his idea that trade should be protected, and A Memorial Concerning Credit and the Means and Methods whereby it may be Restored, generally viewed as an attempt to curry favour with the party in power to gain a post in the Excise department. In October 1696 he published Essay on Publick Virtue, a diatribe against the ruling Whig Junto. In 1696, also, he published Essay on the East India Trade in which he "opposed the protection of English Textiles against Indian competition on the grounds that commerce with East India improved Britain's balance of trade, and he refuted the arguments of the protectionists with further applications of the balance of trade concept." In 1697 he published Discourses on the Publick Revenues and on the Trade of England, part 1, which contained strong objections to long-term borrowing as a way to fund government expenditures and advocated paying back the debt incurred during the war as soon as possible. The basis for Davenant's argument was that "high taxation for debt service was a burden on trade, industry, and land." Davenant still believed that land tax was unfair because it placed the heaviest burden of generating public income on the landed gentry, and that the long-term result would be that the gentry would be forced to sell their land to "monied men and usurers" to pay the taxes. In 1698 he published Discourses on the Publick Revenues and on the Trade of England part 2, which described "in a more sustained and complete form the idea of the 'general' balance of trade." There is a likely possibility that this pamphlet was also intended to keep his name before the officials of the East India Company as someone who was sympathetic to their business because he was trying to get them to hire him as an agent. In early 1699 he published An Essay on the probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade. It quoted Gregory King's calculation of the value and size of the "natural resources of England." The last section contained an attack on the actions and policies of the Junto party and was more of a political rant than an exposition of economic ideas. At the end of 1699 he published A Discourse of Grants and Resumptions, which discussed the practice of the king and queen of England granting "forfeited Irish Estates" to friends and political