erdale, and of Danby, were
certainly enormous. The sumptuous palace to which the populace of London
gave the name of Dunkirk Mouse, the stately pavilions, the fishponds,
the deer park and the orangery of Euston, the more than Italian luxury
of Ham, with its busts, fountains, and aviaries, were among the many
signs which indicated what was the shortest road to boundless wealth.
This is the true explanation of the unscrupulous violence with which the
statesmen of that day struggled for office, of the tenacity with which,
in spite of vexations, humiliations and dangers, they clung to it, and
of the scandalous compliances to which they stooped in order to retain
it. Even in our own age, formidable as is the power of opinion, and
high as is the standard of integrity, there would be great risk of a
lamentable change in the character of our public men, if the place of
First Lord of the Treasury or Secretary of State were worth a hundred
thousand pounds a year. Happy for our country the emoluments of the
highest class of functionaries have not only not grown in proportion to
the general growth of our opulence, but have positively diminished.

The fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has, in a time not
exceeding two long lives, been multiplied forty-fold, is strange, and
may at first sight seem appalling. But those who are alarmed by the
increase of the public burdens may perhaps be reassured when they have
considered the increase of the public resources. In the year 1685, the
value of the produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the
other fruits of human industry. Yet agriculture was in what would now
be considered as a very rude and imperfect state. The arable land and
pasture land were not supposed by the best political arithmeticians of
that age to amount to much more than half the area of the kingdom. [62]
The remainder was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These
computations are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps of the
seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many
routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards,
cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but
heath, swamp, and warren. [63] In the drawings of English landscapes
made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be
seen, and numerous tracts; now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as
Salisbury Plain. [64] At Enfield, hardly out of sight of