No More Learning

They were all in fact bribed
by the very bill by which he would be punished.

His property was supposed to amount to considerably more than four
hundred thousand pounds. Two thirds of that property were equivalent to
about sevenpence in the pound on the rental of the kingdom as assessed
to the land tax. If, therefore, two thirds of that property could have
been brought into the Exchequer, the land tax for 1699, a burden most
painfully felt by the class which had the chief power in England, might
have been reduced from three shillings to two and fivepence. Every
squire of a thousand a year in the House of Commons would have had
thirty pounds more to spend; and that sum might well have made to him
the whole difference between being at ease and being pinched during
twelve months. If the bill had passed, if the gentry and yeomanry of
the kingdom had found that it was possible for them to obtain a welcome
remission of taxation by imposing on a Shylock or an Overreach, by a
retrospective law, a fine not heavier than his misconduct might, in a
moral view, seem to have deserved, it is impossible to believe that they
would not soon have recurred to so simple and agreeable a resource. In
every age it is easy to find rich men who have done bad things for which
the law has provided no punishment or an inadequate punishment. The
estates of such men would soon have been considered as a fund applicable
to the public service. As often as it was necessary to vote an
extraordinary supply to the Crown, the Committee of Ways and Means would
have looked about for some unpopular capitalist to plunder. Appetite
would have grown with indulgence. Accusations would have been eagerly
welcomed. Rumours and suspicions would have been received as proofs. The
wealth of the great goldsmiths of the Royal Exchange would have become
as insecure as that of a Jew under the Plantagenets, as that of a
Christian under a Turkish Pasha. Rich men would have tried to invest
their acquisitions in some form in which they could lie closely hidden
and could be speedily removed. In no long time it would have been found
that of all financial resources the least productive is robbery, and
that the public had really paid far more dearly for Duncombe's hundreds
of thousands than if it had borrowed them at fifty per cent.

These considerations had more weight with the Lords than with the
Commons. Indeed one of the principal uses of the Upper House is to
defend the vested rights of property in cases in which those rights are
unpopular, and are attacked on grounds which to shortsighted politicians
seem valid. An assembly composed of men almost all of whom have
inherited opulence, and who are not under the necessity of paying court
to constituent bodies, will not easily be hurried by passion or seduced
by sophistry into robbery. As soon as the bill for punishing Duncombe
had been read at the table of the Peers, it became clear that there
would be a sharp contest. Three great Tory noblemen, Rochester,
Nottingham and Leeds, headed the opposition; and they were joined by
some who did not ordinarily act with them. At an early stage of the
proceedings a new and perplexing question was raised. How did it appear
that the facts set forth in the preamble were true, that Duncombe had
committed the frauds for which it was proposed to punish him in so
extraordinary a manner? In the House of Commons, he had been taken
by surprise; he had made admissions of which he had not foreseen the
consequences; and he had then been so much disconcerted by the severe
manner in which he had been interrogated that he had at length avowed
everything. But he had now had time to prepare himself; he had been
furnished with advice by counsel; and, when he was placed at the bar of
the Peers, he refused to criminate himself and defied his persecutors
to prove him guilty. He was sent back to the Tower. The Lords acquainted
the Commons with the difficulty which had arisen. A conference was
held in the Painted Chamber; and there Hartington, who appeared for the
Commons, declared that he was authorized, by those who had sent him, to
assure the Lords that Duncombe had, in his place in Parliament, owned
the misdeeds which he now challenged his accusers to bring home to him.
The Lords, however, rightly thought that it would be a strange and a
dangerous thing to receive a declaration of the House of Commons in its
collective character as conclusive evidence of the fact that a man
had committed a crime. The House of Commons was under none of those
restraints which were thought necessary in ordinary cases to protect
innocent defendants against false witnesses. The House of Commons
could not be sworn, could not be cross-examined, could not be indicted,
imprisoned, pilloried, mutilated, for perjury. Indeed the testimony of
the House of Commons in its collective character was of less value than
the uncontradicted testimony of a single member. For it was only
the testimony of the majority of the House. There might be a large
respectable minority whose recollections might materially differ from
the recollections of the majority. This indeed was actually the case.
For there had been a dispute among those who had heard Duncombe's
confession as to the precise extent of what he had confessed; and
there had been a division; and the statement which the Upper House was
expected to receive as decisive on the point of fact had been at last
carried only by ninety votes to sixty-eight. It should seem therefore
that, whatever moral conviction the Lords might feel of Duncombe's
guilt, they were bound, as righteous judges, to absolve him.

After much animated debate, they divided; and the bill was lost by
forty-eight votes to forty-seven. It was proposed by some of the
minority that proxies should be called; but this scandalous proposition
was strenuously resisted; and the House, to its great honour, resolved
that on questions which were substantially judicial, though they might
be in form legislative, no peer who was absent should be allowed to have
a voice.

Many of the Whig Lords protested. Among them were Orford and Wharton.
It is to be lamented that Burnet, and the excellent Hough, who was now
Bishop of Oxford, should have been impelled by party spirit to record
their dissent from a decision which all sensible and candid men will now
pronounce to have been just and salutary. Somers was present; but his
name is not attached to the protest which was subscribed by his brethren
of the junto. We may therefore not unreasonably infer that, on this as
on many other occasions, that wise and virtuous statesman disapproved of
the violence of his friends.

In rejecting the bill, the Lords had only exercised their indisputable
right. But they immediately proceeded to take a step of which the
legality was not equally clear. Rochester moved that Duncombe should be
set at liberty. The motion was carried; a warrant for the discharge of
the prisoner was sent to the Tower, and was obeyed without hesitation
by Lord Lucas, who was Lieutenant of that fortress. As soon as this was
known, the anger of the Commons broke forth with violence. It was by
their order that the upstart Duncombe had been put in ward. He was their
prisoner; and it was monstrous insolence in the Peers to release him.
The Peers defended what they had done by arguments which must be allowed
to have been ingenious, if not satisfactory. It was quite true that
Duncombe had originally been committed to the Tower by the Commons. But,
it was said, the Commons, by sending a penal bill against him to the
Lords, did, by necessary implication, send him also to the Lords. For
it was plainly impossible for the Lords to pass the bill without hearing
what he had to say against it. The Commons had felt this, and had not
complained when he had, without their consent, been brought from his
place of confinement, and set at the bar of the Peers. From that moment
he was the prisoner of the Peers. He had been taken back from the bar
to the Tower, not by virtue of the Speaker's warrant, of which the force
was spent, but by virtue of their order which had remanded him. They,
therefore, might with perfect propriety discharge him.

Whatever a jurist might have thought of these arguments, they had no
effect on the Commons. Indeed, violent as the spirit of party was in
those times, it was less violent than the spirit of caste. Whenever a
dispute arose between the two Houses, many members of both forgot that
they were Whigs or Tories, and remembered only that they were Patricians
or Plebeians. On this occasion nobody was louder in asserting the
privileges of the representatives of the people in opposition to the
encroachments of the nobility than Harley. Duncombe was again arrested
by the Serjeant at Arms, and remained in confinement till the end of the
session. Some eager men were for addressing the King to turn Lucas out
of office. This was not done; but during several days the ill humour
of the Lower House showed itself by a studied discourtesy. One of
the members was wanted as a witness in a matter which the Lords were
investigating. They sent two judges with a message requesting the
permission of the Commons to examine him. At any other time the judges
would have been called in immediately, and the permission would have
been granted as of course. But on this occasion the judges were kept
waiting some hours at the door; and such difficulties were made about
the permission that the Peers desisted from urging a request which
seemed likely to be ungraciously refused.

The attention of the Parliament was, during the remainder of the
session, chiefly occupied by commercial questions. Some of those
questions required so much investigation, and gave occasion to so much
dispute, that the prorogation did not take place till the fifth of July.
There was consequently some illness and much discontent among both Lords
and Commons. For, in that age, the London season usually ended soon
after the first notes of the cuckoo had been heard, and before the poles
had been decked for the dances and mummeries which welcomed the genial
May day of the ancient calendar. Since the year of the Revolution, a
year which was an exception to all ordinary rules, the members of the
two Houses had never been detained from their woods and haycocks even so
late as the beginning of June.

The Commons had, soon after they met, appointed a Committee to enquire
into the state of trade, and had referred to this Committee several
petitions from merchants and manufacturers who complained that they were
in danger of being undersold, and who asked for additional protection.

A highly curious report on the importation of silks and the exportation
of wool was soon presented to the House. It was in that age believed by
all but a very few speculative men that the sound commercial policy was
to keep out of the country the delicate and brilliantly tinted textures
of southern looms, and to keep in the country the raw material on which
most of our own looms were employed. It was now fully proved that,
during eight years of war, the textures which it was thought desirable
to keep out had been constantly coming in, and the material which it
was thought desirable to keep in had been constantly going out. This
interchange, an interchange, as it was imagined, pernicious to England,
had been chiefly managed by an association of Huguenot refugees,
residing in London. Whole fleets of boats with illicit cargoes had
been passing and repassing between Kent and Picardy. The loading and
unloading had taken place sometimes in Romney Marsh, sometimes on the
beach under the cliffs between Dover and Folkstone. All the inhabitants
of the south eastern coast were in the plot. It was a common saying
among them that, if a gallows were set up every quarter of a mile along
the coast, the trade would still go on briskly. It had been discovered,
some years before, that the vessels and the hiding places which were
necessary to the business of the smuggler had frequently afforded
accommodation to the traitor. The report contained fresh evidence upon
this point. It was proved that one of the contrabandists had provided
the vessel in which the ruffian O'Brien had carried Scum Goodman over to
France.

The inference which ought to have been drawn from these facts was that
the prohibitory system was absurd. That system had not destroyed the
trade which was so much dreaded, but had merely called into existence a
desperate race of men who, accustomed to earn their daily bread by the
breach of an unreasonable law, soon came to regard the most reasonable
laws with contempt, and, having begun by eluding the custom house
officers, ended by conspiring against the throne. And, if, in time of
war, when the whole Channel was dotted with our cruisers, it had been
found impossible to prevent the regular exchange of the fleeces of
Cotswold for the alamodes of Lyons, what chance was there that any
machinery which could be employed in time of peace would be more
efficacious? The politicians of the seventeenth century, however, were
of opinion that sharp laws sharply administered could not fail to save
Englishmen from the intolerable grievance of selling dear what could
be best produced by themselves, and of buying cheap what could be best
produced by others. The penalty for importing French silks was made
more severe. An Act was passed which gave to a joint stock company an
absolute monopoly of lustrings for a term of fourteen years. The fruit
of these wise counsels was such as might have been foreseen. French
silks were still imported; and, long before the term of fourteen years
had expired, the funds of the Lustring Company had been spent, its
offices had been shut up, and its very name had been forgotten at
Jonathan's and Garraway's.

Not content with prospective legislation, the Commons unanimously
determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to
light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few
cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and
cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of
great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that
several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned
in the contraband trade should be impeached. Managers were appointed;
articles were drawn up; preparations were made for fitting up
Westminster Hall with benches and scarlet hangings; and at one time
it was thought that the trials would last till the partridge shooting
began. But the defendants, having little hope of acquittal, and not
wishing that the Peers should come to the business of fixing the
punishment in the temper which was likely to be the effect of an
August passed in London, very wisely declined to give their lordships
unnecessary trouble, and pleaded guilty. The sentences were consequently
lenient. The French offenders were merely fined; and their fines
probably did not amount to a fifth part of the sums which they had
realised by unlawful traffic. The Englishman who had been active in
managing the escape of Goodman was both fined and imprisoned.

The progress of the woollen manufactures of Ireland excited even more
alarm and indignation than the contraband trade with France. The
French question indeed had been simply commercial. The Irish question,
originally commercial, became political. It was not merely the
prosperity of the clothiers of Wiltshire and of the West Riding that was
at stake; but the dignity of the Crown, the authority of the Parliament,
and the unity of the empire. Already might be discerned among the
Englishry, who were now, by the help and under the protection of the
mother country, the lords of the conquered island, some signs of a
spirit, feeble indeed, as yet, and such as might easily be put down by a
few resolute words, but destined to revive at long intervals, and to be
stronger and more formidable at every revival.

The person who on this occasion came forward as the champion of the
colonists, the forerunner of Swift and of Grattan, was William Molyneux.
He would have rejected the name of Irishman as indignantly as a citizen
of Marseilles or Cyrene, proud of his pure Greek blood, and fully
qualified to send a chariot to the Olympic race course, would have
rejected the name of Gaul or Libyan. He was, in the phrase of that
time, an English gentleman of family and fortune born in Ireland. He had
studied at the Temple, had travelled on the Continent, had become
well known to the most eminent scholars and philosophers of Oxford and
Cambridge, had been elected a member of the Royal Society of London, and
had been one of the founders of the Royal Society of Dublin. In the days
of Popish ascendancy he had taken refuge among his friends here; he
had returned to his home when the ascendancy of his own caste had been
reestablished; and he had been chosen to represent the University of
Dublin in the House of Commons. He had made great efforts to promote the
manufactures of the kingdom in which he resided; and he had found those
efforts impeded by an Act of the English Parliament which laid severe
restrictions on the exportation of woollen goods from Ireland. In
principle this Act was altogether indefensible. Practically it was
altogether unimportant. Prohibitions were not needed to prevent the
Ireland of the seventeenth century from being a great manufacturing
country; nor could the most liberal bounties have made her so. The
jealousy of commerce, however, is as fanciful and unreasonable as the
jealousy of love. The clothiers of Wilts and Yorkshire were weak enough
to imagine that they should be ruined by the competition of a half
barbarous island, an island where there was far less capital than in
England, where there was far less security for life and property than
in England, and where there was far less industry and energy among the
labouring classes than in England. Molyneux, on the other hand, had
the sanguine temperament of a projector. He imagined that, but for
the tyrannical interference of strangers, a Ghent would spring up
in Connemara, and a Bruges in the Bog of Allen. And what right had
strangers to interfere? Not content with showing that the law of which
he complained was absurd and unjust, he undertook to prove that it was
null and void. Early in the year 1698 he published and dedicated to the
King a treatise in which it was asserted in plain terms that the English
Parliament had no authority over Ireland.

Whoever considers without passion or prejudice the great constitutional
question which was thus for the first time raised will probably be
of opinion that Molyneux was in error. The right of the Parliament of
England to legislate for Ireland rested on the broad general principle
that the paramount authority of the mother country extends over all
colonies planted by her sons in all parts of the world. This principle
was the subject of much discussion at the time of the American troubles,
and was then maintained, without any reservation, not only by the
English Ministers, but by Burke and all the adherents of Rockingham,
and was admitted, with one single reservation, even by the Americans
themselves. Down to the moment of separation the Congress fully
acknowledged the competency of the King, Lords and Commons to make laws,
of any kind but one, for Massachusetts and Virginia. The only power
which such men as Washington and Franklin denied to the Imperial
legislature was the power of taxing. Within living memory, Acts which
have made great political and social revolutions in our Colonies have
been passed in this country; nor has the validity of those Acts ever
been questioned; and conspicuous among them were the law of 1807 which
abolished the slave trade, and the law of 1833 which abolished slavery.

The doctrine that the parent state has supreme power over the colonies
is not only borne out by authority and by precedent, but will appear,
when examined, to be in entire accordance with justice and with policy.
During the feeble infancy of colonies independence would be pernicious,
or rather fatal, to them. Undoubtedly, as they grow stronger and
stronger, it will be wise in the home government to be more and more
indulgent. No sensible parent deals with a son of twenty in the same way
as with a son of ten. Nor will any government not infatuated treat such
a province as Canada or Victoria in the way in which it might be proper
to treat a little band of emigrants who have just begun to build their
huts on a barbarous shore, and to whom the protection of the flag of
a great nation is indispensably necessary. Nevertheless, there cannot
really be more than one supreme power in a society. If, therefore, a
time comes at which the mother country finds it expedient altogether to
abdicate her paramount authority over a colony, one of two courses
ought to be taken. There ought to be complete incorporation, if
such incorporation be possible. If not, there ought to be complete
separation. Very few propositions in polities can be so perfectly
demonstrated as this, that parliamentary government cannot be carried on
by two really equal and independent parliaments in one empire.

And, if we admit the general rule to be that the English parliament is
competent to legislate for colonies planted by English subjects, what
reason was there for considering the case of the colony in Ireland as an
exception? For it is to be observed that the whole question was between
the mother country and the colony. The aboriginal inhabitants, more than
five sixths of the population, had no more interest in the matter than
the swine or the poultry; or, if they had an interest, it was for
their interest that the caste which domineered over them should not be
emancipated from all external control. They were no more represented in
the parliament which sate at Dublin than in the parliament which sate at
Westminster. They had less to dread from legislation at Westminster than
from legislation at Dublin. They were, indeed, likely to obtain but a
very scanty measure of justice from the English Tories, a more scanty
measure still from the English Whigs; but the most acrimonious English
Whig did not feel towards them that intense antipathy, compounded of
hatred, fear and scorn, with which they were regarded by the Cromwellian
who dwelt among them. [8] For the Irishry Molyneux, though boasting that
he was the champion of liberty, though professing to have learned his
political principles from Locke's writings, and though confidently
expecting Locke's applause, asked nothing but a more cruel and more
hopeless slavery. What he claimed was that, as respected the colony to
which he belonged, England should forego rights which she has exercised
and is still exercising over every other colony that she has ever
planted. And what reason could be given for making such a distinction?
No colony had owed so much to England. No colony stood in such need of
the support of England. Twice, within the memory of men then living, the
natives had attempted to throw off the alien yoke; twice the intruders
had been in imminent danger of extirpation; twice England had come to
the rescue, and had put down the Celtic population under the feet of
her own progeny. Millions of English money had been expended in the
struggle. English blood had flowed at the Boyne and at Athlone, at
Aghrim and at Limerick. The graves of thousands of English soldiers
had been dug in the pestilential morass of Dundalk. It was owing to the
exertions and sacrifices of the English people that, from the basaltic
pillars of Ulster to the lakes of Kerry, the Saxon settlers were
trampling on the children of the soil. The colony in Ireland was
therefore emphatically a dependency; a dependency, not merely by the
common law of the realm, but by the nature of things. It was absurd to
claim independence for a community which could not cease to be dependent
without ceasing to exist.

Molyneux soon found that he had ventured on a perilous undertaking. A
member of the English House of Commons complained in his place that
a book which attacked the most precious privileges of the supreme
legislature was in circulation. The volume was produced; some passages
were read; and a Committee was appointed to consider the whole subject.
The Committee soon reported that the obnoxious pamphlet was only one
of several symptoms which indicated a spirit such as ought to be
suppressed. The Crown of Ireland had been most improperly described in
public instruments as an imperial Crown. The Irish Lords and Commons had
presumed, not only to reenact an English Act passed expressly for
the purpose of binding them, but to reenact it with alterations. The
alterations were indeed small; but the alteration even of a letter was
tantamount to a declaration of independence. Several addresses were
voted without a division. The King was entreated to discourage all
encroachments of subordinate powers on the supreme authority of the
English legislature, to bring to justice the pamphleteer who had dared
to question that authority, to enforce the Acts which had been passed
for the protection of the woollen manufactures of England, and to direct
the industry and capital of Ireland into the channel of the linen trade,
a trade which might grow and flourish in Leinster and Ulster without
exciting the smallest jealousy at Norwich or at Halifax.

The King promised to do what the Commons asked; but in truth there was
little to be done. The Irish, conscious of their impotence, submitted
without a murmur. The Irish woollen manufacture languished and
disappeared, as it would, in all probability, have languished and
disappeared if it had been left to itself. Had Molyneux lived a few
months longer he would probably have been impeached. But the close of
the session was approaching; and before the Houses met again a timely
death had snatched him from their vengeance; and the momentous question
which had been first stirred by him slept a deep sleep till it was
revived in a more formidable shape, after the lapse of twenty-six years,
by the fourth letter of The Drapier.

Of the commercial questions which prolonged this session far into the
summer the most important respected India. Four years had elapsed since
the House of Commons had decided that all Englishmen had an equal right
to traffic in the Asiatic Seas, unless prohibited by Parliament; and in
that decision the King had thought it prudent to acquiesce. Any merchant
of London or Bristol might now fit out a ship for Bengal or for China,
without the least apprehension of being molested by the Admiralty or
sued in the Courts of Westminster. No wise man, however, was disposed
to stake a large sum on such a venture. For the vote which protected him
from annoyance here left him exposed to serious risks on the other
side of the Cape of Good Hope. The Old Company, though its exclusive
privileges were no more, and though its dividends had greatly
diminished, was still in existence, and still retained its castles and
warehouses, its fleet of fine merchantmen, and its able and zealous
factors, thoroughly qualified by a long experience to transact business
both in the palaces and in the bazaars of the East, and accustomed
to look for direction to the India House alone. The private trader
therefore still ran great risk of being treated as a smuggler, if not as
a pirate. He might indeed, if he was wronged, apply for redress to the
tribunals of his country. But years must elapse before his cause could
be heard; his witnesses must be conveyed over fifteen thousand miles
of sea; and in the meantime he was a ruined man. The experiment of free
trade with India had therefore been tried under every disadvantage, or,
to speak more correctly, had not been tried at all. The general opinion
had always been that some restriction was necessary; and that opinion
had been confirmed by all that had happened since the old restrictions
had been removed. The doors of the House of Commons were again besieged
by the two great contending factions of the City. The Old Company
offered, in return for a monopoly secured by law, a loan of seven
hundred thousand pounds; and the whole body of Tories was for accepting
the offer. But those indefatigable agitators who had, ever since the
Revolution, been striving to obtain a share in the trade of the Eastern
seas exerted themselves at this conjuncture more strenuously than ever,
and found a powerful patron in Montague.

That dexterous and eloquent statesman had two objects in view. One was
to obtain for the State, as the price of the monopoly, a sum much larger
than the Old Company was able to give. The other was to promote the
interest of his own party. Nowhere was the conflict between Whigs and
Tories sharper than in the City of London; and the influence of the City
of London was felt to the remotest corner of the realm. To elevate the
Whig section of that mighty commercial aristocracy which congregated
under the arches of the Royal Exchange, and to depress the Tory section,
had long been one of Montague's favourite schemes. He had already formed
one citadel in the heart of that great emporium; and he now thought that
it might be in his power to erect and garrison a second stronghold in a
position scarcely less commanding. It had often been said, in times of
civil war, that whoever was master of the Tower and of Tilbury Fort was
master of London. The fastnesses by means of which Montague proposed
to keep the capital obedient in times of peace and of constitutional
government were of a different kind. The Bank was one of his fortresses;
and he trusted that a new India House would be the other.

The task which he had undertaken was not an easy one. For, while his
opponents were united, his adherents were divided. Most of those who
were for a New Company thought that the New Company ought, like the Old
Company, to trade on a joint stock. But there were some who held that
our commerce with India would be best carried on by means of what is
called a regulated Company. There was a Turkey Company, the members of
which contributed to a general fund, and had in return the exclusive
privilege of trafficking with the Levant; but those members trafficked,
each on his own account; they forestalled each other; they undersold
each other; one became rich; another became bankrupt. The Corporation
meanwhile watched over the common interest of all the members, furnished
the Crown with the means of maintaining an embassy at Constantinople,
and placed at several important ports consuls and vice-consuls, whose
business was to keep the Pacha and the Cadi in good humour, and to
arbitrate in disputes among Englishmen. Why might not the same system be
found to answer in regions lying still further to the east?
Why should
not every member of the New Company be at liberty to export European
commodities to the countries beyond the Cape, and to bring back shawls,
saltpetre and bohea to England, while the Company, in its collective
capacity, might treat with Asiatic potentates, or exact reparation
from them, and might be entrusted with powers for the administration of
justice and for the government of forts and factories?

Montague tried to please all those whose support was necessary to him;
and this he could effect only by bringing forward a plan so intricate
that it cannot without some pains be understood. He wanted two millions
to extricate the State from its financial embarrassments. That sum he
proposed to raise by a loan at eight per cent. The lenders might be
either individuals or corporations. But they were all, individuals and
corporations, to be united in a new corporation, which was to be called
the General Society. Every member of the General Society, whether
individual or corporation, might trade separately with India to an
extent not exceeding the amount which such member had advanced to the
government. But all the members or any of them might, if they so thought
fit, give up the privilege of trading separately, and unite themselves
under a royal Charter for the purpose of trading in common. Thus the
General Society was, by its original constitution, a regulated company;
but it was provided that either the whole Society or any part of it
might become a joint stock company.

The opposition to the scheme was vehement and pertinacious. The Old
Company presented petition after petition. The Tories, with Seymour at
their head, appealed both to the good faith and to the compassion of
Parliament. Much was said about the sanctity of the existing Charter,
and much about the tenderness due to the numerous families which had,
in reliance on that Charter, invested their substance in India stock. On
the other side there was no want of plausible topics or of skill to use
them. Was it not strange that those who talked so much about the Charter
should have altogether overlooked the very clause of the Charter on
which the whole question turned? That clause expressly reserved to
the government power of revocation, after three years' notice, if the
Charter should not appear to be beneficial to the public. The Charter
had not been found beneficial to the public; the three years' notice
should be given; and in the year 1701 the revocation would take effect.
What could be fairer? If anybody was so weak as to imagine that the
privileges of the Old Company were perpetual, when the very instrument
which created those privileges expressly declared them to be terminable,
what right had he to blame the Parliament, which was bound to do the
best for the State, for not saving him, at the expense of the State,
from the natural punishment of his own folly? It was evident that
nothing was proposed inconsistent with strict justice. And what right
had the Old Company to more than strict justice? These petitioners
who implored the legislature to deal indulgently with them in their
adversity, how had they used their boundless prosperity? Had not the
India House recently been the very den of corruption, the tainted spot
from which the plague had spread to the Court and the Council, to the
House of Commons and the House of Lords? Were the disclosures of 1695
forgotten, the eighty thousand pounds of secret service money disbursed
in one year, the enormous bribes direct and indirect, Seymour's
saltpetre contracts, Leeds's bags of golds? By the malpractices which
the inquiry in the Exchequer Chamber then brought to light, the Charter
had been forfeited; and it would have been well if the forfeiture had
been immediately enforced. "Had not time then pressed," said Montague,
"had it not been necessary that the session should close, it is probable
that the petitioners, who now cry out that they cannot get justice,
would have got more justice than they desired. If they had been called
to account for great and real wrong in 1695, we should not have had them
here complaining of imaginary wrong in 1698. "

The fight was protracted by the obstinacy and dexterity of the Old
Company and its friends from the first week of May to the last week in
June. It seems that many even of Montague's followers doubted whether
the promised two millions would be forthcoming. His enemies confidently
predicted that the General Society would be as complete a failure as the
Land Bank had been in the year before the last, and that he would in the
autumn find himself in charge of an empty exchequer. His activity and
eloquence, however, prevailed. On the twenty-sixth of June, after many
laborious sittings, the question was put that this Bill do pass, and was
carried by one hundred and fifteen votes to seventy-eight. In the upper
House, the conflict was short and sharp. Some peers declared that, in
their opinion, the subscription to the proposed loan, far from amounting
to the two millions which the Chancellor of the Exchequer expected,
would fall far short of one million. Others, with much reason,
complained that a law of such grave importance should have been sent up
to them in such a shape that they must either take the whole or throw
out the whole. The privilege of the Commons with respect to money bills
had of late been grossly abused. The Bank had been created by one money
bill; this General Society was to be created by another money bill. Such
a bill the Lords could not amend; they might indeed reject it; but to
reject it was to shake the foundations of public credit and to leave
the kingdom defenceless. Thus one branch of the legislature was
systematically put under duress by the other, and seemed likely to
be reduced to utter insignificance. It was better that the government
should be once pinched for money than that the House of Peers should
cease to be part of the Constitution. So strong was this feeling that
the Bill was carried only by sixty-five to forty-eight. It received
the royal sanction on the fifth of July. The King then spoke from the
throne. This was the first occasion on which a King of England
had spoken to a Parliament of which the existence was about to be
terminated, not by his own act, but by the act of the law. He could
not, he said, take leave of the Lords and Gentlemen before him without
publicly acknowledging the great things which they had done for his
dignity and for the welfare of the nation. He recounted the chief
services which they had, during three eventful sessions, rendered to
the country. "These things will," he said, "give a lasting reputation to
this Parliament, and will be a subject of emulation to Parliaments which
shall come after. " The Houses were then prorogued.

During the week which followed there was some anxiety as to the result
of the subscription for the stock of the General Society. If that
subscription failed, there would be a deficit; public credit would be
shaken; and Montague would be regarded as a pretender who had owed his
reputation to a mere run of good luck, and who had tempted chance
once too often. But the event was such as even his sanguine spirit had
scarcely ventured to anticipate. At one in the afternoon of the 14th
of July the books were opened at the Hall of the Company of Mercers in
Cheapside. An immense crowd was already collected in the street. As
soon as the doors were flung wide, wealthy citizens, with their money
in their hands, pressed in, pushing and elbowing each other. The guineas
were paid down faster than the clerks could count them. Before night six
hundred thousand pounds had been subscribed. The next day the throng was
as great. More than one capitalist put down his name for thirty thousand
pounds. To the astonishment of those ill boding politicians who were
constantly repeating that the war, the debt, the taxes, the grants to
Dutch courtiers, had ruined the kingdom, the sum, which it had been
doubted whether England would be able to raise in many weeks, was
subscribed by London in a few hours. The applications from the
provincial towns and rural districts came too late. The merchants of
Bristol had intended to take three hundred thousand pounds of the stock,
but had waited to learn how the subscription went on before they gave
their final orders; and, by the time that the mail had gone down to
Bristol and returned, there was no more stock to be had.

This was the moment at which the fortunes of Montague reached the
meridian. The decline was close at hand. His ability and his constant
success were everywhere talked of with admiration and envy. That man, it
was commonly said, has never wanted, and never will want, an expedient.

During the long and busy session which had just closed, some interesting
and important events had taken place which may properly be mentioned
here. One of those events was the destruction of the most celebrated
palace in which the sovereigns of England have ever dwelt. On the
evening of the 4th of January, a woman,--the patriotic journalists
and pamphleteers of that time did not fail to note that she was a
Dutchwoman,--who was employed as a laundress at Whitehall, lighted a
charcoal fire in her room and placed some linen round it. The linen
caught fire and burned furiously. The tapestry, the bedding, the
wainscots were soon in a blaze. The unhappy woman who had done the
mischief perished. Soon the flames burst out of the windows. All
Westminster, all the Strand, all the river were in commotion. Before
midnight the King's apartments, the Queen's apartments, the Wardrobe,
the Treasury, the office of the Privy Council, the office of the
Secretary of State, had been destroyed. The two chapels perished
together; that ancient chapel where Wolsey had heard mass in the midst
of gorgeous copes, golden candlesticks, and jewelled crosses, and that
modern edifice which had been erected for the devotions of James and
had been embellished by the pencil of Verrio and the chisel of Gibbons.
Meanwhile a great extent of building had been blown up; and it was hoped
that by this expedient a stop had been put to the conflagration. But
early in the morning a new fire broke out of the heaps of combustible
matter which the gunpowder had scattered to right and left. The guard
room was consumed. No trace was left of that celebrated gallery which
had witnessed so many balls and pageants, in which so many maids of
honour had listened too easily to the vows and flatteries of gallants,
and in which so many bags of gold had changed masters at the hazard
table. During some time men despaired of the Banqueting House. The
flames broke in on the south of that beautiful hall, and were with great
difficulty extinguished by the exertions of the guards, to whom Cutts,
mindful of his honourable nickname of the Salamander, set as good an
example on this night of terror as he had set in the breach of Namur.
Many lives were lost, and many grievous wounds were inflicted by the
falling masses of stone and timber, before the fire was effectually
subdued. When day broke, the heaps of smoking ruins spread from Scotland
Yard to the Bowling Green, where the mansion of the Duke of Buccleuch
now stands. The Banqueting House was safe; but the graceful columns and
festoons designed by Inigo were so much defaced and blackened that their
form could hardly be discerned. There had been time to move the most
valuable effects which were moveable. Unfortunately some of Holbein's
finest pictures were painted on the walls, and are consequently known to
us only by copies and engravings. The books of the Treasury and of the
Privy Council were rescued, and are still preserved. The Ministers
whose offices had been burned down were provided with new offices in the
neighbourhood. Henry the Eighth had built, close to St. James's Park,
two appendages to the Palace of Whitehall, a cockpit and a tennis court.
The Treasury now occupies the site of the cockpit, the Privy Council
Office the site of the tennis court.

Notwithstanding the many associations which make the name of Whitehall
still interesting to an Englishman, the old building was little
regretted. It was spacious indeed and commodious, but mean and
inelegant. The people of the capital had been annoyed by the scoffing
way in which foreigners spoke of the principal residence of our
sovereigns, and often said that it was a pity that the great fire had
not spared the old portico of St. Paul's and the stately arcades of
Gresham's Bourse, and taken in exchange that ugly old labyrinth of dingy
brick and plastered timber. It might now be hoped that we should have
a Louvre. Before the ashes of the old palace were cold, plans for a new
palace were circulated and discussed. But William, who could not draw
his breath in the air of Westminster, was little disposed to expend
a million on a house which it would have been impossible for him
to inhabit. Many blamed him for not restoring the dwelling of his
predecessors; and a few Jacobites, whom evil temper and repeated
disappointments had driven almost mad, accused him of having burned it
down. It was not till long after his death that Tory writers ceased to
call for the rebuilding of Whitehall, and to complain that the King of
England had no better town house than St. James's, while the delightful
spot where the Tudors and the Stuarts had held their councils and their
revels was covered with the mansions of his jobbing courtiers. [9]

In the same week in which Whitehall perished, the Londoners were
supplied with a new topic of conversation by a royal visit, which, of
all royal visits, was the least pompous and ceremonious and yet the most
interesting and important. On the 10th of January a vessel from Holland
anchored off Greenwich and was welcomed with great respect. Peter the
First, Czar of Muscovy, was on board. He took boat with a few attendants
and was rowed up the Thames to Norfolk Street, where a house overlooking
the river had been prepared for his reception.

His journey is an epoch in the history, not only of his own country, but
of our's, and of the world. To the polished nations of Western Europe,
the empire which he governed had till then been what Bokhara or Siam is
to us. That empire indeed, though less extensive than at present, was
the most extensive that had ever obeyed a single chief. The dominions of
Alexander and of Trajan were small when compared with the immense
area of the Scythian desert. But in the estimation of statesmen that
boundless expanse of larch forest and morass, where the snow lay deep
during eight months of every year, and where a wretched peasantry could
with difficulty defend their hovels against troops of famished wolves,
was of less account than the two or three square miles into which were
crowded the counting houses, the warehouses, and the innumerable masts
of Amsterdam. On the Baltic Russia had not then a single port. Her
maritime trade with the other rations of Christendom was entirely
carried on at Archangel, a place which had been created and was
supported by adventurers from our island. In the days of the Tudors, a
ship from England, seeking a north east passage to the land of silk and
spice, had discovered the White Sea. The barbarians who dwelt on the
shores of that dreary gulf had never before seen such a portent as a
vessel of a hundred and sixty tons burden. They fled in terror; and,
when they were pursued and overtaken, prostrated themselves before the
chief of the strangers and kissed his feet. He succeeded in opening a
friendly communication with them; and from that time there had been a
regular commercial intercourse between our country and the subjects
of the Czar. A Russia Company was incorporated in London. An English
factory was built at Archangel. That factory was indeed, even in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, a rude and mean building. The
walls consisted of trees laid one upon another; and the roof was of
birch bark. This shelter, however, was sufficient in the long summer day
of the Arctic regions. Regularly at that season several English ships
cast anchor in the bay. A fair was held on the beach. Traders came from
a distance of many hundreds of miles to the only mart where they could
exchange hemp and tar, hides and tallow, wax and honey, the fur of the
sable and the wolverine, and the roe of the sturgeon of the Volga, for
Manchester stuffs, Sheffield knives, Birmingham buttons, sugar from
Jamaica and pepper from Malabar. The commerce in these articles was
open. But there was a secret traffic which was not less active or less
lucrative, though the Russian laws had made it punishable, and though
the Russian divines pronounced it damnable. In general the mandates of
princes and the lessons of priests were received by the Muscovite with
profound reverence. But the authority of his princes and of his priests
united could not keep him from tobacco. Pipes he could not obtain; but
a cow's horn perforated served his turn. From every Archangel fair rolls
of the best Virginia speedily found their way to Novgorod and Tobolsk.

The commercial intercourse between England and Russia made some
diplomatic intercourse necessary. The diplomatic intercourse however
was only occasional. The Czar had no permanent minister here. We had no
permanent minister at Moscow; and even at Archangel we had no consul.
Three or four times in a century extraordinary embassies were sent from
Whitehall to the Kremlin and from the Kremlin to Whitehall.

The English embassies had historians whose narratives may still be
read with interest. Those historians described vividly, and sometimes
bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous
country in which they had sojourned. In that country, they said, there
was neither literature nor science, neither school nor college. It was
not till more than a hundred years after the invention of printing that
a single printing press had been introduced into the Russian empire; and
that printing press had speedily perished in a fire which was supposed
to have been kindled by the priests. Even in the seventeenth century
the library of a prelate of the first dignity consisted of a few
manuscripts. Those manuscripts too were in long rolls; for the art of
bookbinding was unknown. The best educated men could barely read and
write. It was much if the secretary to whom was entrusted the direction
of negotiations with foreign powers had a sufficient smattering of Dog
Latin to make himself understood. The arithmetic was the arithmetic of
the dark ages. The denary notation was unknown. Even in the Imperial
Treasury the computations were made by the help of balls strung on
wires. Round the person of the Sovereign there was a blaze of gold and
jewels; but even in his most splendid palaces were to be found the filth
and misery of an Irish cabin. So late as the year 1663 the gentlemen of
the retinue of the Earl of Carlisle were, in the city of Moscow, thrust
into a single bedroom, and were told that, if they did not remain
together, they would be in danger of being devoured by rats.

Such was the report which the English legations made of what they had
seen and suffered in Russia; and their evidence was confirmed by the
appearance which the Russian legations made in England. The strangers
spoke no civilised language. Their garb, their gestures, their
salutations, had a wild and barbarous character. The ambassador and the
grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to
stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came
to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin. It was said that one
envoy cudgelled the lords of his train whenever they soiled or lost
any part of their finery, and that another had with difficulty been
prevented from putting his son to death for the crime of shaving and
dressing after the French fashion.

Our ancestors therefore were not a little surprised to learn that a
young barbarian, who had, at seventeen years of age, become the autocrat
of the immense region stretching from the confines of Sweden to those
of China, and whose education had been inferior to that of an English
farmer or shopman, had planned gigantic improvements, had learned enough
of some languages of Western Europe to enable him to communicate with
civilised men, had begun to surround himself with able adventurers from
various parts of the world, had sent many of his young subjects to
study languages, arts and sciences in foreign cities, and finally had
determined to travel as a private man, and to discover, by personal
observation, the secret of the immense prosperity and power enjoyed by
some communities whose whole territory was far less than the hundredth
part of his dominions.

It might have been expected that France would have been the first object
of his curiosity. For the grace and dignity of the French King, the
splendour of the French Court, the discipline of the French armies, and
the genius and learning of the French writers, were then renowned all
over the world. But the Czar's mind had early taken a strange ply which
it retained to the last. His empire was of all empires the least capable
of being made a great naval power. The Swedish provinces lay between his
States and the Baltic. The Bosporus and the Dardanelles lay between
his States and the Mediterranean. He had access to the ocean only in
a latitude in which navigation is, during a great part of every
year, perilous and difficult. On the ocean he had only a single port,
Archangel; and the whole shipping of Archangel was foreign. There did
not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing-boat. Yet, from some
cause which cannot now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits
which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania. His
imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders. That large mind,
equal to the highest duties of the general and the statesman, contracted
itself to the most minute details of naval architecture and naval
discipline. The chief ambition of the great conqueror and legislator was
to be a good boatswain and a good ship's carpenter. Holland and England
therefore had for him an attraction which was wanting to the galleries
and terraces of Versailles. He repaired to Amsterdam, took a lodging in
the dockyard, assumed the garb of a pilot, put down his name on the list
of workmen, wielded with his own hand the caulking iron and the mallet,
fixed the pumps, and twisted the ropes. Ambassadors who came to pay
their respects to him were forced, much against their will, to clamber
up the rigging of a man of war, and found him enthroned on the cross
trees.

Such was the prince whom the populace of London now crowded to behold.
His stately form, his intellectual forehead, his piercing black eyes,
his Tartar nose and mouth, his gracious smile, his frown black with all
the stormy rage and hate of a barbarian tyrant, and above all a strange
nervous convulsion which sometimes transformed his countenance during a
few moments, into an object on which it was impossible to look without
terror, the immense quantities of meat which he devoured, the pints
of brandy which he swallowed, and which, it was said, he had carefully
distilled with his own hands, the fool who jabbered at his feet, the
monkey which grinned at the back of his chair, were, during some weeks,
popular topics of conversation. He meanwhile shunned the public gaze
with a haughty shyness which inflamed curiosity. He went to a play; but,
as soon as he perceived that pit, boxes and galleries were staring,
not at the stage, but at him, he retired to a back bench where he was
screened from observation by his attendants. He was desirous to see a
sitting of the House of Lords; but, as he was determined not to be seen,
he was forced to climb up to the leads, and to peep through a small
window. He heard with great interest the royal assent given to a bill
for raising fifteen hundred thousand pounds by land tax, and learned
with amazement that this sum, though larger by one half than the whole
revenue which he could wring from the population of the immense empire
of which he was absolute master, was but a small part of what
the Commons of England voluntarily granted every year to their
constitutional King.

William judiciously humoured the whims of his illustrious guest, and
stole to Norfolk Street so quietly that nobody in the neighbourhood
recognised His Majesty in the thin gentleman who got out of the modest
looking coach at the Czar's lodgings. The Czar returned the visit with
the same precautions, and was admitted into Kensington House by a
back door. It was afterwards known that he took no notice of the fine
pictures with which the palace was adorned. But over the chimney of
the royal sitting room was a plate which, by an ingenious machinery,
indicated the direction of the wind; and with this plate he was in
raptures.

He soon became weary of his residence. He found that he was too far from
the objects of his curiosity, and too near to the crowds to which he was
himself an object of curiosity. He accordingly removed to Deptford, and
was there lodged in the house of John Evelyn, a house which had long
been a favourite resort of men of letters, men of taste and men of
science. Here Peter gave himself up to his favourite pursuits. He
navigated a yacht every day up and down the river. His apartment was
crowded with models of three deckers and two deckers, frigates, sloops
and fireships. The only Englishman of rank in whose society he seemed to
take much pleasure was the eccentric Caermarthen, whose passion for the
sea bore some resemblance to his own, and who was very competent to
give an opinion about every part of a ship from the stem to the stern.
Caermarthen, indeed, became so great a favourite that he prevailed on
the Czar to consent to the admission of a limited quantity of tobacco
into Russia. There was reason to apprehend that the Russian clergy
would cry out against any relaxation of the ancient rule, and would
strenuously maintain that the practice of smoking was condemned by that
text which declares that man is defiled, not by those things which enter
in at the mouth, but by those which proceed out of it. This apprehension
was expressed by a deputation of merchants who were admitted to an
audience of the Czar; but they were reassured by the air with which he
told them that he knew how to keep priests in order.

He was indeed so free from any bigoted attachment to the religion in
which he had been brought up that both Papists and Protestants hoped
at different times to make him a proselyte. Burnet, commissioned by his
brethren, and impelled, no doubt, by his own restless curiosity and
love of meddling, repaired to Deptford and was honoured with several
audiences. The Czar could not be persuaded to exhibit himself at Saint
Paul's; but he was induced to visit Lambeth palace. There he saw the
ceremony of ordination performed, and expressed warm approbation of
the Anglican ritual. Nothing in England astonished him so much as the
Archiepiscopal library. It was the first good collection of books that
he had seen; and he declared that he had never imagined that there were
so many printed volumes in the world.

The impression which he made on Burnet was not favourable. The good
bishop could not understand that a mind which seemed to be chiefly
occupied with questions about the best place for a capstan and the best
way of rigging a jury mast might be capable, not merely of ruling an
empire, but of creating a nation. He complained that he had gone to see
a great prince, and had found only an industrious shipwright. Nor does
Evelyn seem to have formed a much more favourable opinion of his august
tenant.