This, in a few words, is the history of the regeneration of the Board of Trade.  It has perfectly answered its purposes.  It was intended to quiet the minds of the people, and to compose the ferment that was then strongly working in Parliament.  The courtiers were too happy to be able to substitute a board which they knew would be useless in the place of one that they feared would be dangerous.  Thus the Board of Trade was reproduced in a job; and perhaps it is the only instance of a public body which has never degenerated, but to this hour preserves all the health and vigor of its primitive institution.

This Board of Trade and Plantations has not been of any use to the colonies, as colonies:  so little of use, that the flourishing settlements of New England, of Virginia, and of Maryland, and all our wealthy colonies in the West Indies, were of a date prior to the first board of Charles the Second.  Pennsylvania and Carolina were settled during its dark quarter, in the interval between the extinction of the first and the formation of the second board.  Two colonies alone owe their origin to that board.  Georgia, which, till lately, has made a very slow progress,—­and never did make any progress at all, until it had wholly got rid of all the regulations which the Board of Trade had moulded into its original constitution.  That colony has cost the nation very great sums of money; whereas the colonies which have had the fortune of not being godfathered by the Board of Trade never cost the nation a shilling, except what has been so properly spent in losing them.  But the colony of Georgia, weak as it was, carried with it to the last hour, and carries, even in its present dead, pallid visage, the perfect resemblance of its parents.  It always had, and it now has, an establishment, paid by the public of England, for the sake of the influence of the crown:  that colony having never been able or willing to take upon itself the expense of its proper government or its own appropriated jobs.

The province of Nova Scotia was the youngest and the favorite child of the Board.  Good God! what sums the nursing of that ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favored brat has cost to this wittol nation!  Sir, this colony has stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred thousand pounds.  To this day it has made no repayment,—­it does not even support those offices of expense which are miscalled its government; the whole of that job still lies upon the patient, callous shoulders of the people of England.

Sir, I am going to state a fact to you that will serve to set in full sunshine the real value of formality and official superintendence.  There was in the province of Nova Scotia one little neglected corner, the country of the neutral French; which, having the good-fortune to escape the fostering care of both France and England, and to have been shut out from the protection and regulation of councils of commerce and of boards of trade, did, in silence, without notice,