warded by a quick upgrowth of prosperity. The material
progress of the country was such as England had never seen before. Our
exports, which were only six millions in value at the beginning of the
century, had reached the value of twelve millions by the middle of it.
It was above all the trade with the Colonies which began to give England
a new wealth. The whole Colonial trade at the time of the battle of
Blenheim was no greater than the trade with the single isle of Jamaica
at the opening of the American war. At the accession of George the
Second the exports to Pennsylvania were valued at L15,000. At his death
they reached half-a-million. In the middle of the eighteenth century
the profits of Great Britain from the trade with the Colonies were
estimated at two millions a year. And with the growth of wealth came a
quick growth in population. That of Manchester and Birmingham, whose
manufactures were now becoming of importance, doubled in thirty years.
Bristol, the chief seat of the West Indian trade, rose into new
prosperity. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with the
West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the
kingdom. With peace and security, and the wealth that they brought with
them, the value of land, and with it the rental of every country
gentleman, rose fast. "Estates which were rented at two thousand a year
threescore years ago," said Burke in 1766, "are at three thousand at
present."

[Sidenote: His policy of inaction.]

Nothing shows more clearly the soundness of his political intellect than
the fact that this upgrowth of wealth around him never made Walpole
swerve from a rigid economy, from a steady reduction of the debt, or a
diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George the First
the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. It was indeed in
economy alone that his best work could be done. In finance as in other
fields of statesmanship Walpole was forbidden from taking more than
tentative steps towards a wiser system by the needs of the work he had
specially to do. To this work everything gave way. He withdrew his
Excise Bill rather than suffer the agitation it roused to break the
quiet which was reconciling the country to the system of the Revolution.
His hatred of religious intolerance or the support he hoped for from the
Dissenters never swayed him to rouse the spirit of popular bigotry,
which he knew to be ready to burst out at the slight