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The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift 219
Sacramental Test,” all of which were written when he was still ostensibly
a Whig, the same decided Church feeling is more reverently
expressed. It appeared not less clearly in his later Irish tracts, when
it was his clear political interest to endeavour to unite all religions in
Ireland in support of his Irish policy. The abolition of the Test Act,
which excluded Nonconformists from office, was opposed by Swift at
every period of his life. In the reign of Queen Anne, and especially in
its later years, party politics grouped themselves mainly on ecclesiastical
lines. It was on the cry of Church in danger that the Tory party
rode into power in 1710, and the close alliance between the Whigs
and the Nonconformists, and between the Tories and the Church, was
the main fact governing the party divisions of the time. There could be
no doubt to which side Swift would inevitably gravitate.
[ . . . ]
In that remarkable “Essay on Public Absurdities,” which was
published after his death, he deplored that persons without landed
property could by means of the boroughs obtain an entrance into
Parliament, and that the suffrage had been granted to any one who
was not a member of the Established Church, and he condemned
absolutely the system of standing armies which had recently grown
up. On the other hand, on some questions of Parliamentary reform,
he held very advanced views. Like most of his party he strenuously
advocated annual Parliaments, believing them to be the only true
foundation of liberty, and the only means of putting an end to corrupt
traffic between ministers and members of Parliament. He blamed the
custom of throwing the expense of an election upon a candidate; the
custom of making forty-shilling freeholders in order to give votes to
landlords, and the immunity of members and of their servants from
civil suits. “It is likewise,” he says, “absurd that boroughs decayed are
not absolutely extinguished, because the returned members do in
reality represent nobody at all; and that several large towns are not
represented, though full of industrious townsmen.”
The four years of the Harley administration form the most brilliant
and probably the happiest period of his life. His genius had
now reached its full maturity, and he found the sphere which beyond
all others was most fitted for its exercise. In many of the qualities
of effective political writing he has never been surpassed. Without
the grace and delicacy of Addison, without the rich imaginative
eloquence or the profound philosophic insight of Burke, he was a far