It is odd, that among a free trading people, as we take ourselves to be, there should so many be found to close in with those counsels, who have been ever averse from all overtures towards a peace. But yet there is no great mystery in the matter. Let any man observe the equipages in this town; he shall find the greater number of those who make a figure, to be a species of men quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution, consisting either of generals and colonels, or of such whose whole fortunes lie in funds and stocks: so that power, which according to the old maxim, was used to follow land, is now gone over to money; and the country gentleman is in the condition of a young heir, out of whose estate a scrivener receives half the rents for interest, and hath a mortgage on the whole, and is therefore always ready to feed his vices and extravagancies while there is any thing left. So that if the war continues some years longer, a landed man will be little better than a farmer at a rack rent, to the army, and to the public funds. It may perhaps be worth inquiring from what beginnings, and by what steps we have been brought into this desperate condition: and in search of this, we must run up as high as the Revolution. Most of the nobility and gentry who invited over the Prince of Orange, or attended him in his expedition, were true lovers of their country and its constitution, in Church and State; and were brought to yield to those breaches in the succession of the crown, out of a regard to the necessity of the kingdom, and the safety of the people, which did, and could only, make them lawful; but without intention of drawing such a practice into precedent, or making it a standing measure by which to proceed in all times to come; and therefore we find their counsels ever tended to keep things as much as possible in the old course. But soon after, an under set of men, who had nothing to lose, and had neither borne the burthen nor heat of the day, found means to whisper in the king's ear, that the principles of loyalty in the Church of England, were wholly inconsistent with the Revolution.[7] Hence began the early practice of caressing the dissenters, reviling the universities, as maintainers of arbitrary power, and reproaching the clergy with the doctrines of divine-right, passive obedience and non-resistance.[8] At the same time, in order to fasten wealthy people to the new government, they proposed those pernicious expedients of borrowing money by vast _premiums_, and at exorbitant interest: a practice as old as Eumenes,[9] one of Alexander's captains, who setting up for himself after the death of his master, persuaded his principal officers to lend him great sums, after which they were forced to follow him for their own security.