thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in history.
Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been
inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings,
bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad judges, was equal to the misery
caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Those events
which furnish the best themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are
not always those which most affect the happiness of the great body of
the people. The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had
been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily
and prosperously on. While the honour and independence of the State
were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were invaded, while
fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of thousands of quiet, honest
and industrious families laboured and traded, ate their meals and
lay down to rest, in comfort and security. Whether Whigs or Tories,
Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to
market; the grocer weighed out his currants; the draper measured out
his broadcloth; the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in
the towns; the harvest home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the
hamlets; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice
foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in
the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the
timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange
became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as
with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place
and by almost every class, in the dairy and on the threshing floor, by
the anvil and by the loom, on the billows of the ocean and in the depths
of the mine. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The workman and his
employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came round. On a
fair day or a market day the clamours, the reproaches, the taunts, the
curses, were incessant; and it was well if no booth was overturned
and no head broken. [637] No merchant would contract to deliver goods
without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which
he was to be paid. Even men of business were often bewildered by the
confusion into which all pecuniary transactions were thrown. The simple
and the careless were pillag