ends he has chosen to serve him; and when that firmness is fully
perceived, faction will dissolve and be dissipated like a morning fog
before the rising sun, leaving the rest of the day clear with a sky
serene and cloudless. Such after a few of the first years will be the
future course of his Majesty's reign, which I predict will be happy
and truly glorious. A new war I cannot yet see reason to apprehend. The
peace will I think long continue, and your nation be as happy as they
deserve to be."

CHAPTER II. The Burden Of Empire

Nothing of note in Parliament, except one slight day on the
American taxes.--Horace Walpole.

There were plenty of men in England, any time before 1763, who found
that an excellent arrangement which permitted them to hold office in the
colonies while continuing to reside in London. They were thereby enabled
to make debts, and sometimes even to pay them, without troubling much
about their duties; and one may easily think of them, over their claret,
as Mr. Trevelyan says, lamenting the cruelty of a secretary of state
who hinted that, for form's sake at least, they had best show themselves
once in a while in America. They might have replied with Junius: "It was
not Virginia that wanted a governor, but a court favorite that wanted a
salary." Certainly Virginia could do with a minimum of royal officials;
but most court favorites wanted salaries, for without salaries unendowed
gentlemen could not conveniently live in London.

One of these gentlemen, in the year 1763, was Mr. Grosvenor Bedford.
He was not, to be sure, a court favorite, but a man, now well along in
years, who had long ago been appointed to be Collector of the Customs
at the port of Philadelphia. The appointment had been made by the great
minister, Robert Walpole, for whom Mr. Bedford had unquestionably
done some service or other, and of whose son, Horace Walpole, the
letter-writer, he had continued from that day to be a kind of dependent
or protege, being precisely the sort of unobtrusive factotum which that
fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane affairs. But now,
after this long time, when the King's business was placed in the hands
of George Grenville, who entertained the odd notion that a Collector of
the Customs should reside at the port of entry where the customs were
collected rather than in London where he drew his salary, it was being
noised about, and was presently reported at Strawberry Hill, that Mr