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ARGYLE'S ANECDOTE.

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for the advantage of this kingdom that has been set on foot for these many years to which she has not given a negative. There is no measure so much to our detriment into which she has not led us.' He scornfully declared that what the reasons of ministers might be for this pusillanimity he could not tell, for, my Lords, though I am a privy councillor I am as unacquainted with the secrets of the Government as any private gentleman that hears me.' Then he told an anecdote of the late Lord Peterborough. 'When

Lord Peterborough was asked by a friend one day his opinion of a certain measure, says my Lord in some surprise: "This is the first time I ever heard of it." Impossible," says the other; "why, you are a privy councillor." "So I am," replies his Lordship, "and there is a Cabinet councillor coming up to us just now; if you ask the same question of him he will perhaps hold his peace, and then you Iwill think he is in the secret; but if he opens once his mouth about it will find he knows as little of it as I do." No, my Lords,' exclaimed the Duke of Argyle, it is not being in Privy Council or in Cabinet Council; one must be in the Minister's counsel to know the true motives of our late proceedings.' The Duke concluded his oration, characteristically, with a glorification of his own honest and impartial heart.

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The address was sure to be carried; Walpole's influence was still strong enough to accomplish that much. But everybody must already have seen that the Convention was not an instrument capable of satisfying, or, indeed, framed with any notion of

satisfying, the popular demands of England. It was an odd sort of arrangement, partly international and partly personal; an adjustment, or attempted adjustment, here of a dispute between States and there of a dispute between rival trading companies. The reconstituted South Sea Company-which had now become one of the three great trading companies of England, the East India Company and the Bank being the other two-had all manner of negotiations, arrangements, and transactions with the King of Spain. All these affairs now became mixed up with the national claims, and were dealt with alike in the Convention. The British plenipotentiary at the Spanish Court was still further to complicate matters the agent for the South Sea Company. The Convention provided that certain set-off claims of Spain should be taken into consideration as well as the claims of England. Spain had some demands against England for the value of certain vessels of the Spanish navy attacked and captured during the reign of George the First without a declaration of The claim had been admitted in principle by England, and it became what would be called in the law courts only a question of damages. Then the Convention contained some stipulations concerning certain claims of Spain upon the South Sea Company, that is, on what was, after all, only a private trading company. When the anomaly was pointed out by Lord Carteret and others in the House of Lords, and it was asked how came it that the English plenipotentiary at the Court of Spain was also the agent of

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THE PRINCE'S FIRST VOTE.

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the South Sea Company, it was ingeniously answered on the part of the Government that nothing could be more fitting and proper, seeing that, as English plenipotentiary, he had to act for England with the King of Spain, and as agent for the South Sea Company to deal with the same sovereign in that sovereign's capacity as a great private merchant. Therefore the national claims were made to a certain extent subservient to, or dependent on, the claims of the South Sea Company. Whether we may think the claims of the English merchants and seamen were exaggerated or not, one thing is obvious: they could not possibly be satisfied under such a Convention.

The debate in the House of Lords was carried on by the Opposition with great spirit and brilliancy. Lord Hervey defended the policy of the Government with dexterity. Possibly he made as much of the case as could be made of it. The motion for the address was carried by 71 votes against 58—a marked increase of strength on the part of the Opposition. It is to be recorded that the Prince of Wales gave his first vote in Parliament to support the Opposition. The name of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales' is the first in the division list of the peers who voted against the address and in favour of the policy of war. There was nothing very mutinous in Frederick's action so far as the King was concerned. Very likely Frederick would have given the same vote, no matter what the King's views on the subject. But everyone knew that George was eager for war, that he was fully convinced of his capacity to

win laurels on the battle-field, and that he was longing to wear them. A Bonaparte prince of our own day was described by a French literary man as an unemployed Cæsar. King George believed himself an unemployed Cæsar, and was clamorous for early cmployment.

CHAPTER XXXII.

WALPOLE YIELDS TO WAR.

THE nation was plunging, not drifting, into war. Walpole himself, while still striving hard to put off any decisive step, and even yet perhaps hoping against hope that the people would return to their senses and leave the Patriots to themselves, did not venture any longer to meet the demands of the Opposition by bold argument founded on the principles of justice and wisdom. He had sometimes to talk the same 'tall talk' as that in which the Patriots delighted, and to rave a little about the great deeds that would have to be done if Spain did not listen to reason very soon. But he still pleaded that Spain would listen to reason soon, very soon, and that if war must come sooner or later he preferred to take it later. That, it need hardly be said, was not Walpole's expression-it belongs to a later day--but it represents his mode of argument.

On March 6 the House of Commons met for the purpose of taking the foredoomed Convention into consideration. So intense was the interest taken in the subject, so highly strung was political feeling, that more than four hundred members were in their VOL. II.

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