his crown:  and the man who, up to that moment, had been one of the most zealous supporters of the commonwealth, came out next morning as an equally zealous supporter of the king.  He accompanied this wonderful exploit by an act of treachery to three of his old associates,—­including Colonel Oakey, in whose regiment he had served as chaplain,—­which cost them their lives.  He was forthwith knighted, and his commission as ambassador renewed.  After a while, he returned to England; went into Parliament from Morpeth, and ever after the exchequer was in his hands.  By his knowledge, skill, and ability, he enlarged the financial resources of the country, multiplied its manufactures, and extended its power and wealth.  He was probably the original contriver of the policy enforced in the celebrated Navigation Act, having suggested it in Cromwell’s time.  By that single short act of Parliament, England became the great naval power of the world; her colonial possessions, however widely dispersed, were consolidated into one vast fountain of wealth to the imperial realm; the empire of the seas was fixed on an immovable basis, and the proud Hollander compelled to take down the besom from the mast-head of his high-admiral.

Sir George Downing did one thing in favor of the power of the people, in the British system of government, which may mitigate the resentment of mankind for his execrable seizure and delivery to the royal vengeance of Oakey, Corbett, and Barkstead.  He introduced into Parliament and established the principle of Specific Appropriations.  The House of Commons has, ever since, not only held the keys of the treasury, but the power of controlling expenditures.  The fortune of Sir George, on the failure of issue in the third generation, went to the foundation of Downing College, in Cambridge, England.  It amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling.  It is not improbable, that Downing Street, in London, owes its name to the great diplomatist.

This remarkable man spent his later youth and opening manhood on Salem Farms.  In his college vacations and intervals of study, he partook, perhaps, in the labors of the plantation, mingled with the rural population, and shared in their sports.  The crack of his fowling-piece re-echoed through the wild woods beyond Procter’s Corner; he tended his father’s duck-coys at Humphries’ Pond, and angled along the clear brooks.  It is an observable circumstance, as illustrating the transmission of family traits, that the same ingenious activity and versatility of mind, which led Emanuel Downing, while carrying on the multifarious operations of opening a large farm in the forest, presiding in the local court at Salem, and serving year after year in the General Court as a deputy, to contrive complicated machinery for taking wild fowl and getting up distilleries, re-appeared in his son, on the broader field of the manufactures, finances, and foreign relations of a great nation.