with a pathetic and dignified
statement of Raleigh's own attitude towards war. 'It would be an
unspeakable advantage, both to the public and private, if men would
consider that great truth, that no man is wise or safe but he that is
honest. All I have designed is peace to my country; and may England
enjoy that blessing when I shall have no more proportion in it than what
my ashes make.' There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of these
words; yet we must not forget that this pacific light was not that in
which Raleigh's character had presented itself to Robert Cecil or to
Elizabeth.

None of Raleigh's biographers have suggested any employment for his
leisure during the year which followed his release from the Tower. Yet
the expressions he used in the preface to his _Observations on Trade and
Commerce_ show that it must have been prepared during the year 1616 or
1617: 'about fourteen or fifteen years past,' that is to say in 1602, 'I
presented you,' he says to the King, 'a book of extraordinary
importance.' He complains that this earlier book was suppressed, and
hopes for better luck; but the same misfortune, as usual with Raleigh,
attended the _Observations_. That treatise was an impassioned plea,
based upon a survey of the commercial condition of the world, in favour
of free trade. Raleigh looked with grave suspicion on the various duties
which were levied, in increasing amount, on foreign goods entering this
country, and he entreated James I. to allow him to nominate
commissioners to examine into the causes of the depression of trade,
and to revise the tariffs on a liberal basis. It must have seemed to the
King that Raleigh wilfully opposed every royal scheme which he examined.
James had been a protectionist all through his reign, and at this very
moment was busy in attempting to force the native industries to flourish
in spite of foreign competition. Raleigh's treatise must have been put
into the King's hands much about the time at which his violent
protectionism was threatening to draw England into war with Holland.
Raleigh's advice seems to us wise and pointed, but to James it can only
have appeared wilfully wrong-headed. The _Observations upon Trade_
disappeared as so many of Raleigh's manuscripts had disappeared before
it, and was only first published in the _Remains_[10] of 1651.

Of the last three years of Raleigh's imprisonment in the Tower we know
scarcely anything. On September 27, 1615, a fellow-prisoner