Page:The Maid's Tragedy Altered - Waller (1690).djvu/99

how this Money has prospered, how contrary an effect it has had to the end, for which they pre­tended to take it: On every County a Ship is an­nually impos'd; and who would not expect, but our Seas by this time should be covered with the number of our Ships? Alas (my Lords) the daily Complaints of the decay of our Navy tell us how ill Ship-Money has maintained the Sovereignty of the Sea; and by the many Petitions which we're­ceive from the Wives of those miserable Captives at Algier, (being between four or five thousand of our Countrymen) it does too evidently appear that to make us Slaves at home, is not the way to keep us from being made Slaves abroad: so far has this Judgment been from relieving the present, or preventing the future necessity; that as it changed our Real Propriety into the shadow of a Propriety, so of a feigned it has made a real ne­cessity.

A little before the approach of the Gaules to Rome, while the Romans had yet no apprehension of that danger, there was heard a voice in the Air, lowder than ordinary, The Gaules are come; which voice after they had sack'd the City, and besieged the Capitol, was held so ominous, that Livie relates it as a Prodigy. This Anticipation of necessity seems to have been no less ominous to us: These Judges, like ill boding Birds, have call'd necessity upon the State, in a time when I dare say theythought