MERCANTILE PROSPERITY.

689

that farm-labourers rather exceeded the demand, and their wages fell.

With the exception of the failure in the stimulus of high prices to rural enterprise, and which the augmented demand arising from increased consumption did not compensate, all the great branches of national industry were in rapid progress. In spite of the great development of the cotton trade in Lancashire, it still continued to expand, and its bounds seemed illimitable. It was the same in Yorkshire; in the woollen manufactures of Leeds and Huddersfield, the stuffs of Bradford and Halifax, the linens of Barnsley and Knaresborough, and the flannels of Dewsbury, they were all thriving. In the silk trade, in the hosiery and lace trades, in the pottery and iron districts of Staffordshire and Wales, the general condition was highly flourishing.

In the external commerce of the country a change may be noticed, though remarked upon at a period a little subsequent, by the late Sir William Molesworth.* It refers to the different state in which the products of manufacture are exported, and which had been in progress in former reigns. Foreigners have continued to receive in augmenting quantities our hardwares, cottons, woollens, and other textiles; but though the export of these has gone on increasing, the export of them in the raw state, or an intermediate stage of manufacture, has increased in a faster ratio. Thus the increase of the export of cotton and woollen yarns, and of raw iron and steel, has been at a greater percentage rate than the manufactured products. As another incident in foreign commerce, may be mentioned the establishment of the Prusso-Bavarian league called the Zollverein. It excited some jealousy in England, but without reason, since the regulations of the House of Commons, March 13. 1839. Y Y

union have proved chiefly fiscal, and limited to the removal of the custom duties which obstructed the transit of commodities through conterminous German states.

The uncommon prosperity of the country was temporarily arrested by the usual sequel of a Mercantile Reaction. The revulsion of 1836-7 had a similar origin, and was marked by similar characteristics as the one noticed twelve years previously (p. 630.), but its effects were more limited and less enduring than the overwhelming pecuniary desolation which signalised the crisis of 1825. The chief points of distinction between the two, were in the value of the lesson the former had taught in the curtailment of private credit, and the greater share overtrading and an unguaranteed system of banking had in producing the recoil of 1837. It was not limited to England, but extended with equal or greater violence to the United States, and on both sides of the Atlantic had the same common origin—an inordinate thirst of gain; in America sought to be realised by land-jobs and speculations in British produce; in this country from excess of exports, railway projects, and joint-stock companies, projected on every imaginable temptation.

The Reform era had one sombre accompaniment, in the number of individuals of eminence whose career terminated, and the works or lives of most of whom, as previously glanced at, had helped to characterise, and been principally spent in a more stormy period. Sir James Mackintosh, Jeremy Bentham, Sir Walter Scott, Godwin, Malthus, Coleridge, James Mill, Hazlitt, and William Cobbett, are some of the popular or distinguished names which had passed away on the eve of a new generation, made wiser and better, it is probable, by the experience and precepts of a foregone race. The elder Scott, brother of the celebrated Lord Chancellor Eldon, had

DEATH OF THE KING.

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been also numbered among the dead. Sir William, or Lord Stowell as he had been ennobled, had lived through the varying scenes of almost a century-had been eighteen years a college tutor, occupied in training the intellect of the aristocracy in classical and historical knowledge-had mingled familiarly in the literary circle of Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Edmund Burkewas long the dispensing oracle of Doctors' Commons in matrimonial affairs, and spent thirty years as Admiralty judge, accumulating riches from naval prizes, and elaborating into symmetry maritime law from the crude dicta of his predecessors. France had two deaths of distinguished characters, who had fixed epochs in her history,- that of M. de Lafayette, whose public life began with the revolution in America; and that of the Abbé Sieyes, the venerable artiste of political constitutions from the assembling of the famous Tiers-Etat, through the vivid scenes of the first National Assembly and the Reign of Terror up to the first instalment of the Napoleonic age.

The death of the Reform King closes the eventful calendar of mortality. William IV. expired of natural decay, in June 1837. He had been a good man and beneficent sovereign, but his virtues were rather those of private life than of the regal station. Instead of the disturbing passions and commanding faculties, which form the chief historical portraits, his merits were the unpretending and often less hurtful qualities which contribute to domestic comfort, social enjoyment, and personal friendship. His education, in common with that of his brothers and of George III., had been below the standard of the age in which he survived to act a part. Notwithstanding defects of early culture, and natural gifts, his name is

*

* Letter of Sir William Taylor, private secretary of George III.

connected with a portion of British history over which the philanthropist may exult with the least alloy of dissatis faction. The glories of successful warfare signalised the early sway of his immediate predecessor; the less melancholy triumphs of peace, that of King William. During the seven eventful years of his reign, England had been revolutionised without violence or spoliation. All her great foundations and authorities, save the national universities, had been reformed, or prepared for reformation, by a free and unshrinking investigation. The veil was rent asunder, and every establishment, whether ecclesiastical, judicial, official, or colonial, thrown open to the general gaze and scrutiny. Public institutions were sought to be based on their public utilities, and the corrupt or factitious supports which government had been wont to derive from Treasury boroughs, close corporations, commercial monopolies, vast and irresponsible patronage, and a lavish fiscal expenditure, were struck from under it. Public opinion was made supreme, and that opinion free and unfettered. Whoever could sway it, whether by desert, talent, truth, or illusive arts, became the ruling power of the State.

CHAPTER XXXII.

PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA.

Stability of the British Constitution.

Weakness of the Melbourne Ministry. — Questions of Ministerial Appointments in the Royal Household.-Settlement of Canada, and Consolidation of its Political Government. Quintuple Alliance against the Egyptian Pacha. War with the Chinese. ·Disastrous Expedition into Affghanistan. -Affair of Scinde.-Defeat and Subjugation of the Sikhs.—British Policy in India; the Government of Lord Dalhousie. Annexation of Oude. · Act for the better Government of British India. — Domestic Occurrences; the Welsh Riots, and Chartist Insurrection.— Sir Robert Peel's Ministry.—Free Trade Principle; its Origin and Progress.-Reforms of the Tariff-Schism among the Protectionists, and Resignation of the Peel Ministry. - Difficulties of the Whig Ministry; its Extension of commercial Freedom to the Colonies. Repeal of the Navigation Laws, and opening of the Coasting Trade. - Progress of Liberalism.

THE two preceding reigns had been eminently progressive; that of George IV. by the abolition of the religious disqualifications of the Roman Catholics and Dissenters; that of William IV. by the political enfranchisement of the people, and the removal of obstructive municipal and commercial monopolies. In the brief reign of King William the foundations of the Constitution had been repaired, and those political and civil principles of freedom consummated which had been opened, and often ardently agitated during the eventful periods of George III. and his immediate successor. Together they closed the Georgian era; and by the last two sovereigns dying without issue, and the sceptre descending to a female branch, the dynasty of the House of Brunswick seemed