Swift's Whiggism would naturally be strengthened by his personal relation with Temple, and with various Whigs whom he came to know through Temple. But Swift, I have said, was a churchman as well as a Whig; as staunch a churchman as Laud, and as ready, I imagine, to have gone to the block or to prison in defence of his church as any one from the days of Laud to those of Mr. Green. For a time his zeal was not called into play; the war absorbed all interests. Marlborough and Godolphin, the great heads of the family clique which dominated poor Queen Anne, had begun as Tories and churchmen, supported by a Tory majority. The war had been dictated by a national sentiment: but from the beginning it was really a Whig war: for it was a war against Louis, Popery, and the Pretender. And thus, the great men who were identified with the war, began slowly to edge over to the party whose principles were the war principles; who hated the Pope, the Pretender, and the King of France, as their ancestors had hated Phillip of Spain, or as their descendants hated Napoleon. The war meant alliance with the Dutch, who had been the martyrs, and were the enthusiastic defenders of toleration and free thought; and it forced English ministers, almost in spite of themselves, into the most successful piece of statesmanship of the century, the Union with Scotland. Now Swift hated the Dutch and hated the Scotch, with a vehemence that becomes almost ludicrous. The margin of his Burnet was scribbled over with execrations against the Scots. "Most damnable Scots," "Scots hell-hounds," "Scotch dogs," "cursed Scots still," "hellish Scottish dogs," are a few of his spontaneous flowers of speech. His prejudices are the prejudices of his class intensified as all passions were intensified in him. Swift regarded Scotchmen as the most virulent and dangerous of all dissenters; they were represented to him by the Irish Presbyterians, the natural rivals of his church. He reviled the Union, because it implied the recognition by the State of a sect which regarded the Church of England as little better than a manifestation of Antichrist. And, in this sense, Swift's sympathies were with the Tories. For in truth the real contrast between Whigs and Tories, in respect of which there is a perfect continuity of principle, depended upon the fact that the Whigs reflected the sentiments of the middle classes, the "monied men" and the dissenters; whilst the Tories reflected the sentiments of the land and the church. Each party might occasionally adopt the commonplaces or accept the measures generally associated with its antagonists; but at bottom, the distinction was between squire and parson on one side, tradesmen and banker on the other.