rica had acted like a spell upon the imagination of
Englishmen, and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea Company, which
promised a reduction of the public debt as the price of a monopoly of
the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously to her old prohibitions
of all foreign commerce; and the Treaty of Utrecht only won for England
the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade with its dominions and of
despatching a single ship to the coast of Spanish America. But in spite
of all this, the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for
new privileges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a
million a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the
country against this "dream." Both went mad; and in 1720 bubble Company
followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought a general
ruin in its train. The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his
colleagues, many were found to have received bribes from the South Sea
Company to back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of
terror at the investigation; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
was sent to the Tower; and in the general wreck of his rivals Robert
Walpole mounted again into power. In 1721 he became First Lord of the
Treasury, while his brother-in-law, Lord Townshend, returned to his
post of Secretary of State. But their relative position was now
reversed. Townshend had been the head in the earlier administration: in
this Walpole was resolved, to use his own characteristic phrase, that
"the firm should be Walpole and Townshend and not Townshend and
Walpole."

[Sidenote: Walpole's Ministry.]

But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the
head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared
worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness
has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His
qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full
justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man;
nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to
do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque
or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe,
was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on
this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone
it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable