vantageous bargain with the Bank of England for the
renewal of its charter. Yet in some matters his economy was
short-sighted and peddling. He starved the naval estimates. During the
war many ships were built hastily of timber insufficiently seasoned, and
had fallen into so bad a condition that half their original cost was
needed for the repair of their hulls; there were too few workmen in the
dockyards, and the stores were empty of sails, rigging, and cordage.
Lord Egmont, the first lord of the admiralty, represented the necessity
for a large expenditure on the navy, but Grenville would not hear of it.
So, too, in less important matters, he grudged spending money on the
police of London, and highway robbery and other crimes of violence were
insufficiently checked, and he even refused so small a sum as L20,000
which the king wanted for the purchase of some land at the back of
Buckingham House, the site of part of the present Grosvenor Place, in
order that the garden which he was then making might not be overlooked.

The expenditure on the American colonies and the irregularities by which
they evaded their legal obligations, were offensive to his frugal and
orderly temperament; he proposed to enforce their obligations, and to
draw from the colonies some part of their cost to the mother-country.
The colonies occupied a long and comparatively narrow tract of country
stretching for seventeen hundred miles along the Atlantic. They differed
in character. In the northern colonies the puritan element was strong,
and the chief sources of wealth were commerce and farming. The southern
colonies had cavalier traditions, and their wealth was chiefly derived
from plantations which were cultivated by slave labour. Though
puritanism as a religious force was well-nigh extinct in the New England
provinces, it affected the temper of the people; they set a high value
on speech-making and fine words, and were litigious and obstinate;
lawyers were plentiful among them, and had much influence. As a whole
the colonies were impatient of control and jealous of interference.
Their constitutions differed in various points; in some the governor was
appointed by the crown, in others by the proprietary. All alike enjoyed
a large measure of personal and political freedom: they had the form and
substance of the British constitution; they had representative
assemblies in which they taxed themselves for their domestic purposes,
chose most of their own mag