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Cromwell fostered British commerce by all the means in his power, and most successfully; and the commercial activity thus excited acquired power, and continued to increase ever afterwards. He encouraged and extended the colonies, especially by the acquisition of Jamaica, and the trade with the West Indies and American colonies added increasingly, during the period now under review, to our commercial wealth and navy. The writer of "The World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell," published in the "Harleian Miscellany," says:—"When this tyrant, or Protector, as some call him, turned out the Long Parliament in April, 1653, the kingdom had arrived at the highest pitch of trade it ever knew. The riches of the nation showed itself in the high value of land and of all our native commodities, which are the certain marks of opulence." Besides this, the great quantity of land thrown into the hands of small proprietors, from time to time, and from a succession of causes, ever since the breaking up of the Roman Church, and all its monasteries and convents by Henry VIII., was every day telling more markedly on the wealth and spirit of the people. We have just seen what a powerful body the yeomanry had grown; and, from the same causes, a large accession of capital had flowed into trade. The culture of these divided lands was enormously increased; instead of lying as vast deserts and hunting grounds, they now were become fertile farms. The internal resources of the country were rapidly and constantly developing themselves; and from the cool transfer of the taxation from the aristocracy to the people at large, it had become the interest of the monarchs, if they did little positively to accelerate the growth of national wealth, at least to leave in freedom the capital-increasing exertions of the population. The more the people traded abroad, the greater were the proceeds of the customs; the more they consumed, the greater the proceeds of the excise; now the chief items of the royal revenue. All the sources of national wealth originated in the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth, for the transfers of the customs and excise were first made then, and only resumed after the Restoration.

SHIPS OF THE TIME OF CHARLES II.

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We may now notice the rapid growth of these items of revenue. In the first year of Charles II.'s reign—namely, 1660—the proceeds of the customs were £361,356; in the last year of James's reign, 1688, they were £781,987. Thus, in twenty-eight years the customs had more than doubled themselves. We have not the same complete accounts of the excise, imports and exports, for the same period; but those which we have show the same progressive ratio. In 1663, the imports and exports together amounted to £6,038,831; in 1669, or only six years afterwards, they were £6,259,413; and, since 1613, they had risen up to this amount from £4,628,586. This showed a steady increase of consumption in the nation. During this time the imports exceeded the exports considerably, demonstrating the fact that the internal wealth was greater than the export of goods; but the balance of trade gradually adjusted itself, and, in 1699, the excess of exports over imports was £1,147,660; showing that even exportable articles of manufacture, of raw produce, or of commodities the growth of our colonies and settlements, had continued to increase. The proceeds of the excise in 1660, when Charles became possessed of it, amounted only to about one million; but increased so rapidly that in little more than a century it reached ten millions.

The value of land, and of all kinds of property, rose in proportion. Davenant, in his "Discourses on Trade," shows that the value of the whole rental of England in 1660 was but £6,000,000; in 1688 it was £14,000,000. So that, in 1660, the whole land of England, at twelve years' purchase, was worth only £72,000,000; but, in 1688, at fourteen years' purchase, its then estimated value, it was worth £254,000,000.

As to the mercantile shipping of the country, its tonnage in 1688 was nearly double what it was in 1666. Sir William Petty, in his "Political Arithmetic," published in 1676, states that, within the previous forty years, the houses in London had doubled themselves: the coal trade from Newcastle had quadrupled itself, being then 80,000 tons yearly; the Guinea and American trades had grown up from next to nothing to 40,000 tons of shipping; the customs were trebled; the postage of letters increased from one to twenty; the whole income of Government, in short, was trebled; and the number and splendour of coaches, equipages, and household furniture were wonderfully increased.

These effects were surely no results of the wise measures of such monarchs as Charles and James; they were traceable, as clearly as light to the sun, to the bold and able heads of the Long Parliament and Commonwealth, to their victories over the enemies and rivals of the nation, and to the able regulations which they had made in all quarters for the honourable maintenance of our name and the prosperity of our commerce. What such men as Charles and James did may be seen by examining the condition of what fell under their own management. What the nation at large did by its native energy we have just seen; what these monarchs did let us now see. The royal navy, in 1666, amounted only to 62,594 tons; but in 1685, the last year of Charles, it amounted to 103,558 tons; and, though it fell off a little under James, in 1688, the last year of James, it still reached 101,892 tons. This looks admirable on the surface; but it is necessary to look under the surface, and then we perceive a marvellous difference. The nation had become justly proud of its navy, which had destroyed the great Armada, and, under Blake, had put down the supremacy of Holland and Spain at sea; and though the Commons were averse from trusting Charles II. with money, after they saw that it all went to concubines and parasites, they were never appealed to on the subject of the navy in vain. When Danby was minister, they voted at once £600,000 for the building of thirty new men-of-war. On the evidence of Pepys, the Secretary of the Admiralty, we have it, that scarcely any of this magnificent array of ships were fit for use. The very thirty new vessels for which the £600,000 had been voted had been built of such villainous timber that they were absolutely unseaworthy; and the rest were so rotten and worm-eaten that they would have sunk if they were carried out of port. The same testimony was borne by the French ambassador, Bonrepaux, who, when Charles made a bluster as if he would go to sea, in 1686, examined our fleet, and reported to his Government that it need not trouble itself about the English navy, for that both ships and men were merely nominal. In fact, the money which should have repaired the ships and paid the officers and men had gone the way of all Charles's money. Pepys was pursued in the streets by starving sailors, who demanded the redemption of their tickets; shoals of them lay in the streets, without food or means of procuring shelter; many of them perished of hunger, and some officers are said to have shared the same fate. The whole was the most shameful scene of waste of the public money, neglect of vessels and of men, of utter indolence on the part of the Crown, and consequent negligence on the part of the authorities; of scandalous corruption in many of them, and knavery and peculation in contractors. Such was the state of things that, in 1667, or seven years after the Commonwealth, the Dutch, under De Ruyter, entered the Thames, destroyed the fortifications at Sheerness, took and burned some of our largest ships, and threw the capital into paroxysms of terror. "Many English sailors," says Pepys, "were heard on board the Dutch ships, crying, 'We did heretofore fight for tickets—now we fight for dollars!'"

Besides the causes already enumerated for the rapid progress of England in wealth and prosperity at this period, the persecutions of Protestants abroad, which drove hither their weavers and artisans, and the union with Scotland, giving internal peace and security, had a wonderful influence. De Witt, the celebrated Dutch minister, refers to these causes in a remarkable passage of his work called "The Interest of Holland," published in 1669. "When," he says, "the compulsive laws of the Netherland Halls had first driven the cloth-weaving from the cities into our villages, and, by the cruelty of the Duke of Alva, the say-weaving went also after it, the English by degrees began to send their manufactures throughout Europe; they became potent at sea, and no longer to depend on the Netherlands. Also by that discovery of the inexpressibly rich cod-bank of Newfoundland, those of Bristol in particular made use of that advantage. Moreover, the long persecution of Puritans in England has occasioned the planting of many English colonies in America, by which they derive a very considerable foreign trade thither; so that this mighty island, united with Ireland under one king, seated in the midst of Europe, having a clear, deep coast, with good havens and bays, in so narrow a sea that all foreign ships that sail either to the eastward or the westward are necessitated, even in fair weather, to shun the dangerous French coast, and sail along that of England, and in stormy weather to run in and preserve their lives, ships, and merchandise in the bays—so that England now, by its conjunction with Scotland, being much increased in strength, as well as by manufactures as by a great navigation, will in all respects be formidable to all Europe."