is purse, in order to indulge himself "a
little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do
it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was
no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic
age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest
intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything
that is is best" gives the quality of poetic insight.

In this ago the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to
the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith;
the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the
standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a
smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were
but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found
it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan
principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in
order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an
able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he
"borrowed England on his way to Versailles," and governed it in the
interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges
reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power
fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction--to
Marlborough and little Sidney Godolphin, to Harley and St. John and
Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of
the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of
his generation.

Little wonder if in such an age colonies were regarded as providentially
designed to promote the trade's increase. The recall of the
Massachusetts charter was but one of many circumstances which reveal
the rise in England of renewed interest in the plantations. Faith in
colonial ventures had never, indeed, quite disappeared, nor had the
early Stuarts ever been wholly indifferent to their American
possessions. But the fate of the Virginia Company had cooled the ardor
of moneyed men, and the Civil War, focusing attention for a generation
upon fundamental questions of morals and politics, absorbed the energies
of government and nation. With the establishment of the Protectorate
imperial interests again claimed attention. Cromwell, calling the
merchants to counsel, inaugurated a vigorous policy of mariti