The pamphlet then occupied the place of the newspaper leading article.

The newspapers of the time were veritable chronicles of news, and not organs of opinion.
The expression of opinion was not then associated with the dissemination of facts and rumours.

A man who wished to influence public opinion wrote a pamphlet, small or large, a single leaf or a tract of a few pages, and had it hawked about the streets and sold in the bookshops.

These pamphlets issued from the press in swarms, were thrown aside when read, and hardly preserved except by accident.

That Defoe, if he wrote any or many, should not have reprinted them when fifteen years afterwards he published a collection of his works, is intelligible; he republished only such of his tracts as had not lost their practical interest.