XLIX.

WALPOLE AS A PEACE MINISTER.-GREEN.

[By a law enacted during the life-time of William it was settled that, if neither he and Queen Mary, nor Queen Anne, left any children, the crown should go to the German branch of the Stuart family. The head of this branch, at the time of Queen Anne's death, was George, elector of Hanover, and he accordingly became the first English king of the house of Hanover, or Brunswick, as it is often called. As he was a foreigner, ignorant of English politics, and even of the English language, it was almost inevitable that the administration of affairs should fall into the hands of his ministers. Among these Sir Robert Walpole soon rose to prominence, and became prime minister in 1721. From that time on until his retirement, in 1742, his history is the history of the nation.]

BUT it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no minister has fared worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His qualities, indeed, were such as a practical statesman can alone do full justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man; nor is there any thing picturesque in the work which he set himself to do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe, was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place

GEORGE I.

among English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of our peace ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the honor or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up

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to the very end of his ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and a never-ceasing pressure alike from the opposition and the court, it is the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he was the first of our peace ministers, so he was the first of our financiers. was far indeed from discerning the powers which later statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance-powers of producing both national development and international amity; but he had the sense to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his rule he declared in a speech from the throne that nothing would more conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may

The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of importation. In 1730 he broke, in the same enlightened spirit, through the prejudice which restricted the commerce of the colonies to the mother country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was, that

the rice of America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His excise bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom of Walpole was rewarded by a quick up-growth of prosperity. The material progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it. It was, above all, the trade with the colonies which began to give England a new wealth. The whole colonial trade at the time of the battle of Blenheim (1704) was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at £15,000. At his death they reached half a million. In the middle of the eighteenth century the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the colonies were estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years. Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port of the kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year threescore years ago," said Burke, in 1766, are at three thousand at present."

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Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than the fact that this up-growth of wealth around him never made Walpole swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First the public

burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was, indeed, in economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance, as in other fields of statesmanship, Walpole was forbidden from taking more than tentative steps toward a wiser system by the needs of the work he had specially to do. To this work every thing gave way. He withdrew his excise bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the revolution. His hatred of religious intolerance, or the support he hoped for from the dissenters, never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry, which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slightest challenge, by any effort to repeal the laws against non-conformity. His temper was naturally vigorous and active, and yet the years of his power are years without parallel in our annals for political stagnation. His long administration, indeed, is almost without a history. All legislative and political action seemed to cease with his entry into office. Year after year passed by without a change. In the third year of Walpole's ministry there was but one division in the House of Commons. Such an inaction gives little scope for the historian; but it fell in with the temper of the nation at large. It was popular with the class which commonly presses for political activity. The energy of the trading class was absorbed, for the time, in the rapid extension of commerce and accumulation of wealth. So long as the country was justly and temperately governed the merchant and shopkeeper were content to leave government in the hands that held it. All they asked was to be let alone to enjoy their new freedom and develop their new industries. And Walpole let them alone.

On the other hand, the forces which opposed the revolution lost, year by year, somewhat of their energy. The fervor which breeds revolt died down among the Jacobites as their swords rusted idly in their scabbards. The Tories sulked in their country houses; but their wrath against the house of

Hanover ebbed away for want of opportunities of exerting itself. And, meanwhile, on opponents as on friends, the freedom which the revolution had brought with it was doing its work.

It was to the patient influence of this freedom that Walpole trusted; and it was the special mark of his administration that, in spite of every temptation, he gave it full play. Though he dared not touch the laws that oppressed the Catholic or the dissenter, he took care that they should remain inoperative. Catholic worship went on unhindered. Yearly bills of indemnity exempted the non-conformists from the consequences of their infringement of the test act. There was no tampering with public justice or with personal liberty. Thought and action were alike left free. No minister was ever more foully slandered by journalists and pamphleteers, but Walpole never meddled with the press.

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THE PREACHING OF WHITEFIELD.-LECKÝ.

[The great Methodist revival dates from the later years of Walpole's ministry. The Church of England was in a state of great stagnation, and a group of Oxford students, among whom John and Charles Wesley were the most prominent, determined to regenerate it. But the wonderful preaching of Whitefield was the main instrument in spreading the movement, especially among the lower classes.]

His eloquence had nothing of that chaste and polished beauty which was displayed in the discourses of the great French preachers, and which, in the present century, has led so many men of fastidious taste to hang spell-bound around the pulpit of Robert Hall. It had none of that force of reasoning, that originality of thought, or that splendor of language, which constituted the great charm of the sermons of