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Of all the Whig tracts written in support of the Succession, The Crisis is perhaps the most significant.
Certainly it is the most pretentious and elaborate.
Hanoverian agents assisted in promoting circulation, said to have reached 40,000, and if one may judge by the reaction of Swift and other government writers, the work must have had considerable impact.
Steele's main business here is to arouse public opinion to the immediate danger of a Stuart Restoration.
To this end, the first and longest section of the tract cites all the laws enacted since the Revolution to defend England against the `` Arbitrary Power of a Popish Prince ''.
In his comment on these laws Steele sounds all the usual notes of current Whig propaganda, ranging from a criticism of the Tory peace to an attack on the dismissal of Marlborough ; ;
but his principal theme is that the intrigues of the Tories, `` our Popish or Jacobite Party '', pose an immediate threat to Church and State.
Like Burnet, he deplores the indifference of the people in the face of the crisis.
Treasonable books striking at the Hanoverian Succession, he complains, are allowed to pass unnoticed.
In this connection, Swift, too, is drawn in for attack: `` The Author of The Conduct Of The Allies has dared to drop Insinuations about altering the Succession ''.
In his effort to stir the public from its lethargy, Steele goes so far as to list Catholic atrocities of the sort to be expected in the event of a Stuart Restoration, and, with rousing rhetoric, he asserts that the only preservation from these `` Terrours '' is to be found in the laws he has so tediously cited.
`` It is no time '', he writes, `` to talk with Hints and Innuendos, but openly and honestly to profess our Sentiments before our Enemies have compleated and put their Designs in Execution against us ''.

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