the
threshold of life.

It was buried with little ceremony, and never more thought of until the
reign of King William, when, in the strange vicissitude of neglect and
vigor, of good and ill success that attended his wars, in the year 1695,
the trade was distressed beyond all example of former sufferings by the
piracies of the French cruisers. This suffering incensed, and, as it
should seem, very justly incensed, the House of Commons. In this
ferment, they struck, not only at the administration, but at the very
constitution of the executive government. They attempted to form in
Parliament a board for the protection of trade, which, as they planned
it, was to draw to itself a great part, if not the whole, of the
functions and powers both of the Admiralty and of the Treasury; and
thus, by a Parliamentary delegation of office and officers, they
threatened absolutely to separate these departments from the whole
system of the executive government, and of course to vest the most
leading and essential of its attributes in this board. As the executive
government was in a manner convicted of a dereliction of its functions,
it was with infinite difficulty that this blow was warded off in that
session. There was a threat to renew the same attempt in the next. To
prevent the effect of this manoeuvre, the court opposed another
manoeuvre to it, and, in the year 1696, called into life this Board of
Trade, which had slept since 1673.

This, in a few words, is the history of the regeneration of the Board of
Trade. It has perfectly answered its purposes. It was intended to quiet
the minds of the people, and to compose the ferment that was then
strongly working in Parliament. The courtiers were too happy to be able
to substitute a board which they knew would be useless in the place of
one that they feared would be dangerous. Thus the Board of Trade was
reproduced in a job; and perhaps it is the only instance of a public
body which has never degenerated, but to this hour preserves all the
health and vigor of its primitive institution.

This Board of Trade and Plantations has not been of any use to the
colonies, as colonies: so little of use, that the flourishing
settlements of New England, of Virginia, and of Maryland, and all our
wealthy colonies in the West Indies, were of a date prior to the first
board of Charles the Second. Pennsylvania and Carolina were settled
during its dark quarter, in the interval between the extinction of the