Life's Pleasures Quote by Daniel Defoe

A jab like this lands because it’s dressed up as arithmetic. Defoe frames national rivalry as a household budget: the Englishman’s drinking isn’t just a vice, it’s an economic engine so outsized it could “maintain two families of Dutch.” The line’s comic force comes from its mock-fair tone (“will fairly drink”), as if patriotic excess is merely an honest ledger entry. It’s not moralizing so much as baiting the reader into laughing and wincing at once.

The subtext is pointedly political. In Defoe’s England, “Dutch” wasn’t a neutral descriptor; it carried the charge of recent naval wars, trade competition, and Protestant alliances of convenience. By making English consumption subsidize Dutch domestic life, Defoe flips the usual boast of national strength into a question: who really profits from English habits? It’s an insult aimed sideways. The Dutch are rendered thrifty, even domestically stable (“families”), while the Englishman is defined by indulgence so reliable it becomes foreign aid.

Context matters: Defoe was a journalist and polemicist who wrote in a culture where pamphlets, ballads, and satire were political weapons. This line echoes the period’s obsession with commerce and credit, when nations imagined themselves as rival firms and citizens as the workforce - or the liability. The joke doesn’t just mock drunkenness; it turns English identity into a balance sheet, hinting that bravado can be self-defeating when it’s spent at the tavern.