minister was now
over sixty years of age, and scarcely able to change the settled
convictions and policy of his prime. He was face to face with one of
those irrepressible conflicts between nations and races toward which a
policy of repression and compromise can be employed but for a short
time. The English were bent upon opening the West Indies and Spanish
America, the Spanish government equally bent upon obstructing them.
Unfortunately for their policy of obstruction, they strengthened
Walpole's enemies by unlawful search of English ships on the open sea,
and possibly also by outrages to English seamen. Some of the latter
were brought before the bar of the House of Commons, and testified
that they had been not merely plundered, but tortured, shut up in
prison, and compelled to live and work under loathsome conditions. The
most celebrated case was that of a certain Jenkins, the master of a
merchant-brig, who told that a Spanish officer had torn off one of his
ears, bidding him carry it to the king his master, and say that if he
had been there he would have been served likewise. Being asked what
were his feelings at such a moment of danger and suffering, he was
said to have replied, "I commended my soul to God and my cause to my
country." This well-turned dramatic utterance from the mouth of a man
of his class throws a suspicion of high coloring over the whole story;
but it can be readily imagined what a capital campaign-cry it would be
in the heat of a popular movement. The tide of feeling swept away
Walpole's patchwork of compromise, and war was declared against Spain
by Great Britain on the 19th of October, 1739. The English ultimatum
insisted upon a formal renunciation of the right of search as claimed
and exercised by the Spaniards, and upon an express acknowledgment of
the British claims in North America. Among these claims was one
relating to the limits of Georgia, then a recently established colony,
touching the Spanish territory of Florida.

How far the war thus urged on and begun by England, against the
judgment of her able minister, was morally justifiable has been warmly
argued on either side by English writers. The laws of Spain with
regard to the trade of her colonies did not differ in spirit from
those of England herself as shown by her Navigation Act, and Spanish
naval officers found themselves in a position nearly identical with
that of Nelson when captain of a frigate in the West Indies half a
century