rt.

The address was sure to be carried; Walpole's influence was still
strong enough to accomplish that much. But everybody must already have
seen that the convention was not an instrument capable of satisfying,
or, indeed, framed with any notion of satisfying, the popular demands
of England. It was an odd sort of arrangement, partly international
and partly personal; an adjustment, or attempted adjustment here of a
dispute between States, and there of a dispute between rival trading
companies. The reconstituted South Sea Company--which had now become
one of the three great trading companies of England, the East India
Company and the Bank being the {168} other two--had all manner of
negotiations, arrangements, and transactions with the King of Spain.
All these affairs now became mixed up with the national claims, and
were dealt with alike in the convention. The British plenipotentiary
at the Spanish Court was--still further to complicate matters--the
agent for the South Sea Company. The convention provided that certain
set-off claims of Spain should be taken into consideration as well as
the claims of England. Spain had some demands against England for the
value of certain vessels of the Spanish navy attacked and captured
during the reign of George the First without a declaration of war. The
claim had been admitted in principle by England, and it became what
would be called in the law courts only a question of damages. Then the
convention contained some stipulations concerning certain claims of
Spain upon the South Sea Company; that is, on what was, after all, only
a private trading company. When the anomaly was pointed out by Lord
Carteret and others in the House of Lords, and it was asked how came it
that the English plenipotentiary at the Court of Spain was also the
agent of the South Sea Company, it was ingeniously answered on the part
of the Government that nothing could be more fitting and proper, seeing
that, as English plenipotentiary, he had to act for England with the
King of Spain, and as agent for the South Sea Company to deal with the
same sovereign in that sovereign's capacity as a great private
merchant. Therefore the national claims were made, to a certain
extent, subservient to, or dependent on, the claims of the South Sea
Company. Whether we may think the claims of the English merchants and
seamen were exaggerated or not, one thing is obvious: they could not
possibly be satisfied under such