Note 13 — THE LIFE OF DE FOE, BY GEORGE CHALMERS, ESQ.

Mr. Wilson has some valuable observations on this subject, which justice to the memory of De Foe requires us to transcribe. "The failure of this speculation seems to have been owing rather to the want of encouragement upon the part of the public, than to any imprudence in the projector. Pantiles had been hitherto a Dutch manufacture, and were brought in large quantities to England. To supersede the necessity of their importation, and to provide a new channel for the employment of labour, the works at Tilbury were laudably erected; and De Foe tells us that he employed a hundred poor labourers in the undertaking. The capital embarked in the concern must also have been considerable; for he informs us that his own loss by its failure was no less a sum than three thousand pounds. But besides so serious a misfortune to himself, it was no less so to the public; not only by the failure of an ingenious manufacture, but for the sake of the numerous families supported by it, who were now turned adrift in the world, or thrown upon some other branch of trade. De Foe continued the pantile works it is believed until the year 1703, when he was prosecuted by the government for a libel, and being deprived of his liberty the undertaking soon came to an end." Mr. Wilson adds an extract from one of the Reviews, (March, 1705,) in which De Foe indignantly refers to this undertaking and its calamitous issue. "Nor should the author of this paper boast in vain, if he tells the world that he himself, before violence, injury, and barbarous treatment destroyed him and his undertaking, employed a hundred poor people in making pantiles in England, a manufacture always bought in Holland; and thus he pursued this principle with his utmost zeal for the good of England; and those gentlemen who so easily persecuted him for saying what all the world since owns to be true, and which he has since a hundred times offered to prove, were particularly serviceable to the nation, in turning that hundred of poor people and their families a begging for work, and forcing them to turn other poor families out of work to make room for them, besides three thousand pounds damage to the author of this, which he has paid for this little experience."—Ed.