encouragement." In the former case the Queen's influence was on the side of peace. In 1861, Prince Albert's insistence, just before his last illness, on the modification of one of Lord John's despatches to America probably prevented a war between England and the Northern States. In the same way, in 1864, the Queen persuaded Russell to refrain from threats to Prussia and Austria which might have resulted in England fighting on the side of Denmark. The Queen was entitled to the congratulations of King Leopold : "You may well be proud of your success," he wrote," and our dear angel will see with unbounded satisfaction how gloriously you have acted in His Spirit.'

In 1877, the Queen was thinking not of Albert's belief in peace but of his acceptance of the necessity of the Crimean War. Her anxiety to renew the struggle with Russia was such that Disraeli could declare that "she writes every day and telegraphs every hour-almost literally." She anxiously awaited the resignation of the peace party in the Cabinet and as for Mr. Gladstone, who was touring the country rousing up feeling about Turkish atrocities, she declared that he had "taken leave of his senses." Yet again there was no war, and Disraeli's apparent triumph at the Congress of Berlin satisfied her almost as much as if she had, in her own phrase, given "those Russians a good beating."

On the whole there does not seem to be ground for the view that the monarchy, in the nineteenth century at least, was more likely to favour war than any average citizen. Both in 1864 and in 1877 it would have been possible to rouse a public opinion as enthusiastically in favour of war as that of 1854. But in 1864 Palmerston was less impetuous than he had been ten years earlier, and there was no incident like that of Sinope which could be represented as a direct challenge to British honour; while in 1877 public opinion was divided between Gladstone and Disraeli-each of them seemed anxious to fight, but on different sides. It therefore happened that the Queen helped to keep peace on the first occasion, and was not powerful enough to make war on the second.

The above account of the Queen's relations with her Ministers should make it clear that her interpretation of the right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn " was a wide

one. As exercised by her, it at least involved the right to harass, to delay, to reprimand, and, indeed, as one who suffered much from her remarked, the right to "bully " her Ministers, These functions she exercised throughout her reign. In the last resort, both in home and foreign affairs, a Prime Minister could of course get his own way, but often only at the expense of a lengthy and delicate combat. If, as some have held, it is the duty of the English monarch to be passive and impartial, the Queen was certainly the least constitutional of sovereigns. That she retained the reputation of a model monarch was due to the fact that, though she strained the constitution almost to breaking point, her prejudices and her conventions were so exactly those dominant in her age that she seemed to embody its very nature within herself. Her influence, moreover, was almost always in the direction which middle-class sentiment would have approved. Though she took a more direct part in government than was generally ascribed to her, on the whole, the popular conception of her character was remarkably accurate. In truth she could be relied upon to live up to it. She spoke, one feels, with the whole authority of her age when she refused Sir Alexander Cockburn a peerage because he had been immoral in his youth; when she opposed the idea of a Channel tunnel because" if England is to be connected with the Continent, we shall have to keep up double the army, which we so unwillingly afford now"; when she argued against a tax on matches because it would drive some of "the very poorest people and little children" out of work; when she declared it "monstrous "that there should be no legislation to prevent railway accidents when Mr. Gladstone was merely passing laws about education; when she admitted that Lord Lytton, who had provoked a war with the Afghans, had disobeyed the Cabinet in so doing, and then added: "Now, of course, we must punish the insult, and support Lord Lytton." When has a period ever been so accurately named as the Victorian Age ?

In 1878, when her published letters end, the Queen had surmounted her difficulties. The public had made her a symbol of the prosperity of their Empire. Thus it came about, as Mr. Strachey explains, that the prestige of the monarchy increased when its power declined. For in spite of the Queen's tenacity and vigour, her political influence grew less as she grew older.

A series of powerful ministers, a firmer party organization, a growing system of civil service administration and a vast increase in the business of the State, all necessarily meant that the Queen's word counted for less in practice as the century went on. But the magic of monarchy increased as its political power declined. When the Queen emerged from her seclusion she found awaiting her an overwhelming ovation. Sir Charles Dilke's discussions of her income, and the fashionable talk of republicanism, died before the appearance of majesty itself. The clerk in Shoreditch felt the glamour of monarchy as keenly as the labourer in Somerset. There were many reasons for the revival of royal popularity. But the point which here concerns us is that the movement begun by Disraeli, to identify the symbolism of monarchy with the symbolism of Empire, was overwhelmingly successful. Imperialism and the popular monarchy grew side by side and blended. The propaganda value of the monarchy enormously increased, and the new journalism of the 'nineties converted it into dividends. It seems clear that the old dangers which Radicals of the 'seventies scented in the monarchy no longer excite anyone against it. Its expense, its snobbery, even the political influence it might still exercise in a crisis, seem rather to increase than to decrease its popularity. Its fortunes have become bound up with those of the Empire and it is probably as safe as the Empire-and no safer.

KINGSLEY MARTIN

I.

ENGLAND'S TREASURE BY TRADE

A Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce. Edited by J. R. MCCULLOCH. Printed for the Political Economy Club. 1856. 2. The Romance of Commerce. By H. GORDON SELFRIDGE. The Bodley

Head. 1918.

3. A History of the Custom-Revenue in England. By HUBERT HALL. Elliott Stock.

1892.

4. The Town of Cambridge. By ARTHUR GRAY, Master of Jesus College. Cambridge: Heffer & Sons.

1925.

5. The English Brass and Copper Industries. By HENRY HAMILTON. Longmans, Green. 1926.

6. The Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1920. By Sir WILLIAM SCHOOLING, K.B.E. Published by the Hudson's Bay Company. 1920.

IN

IN the present generation we perhaps insufficiently realise how much the prosperity of our country depends upon commerce. There is a very frequent tendency to depreciate the trader as a person of relatively little value compared with the primary producer. Indeed this tendency goes so far that many traders, popularly known as middlemen, are held up to opprobrium as mere parasites, living upon the honest labour of the producer while defrauding the consumer. To some extent this attitude of the general public towards the trader has existed for all time. Those who achieve success are always liable to be accused of fraud. But in earlier generations some Englishmen at any rate seem to have had a fuller appreciation of the value of the trader's services to his country than is to be found to-day in many newspapers.

In the seventeenth century there were published in England various tracts on commerce by different writers. These were collected and printed at the cost of the Political Economy Club in 1856. One of these essays bears the attractive title "England's Treasure by Forraign Trade." Another is entitled "The Treasure of Traffike," with the explanatory sub-title "A Discourse of Foreign Trade; wherein is shewed the benefit and commoditie arising to a Commonwealth or Kingdome by the skilfull Merchant, and by a well ordered Commerce and regular Traffike." There is also a very interesting essay by Sir Dudley North, who spent much of his life as a merchant in Turkey, and on his return to England was made a Commissioner of the Customs. He deals

VOL. 243.

NO. 496.

Y

in detail with the bad state of the coinage at that period (1691), but opposes the notion that either coinage or trade could be improved by restricting the exportation of the precious metals, and insists-as happily some politicians to-day are at last beginning to realise that "it is peace and industry and freedom that bring trade and wealth, and nothing else."

Many of the issues discussed in this volume of seventeenth century essays are still of such active interest that it is worth while to deal in detail with some of the points raised.

One of the factors which has most influenced popular opinion with regard to trade through many generations is the common belief that the only real "treasure" consists of precious metals. Indeed, several of the writers in this volume of essays, including those who argue that England's treasure grows by trade, use the word "treasure" as synonymous with bullion. And in earlier centuries, even more frequently than to-day, people assumed that goods imported were necessarily paid for by gold and silver, and that consequently a nation which bought largely from foreign countries would lose its "treasure." For this reason it was long the practice of England, as of other nations, to prohibit the exportation of the precious metals. The establishment of the East India Company in the year 1600 created a new situation. Traders to India quickly discovered that gold and silver were specially valuable as articles of commerce in Eastern markets, and to meet the needs of the East India Company the prohibition on the export of the precious metals was relaxed. This led to many angry protests, and the pending ruin of England was loudly proclaimed.

In 1621, Thomas Mun, one of the directors of the company, published in reply to these critics an essay entitled "A discourse of trade to the East Indies." He did not go so far as to challenge the view that bullion was the only true wealth, but he argued that though bullion must be sent out of the country to purchase Indian goods, many of those goods would be sold at a profit to continental countries, so that more bullion would come back than went out. He also dealt with the general advantages of trade with India and especially of the newly developed route round the Cape. He claimed that the drugs and spices, raw silk, indigo and calicoes imported from India were very useful commodities. Of calicoes he remarks that they are "the manufacture of Infidells