will with which he faced
every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among
English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of
our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in
which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while
it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the
honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won
victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his
negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the
very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced
his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and
a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is
the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he
was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our
Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later
statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing
both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense
to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a
statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in
the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he
can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national
wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his
rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more
conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of
our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the
manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be."

[Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]

The first act of his financial administration was to take off the duties
from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty articles of
importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened spirit through the
prejudice which restricted the commerce of the Colonies to the mother
country alone, by allowing Georgia and the Carolinas to export their
rice directly to any part of Europe. The result was that the rice of
America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from the market. His Excise
Bill, defective as it was, was the first measure in which an English
Minister showed any real grasp of the principles of taxation. The wisdom
of Walpole was re