THE ACT OF ANNE. THE PRESENT ESTATE.

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the Crown estate confirms this calculation. Of course it had become wholly insufficient for the maintenance of those objects to which it had been originally dedicated, and even for the royal household, which thenceforward depended on a civil list, voted and appropriated at the commencement of each reign.

Practically, the estate of the Crown has become part of the national estate. It does not belong to the present royal family by descent, for on mere grounds of hereditary right, there are many persons more near the Stuart stock than that which was declared after the death of the Duke of Gloucester, by Act of Parliament, to be next in succession. The doctrine that the Crown lands belong to the Crown is as obsolete as the doctrine would be that the hereditary excise of the Restoration does. These lands have been surrendered, or rather have never been given, and the estate is managed by and for the State, under the control of Parliament. Even in their present form they cannot be charged or alienated, although it must be allowed, the restraint was put on when there was little left to save, just as in Elizabeth's reign, the disabling statute, putting a check to the alienation of lands belonging to ecclesiastical and academical corporations was not enacted till many sees had been greatly impoverished by the exactions of Elizabeth's courtiers, and with the queen's connivance.

The Act restraining the Crown from alienating the royal estate in England did not extend to Ireland, and enormous grants of these forfeited estates, about which so much stir was made in William's reign, were conferred on the queen's favourites, notably on the Seymour Conways. But, in fact, the Irish exchequer, even up to the days of the Union, was loaded with placemen, rewarded for services which, even in Walpole's time, the English Parliament would have compensated very differently. Perhaps among the many Irish grievances which existed before and after 1782, none was more offensive to national feeling than the use which was made of the Irish pension list, and the lavish expenditure of Irish money on those who were fortunate enough to get a share in the distribution. Nearly as many families were founded and enriched from this source as from the Church lands in the days of Henry, and even the Irish Parliament which is associated with Grattan's name, contained persons in it, created under this system, who would not have been

endured in the very worst times of English Parliamentary corruption; men who merited the indignant contempt with which Wolfe Tone characterized the Irish House of Commons.

Two of the ancient Crown estates are still annexed to the reigning monarch and the heir apparent, the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. They are curious survivals of the old feudal tenures, and illustrate how strangely the possessions of the ancient estates were scattered all over the country, for the two duchies hold lands in most of the English counties. For example, there is a considerable estate of the Duchy of Cornwall in Berkshire, not half a dozen miles from Oxford. Up to recently those estates were generally occupied under the system of beneficial leases, but these leases have not been renewed, and in consequence no little discontent has been expressed by those who had purchased on the understanding that the traditional custom would be continued. But in fact, as these estates are appropriated to these royal persons, they are naturally, in their improved condition, to be taken into account in the settlement of the civil list, and so fulfil to some extent the purposes for which in old times the estate of the Crown was so suspiciously watched.

I have dealt with this subject then, partly because it plays in past history so important a part in that economic side of English public life which deals with taxation and revenue. Its indirect significance in the many disturbances and changes which have occurred in the English monarchy is of the greatest. As I said at first, revolutions in English history, the deposition of princes, the change in the succession, the control of Parliament over the executive, may have been brought about by a plurality of causes, but the fiscal or economic cause dominates the whole. In one way the shrunken importance of the Crown estate, now not as much as the two-hundredth part of the annual revenue, has made the succession infinitely stronger. It is now exactly two centuries since Parliament undertook to change the succession to the Crown, and to dissociate itself from the dogma of Divine or even of hereditary right. You will not find any two centuries of English history in which the position of the dynasty which Parliament established has been so unassailed as that of the House of Hanover. The constantly recurrent cause of disaffection has been taken away.

THE ANCIENT INTEREST OBSOLETE.

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The personality of the sovereign, though by no means lost, is merged in that of Parliament.

The appropriation of the Crown lands by Parliament, and the limitations imposed by the statute of Anne, had much to do with the gradual extinction of Parliamentary corruption. People may, if they please, criticize the conduct of the House of Commons, its management of business, its appetite for undertakings which it cannot adequately deal with, its delays, its disturbances, its factions. But no critic can charge it with being corrupt, with its members being influenced by personal advantage in their political action, with any motive more ignoble than ambition. In this it can be contrasted to its honour with every other Parliament, with every other British institution, even with the University of Oxford. In this political purity lies its enduring hold on the English people. This reputation had its beginnings in the efforts of those who quarrelled, however unskilfully and unduly, with William, and anticipated by its own action, in the Act of Anne, the possible continuance of William's errors under the rule of his feeble successor. But the historical interest in the doctrine of resumptions is materially modified, if not extinguished, by the passing of the Nullum Tempus Act in 1768 (9 George III. cap. 16). By this Act, the Crown was disabled from resuming any grant after a lapse of sixty years. The occasion of the Act was an attempt, on the part of Sir John Lowther, to appropriate to himself through the interest of his father-in-law, Lord Bute, one of the grants which William III. had made to Bentinck.

XX.

PUBLIC DEBTS.

Early loans-The example of the Dutch-Their finance-The origin of their loans-The power which a government possesses of raising loans-The United States-France-India and the ColoniesElements of safety and distrust-Loans in government paperInconvertible paper-Taxation of dividends-The ordinary object of loans-Permanent and terminable loans-The loans of the Revolution-The system of borrowing-The funding system, and the arguments for and against it-The return to cash payments, and the reasoning of those who wished to degrade the currency— Peel's action.

THE Dutch taught European governments that part of finance which under the name of public debts pledges the future earnings of a people to the payment of interest on loans, and to the repayment of them in course of time. Governments have often borrowed money on the security of taxes. Thus our Edward III. raised large loans from Florentine bankers, giving them what they no doubt thought adequate security, and broke faith with them. It is not so long ago that the descendant and representative of one of these houses was entertained in London, when he alluded to the fact, though without any expression of hope that the liability written off five centuries ago as a bad debt would be recognized by the present generation. I mention the fact to illustrate how enduring is the memory of repudiation. In the same way Philip II. repudiated his debts in 1596, and nearly ruined Genoa, which had plentifully discounted his paper. From that time the Government of Spain has never been able to retrieve its credit. Public credit is

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vigorous enough when the integrity of a government has been traditionally unblemished. But it takes a long time to restore a tarnished reputation in matters of finance, when the confidence has been that of a foreign creditor whose most effectual criticism of the past is a deaf ear to present applications. I shall try in the course of this lecture to point out, not only the acts which destroy all trust, they are fairly obvious, but also the circumstances which excite a hardly less dangerous suspicion.

The war of Dutch independence is, to my mind, the most striking fact in modern European history, perhaps in the history of civilization. It begins with the capture of Brill by the Beggars of the Sea on April 1, 1572, and ends with the practical acknowledgment of Dutch Independence in 1609. It is true that before this time William of Orange was resisting and negotiating, and no one doubts how important was his name as a rallying cry, and his counsel in success or in adversity. But the War of Independence was essentially one of the traders and the people. The Dutch nobility were constantly traitors to the cause which they had embraced, and to the men who trusted, honoured, and rewarded them. It was unhappily the case that two of the English commanders, Yorke and Stanley, were even more treacherous. It is only too true that the house of Orange has exhibited the most conspicuous illustration of how little hereditary political virtue, political intelligence, and true patriotism This house in its later times has clung only to the worst traits which disfigured some of the earlier members in the lineage. But during the whole struggle the Dutch merchant and the Dutch peasant were as true as steel, never discouraged, though constantly deceived.

are.

The debt which modern civilization owes to the Dutch cannot be too overrated. They taught Europe the art of agriculture; for it is to their example that the new agriculture, which we adopted tardily in the eighteenth century, was due. They instructed Europe in the mystery of commercial credit, and the Bank of Amsterdam supplied what were virtually the earliest practical lessons in mercantile finance. They taught the world the whole of the scientific navigation which it knew for centuries. They were the pioneers of international law, of physics, of mechanical science, of a rational medicine, of scholarship, of jurisprudence. The geographical dis