to be met by anticipating parts of
the revenue for years ahead, and by a series of extraordinary
transactions tedious to name or to understand.

"In the summer of 1715 [two years after the peace] it seemed as
if the situation could not grow worse,--no more public nor
private credit; no more clear revenue for the State; the
portions of the revenue not pledged, anticipated on the
following years. Neither labor nor consumption could be resumed
for want of circulation; usury reigned on the ruins of society.
The alternations of high prices and the depreciation of
commodities finally crushed the people. Provision riots broke
out among them, and even in the army. Manufactures were
languishing or suspended; forced mendicity was preying upon the
cities. The fields were deserted, the lands fallow for lack of
instruments, for lack of manure, for lack of cattle; the houses
were falling to ruin. Monarchical France seemed ready to expire
with its aged king."[78]

Thus it was in France, with a population of nineteen millions at that
time to the eight millions of all the British Islands; with a land
vastly more fertile and productive; before the great days, too, of
coal and iron. "In England, on the contrary, the immense grants of
Parliament in 1710 struck the French prodigiously; for while their
credit was low, or in a manner quite gone, ours was at its zenith."
During that same war "there appeared that mighty spirit among our
merchants which enabled them to carry on all their schemes with a
vigor that kept a constant circulation of money throughout the
kingdom, and afforded such mighty encouragement to all manufactures as
has made the remembrance of those times grateful in worse."

"By the treaty with Portugal we were prodigious gainers.... The
Portuguese began to feel the comfortable effects of their Brazil
gold mines, and the prodigious commerce that followed with us
made their good fortune in great measure ours; and so it has
been ever since; otherwise I know not how the expenses of the
war had been borne.... The running cash in the kingdom increased
very considerably, which must be attributed in great measure to
our Portuguese trade; and this, as I have made manifest, we owed
wholly to our power at sea [which took Portugal from the
alliance of the two crowns, and threw her upon the protection of
the maritime powers]. Our trade