But if what I told him were true, he was
still at a loss how a kingdom could run out of its estate like a private
person. He asked me who were our creditors, and where we found to pay
them. He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and expensive wars;
that certainly we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad
neighbors and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings. He
asked what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the score
of trade or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet. Above all,
he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army in the midst
of peace and among a free people. He said if we were governed by our own
consent, in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of
whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my
opinion, whether a private man's house might not better be defended by
himself, his children, and family, than by half-a-dozen rascals, picked
up at a venture in the streets for small wages, who might get a hundred
times more by cutting their throats?
He laughed at my odd kind of arithmetic (as he was pleased to call it),
in reckoning the numbers of our people by a computation drawn from the
several sects among us, in religion and politics.
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