation to a consideration of the Constitution; he attributed to the people (because, of course, they had elected the new ministry into power) an appreciation of what was best for the protection of their ancient privileges and rights. The past twenty years had been a period of mismanagement, in which the Constitution had been ignored; "but the body of the people is wiser; and by the choice they have made, shew they do understand our Constitution, and would bring it back to the old form." "The nation has groaned under the intolerable burden of those who sucked her blood for gain. We have carried on wars, that we might fill the pockets of stock-jobbers. We have revised our Constitution, and by a great and united national effort, have secured our Protestant succession, only that we may become the tools of a faction, who arrogate to themselves the whole merit of what was a national act. We are governed by upstarts, who are unsettling the landmarks of our social system, and are displacing the influence of our landed gentry by that of a class of men who find their profit in our woes." The rule of the tradesman must be replaced by the rule of those whose lives are bound up with the land of their country. The art of government was not "the importation of nutmegs, and the curing of herrings;" but the political embodiment of the will of "a Parliament freely chosen, without threatening or corruption," and "composed of landed men" whose interests being in the soil would be at one with the interests of those who lived on the soil. Whigs and Tories may dispute as they will among themselves as to the best side from which to defend the country; but the men of the true party are the men of the National party--they "whose principles in Church and State, are what I have above related; whose actions are derived from thence, and who have no attachment to any set of ministers, further than as these are friends to the Constitution in all its parts; but will do their utmost to save their Prince and Country, whoever be at the Helm".[1]