As to our commerce, the imports and exports of the nation, now six-and-forty million, did not then amount to ten.  The inland trade, which is commonly passed by in this sort of estimates, but which, in part growing out of the foreign, and connected with it, is more advantageous and more substantially nutritive to the state, is not only grown in a proportion of near five to one as the foreign, but has been augmented at least in a tenfold proportion.  When I came to England, I remember but one river navigation, the rate of carriage on which was limited by an act of Parliament.  It was made in the reign of William the Third.  I mean that of the Aire and Calder.  The rate was settled at thirteen pence.  So high a price demonstrated the feebleness of these beginnings of our inland intercourse.  In my time, one of the longest and sharpest contests I remember in your House, and which rather resembled a violent contention amongst national parties than a local dispute, was, as well as I can recollect, to hold the price up to threepence.  Even this, which a very scanty justice to the proprietors required, was done with infinite difficulty.  As to private credit, there were not, as I believe, twelve bankers’ shops at that time out of London.  In this their number, when I first saw the country, I cannot be quite exact; but certainly those machines of domestic credit were then very few.  They are now in almost every market-town:  and this circumstance (whether the thing be carried to an excess or not) demonstrates the astonishing increase of private confidence, of general circulation, and of internal commerce,—­an increase out of all proportion to the growth of the foreign trade.  Our naval strength in the time of King William’s war was nearly matched by that of France; and though conjoined with Holland, then a maritime power hardly inferior to our own, even with that force we were not always victorious.  Though finally superior, the allied fleets experienced many unpleasant reverses on their own element.  In two years three thousand vessels were taken from the English trade.  On the Continent we lost almost every battle we fought.

In 1697, (it is not quite an hundred years ago,) in that state of things, amidst the general debasement of the coin, the fall of the ordinary revenue, the failure of all the extraordinary supplies, the ruin of commerce, and the almost total extinction of an infant credit, the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, whom we have just seen begging from door to door, came forward to move a resolution full of vigor, in which, far from being discouraged by the generally adverse fortune and the long continuance of the war, the Commons agreed to address the crown in the following manly, spirited, and truly animating style:—­

“This is the EIGHTH year in which your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons in Parliament assembled, have assisted your Majesty with large supplies for carrying on a just and necessary war, in defence of our religion, preservation of our laws, and vindication of the rights and liberties of the people of England.”