neglect to attach himself to the English there is, however, much excuse. The men about his court, and the very party who brought him in, were a most selfish, rapacious, and unprincipled set. It is difficult to point to a truly noble and genuinely patriotic man amongst them. Perhaps the most unexceptionable were the earl of Devonshire and lord Somers; but the greater part of them were men whose chief object was self-aggrandisement, and the party fight which the two factious kept up around the throne, made it anything but an enviable seat. The peculation and jobbery in every department of the state were wholesale and unblushing, and the greater part of those who were ostensibly serving him and receiving his pay, were secretly engaged to his enemies, spies upon all his actions and intentions, and traitors, in a perpetual transmission of his projects to the court of his deadly foes. The forbearance which he constantly manifested towards those despicable men, was something admirable and almost superhuman. Though he was well aware of their treason, he still employed and endeavoured to conciliate them. With a cold exterior, William was far from destitute of affection. This he showed in the confidence with which he intrusted the government to his wife in his absence, and in his passionate grief for her death. This was also manifested in his warm and unshaken attachment to the friends who had shared his fortunes, spoke his tongue, knew his whole mind and nature, and served him with a fidelity, amid an age of treachery and a court of deep corruption, which has nothing more beautiful in history.
As a monarch William conferred the most solid advantages on this country, but at the same time he entailed upon it evils of the most gigantic magnitude. He was the first monarch for many centuries who was a genuine friend to constitutional liberty. None of our native kings since Alfred displayed the same disinterested and magnanimous regard for the rights and freedom of the nation. By his manly pride, as well as by his liberal mind, he broke the fatal chain of the divine right of kings, and freely consented to the establishment of a new charter in the Bill of Rights, which was more complete than Magna Charta itself. It must be recorded, to the eternal honour of William III., that he on no occasion betrayed the slightest desire to encroach on the privileges of the people—a striking spectacle after the obstinate and pertinacious endeavour of the four last kings of the race of Stuart to crush every liberty of the people. Nor must we even forget that to William we owe our religious as well as our civil liberty. To him we owe the act of toleration, which put an end to the frightful scenes of blood, of fire, of incarceration in the most hideous of dungeons, of the plunder of property, and the insults and injuries to the person, which had disgraced the reign of the Stuarts. We should have had still a greater religious freedom if he could have had his own way. But he had to contend with a high church party which loved dominion, and was on the highway to popish ceremony and despotism over souls till it got a fright from popish James; he had also to contend with a hard and equally intolerant presbyterianism in Scotland. Yet, though he could not utterly extirpate the rank and poisonous weeds of religious intolerance, he mowed them down, and laid bare their roots, for us gradually to dig out. He relieved the quakers from their subjection to oaths, giving them the credit for men being bound by more binding principles. These were inestimable blessings, noble gifts to a nation that did not love him, and which pointed to a still higher path of policy which succeeding ages might ascend.
But the great fault of William was his ambition to be the arbiter of the destinies of the continental nations. No doubt that he was sincere in his belief that the happiness of those destinies lay in the balance of national powers there. No doubt but that he firmly believed that Louis XIV., without his exertions and the employment of the wealth and force of England, would tread the whole continent under his feet, and put out the light of liberty and the sacred exercise of mind. It must be conceded, moreover, that his ambition was a generous ambition, that his views and desires and labours were in favour of the rights, creeds, and happiness of mankind. But, notwithstanding all this, the system which he inaugurated, of this country taking the lead in the quarrels of the continental nations, was a fatal system, and one which has heaped loads of debt on this country, caused rivers of its blood to flow, without producing one of those benefits to the nations for which it was introduced, which he or his successors promised to themselves or to the nations. The perpetual cry has been, Will you suffer your neighbour nations to be overrun by an unprincipled tyrant? and the result of the stupendous efforts to prevent this catastrophe has put them under the feet of a score of unprincipled tyrants. At this moment, after all our wars from the time of William, behold the whole of Europe ruled, not by free constitutions, but by thousands of cannon and myriads of bayonets. We need not waste arguments upon this topic; the miserable result supersedes all argument.
The whole of those wars which have succeeded the reign of William, triumphantly established the great fact which the tories in William's time contended for, had they but contended honestly—that England has a more noble, philanthropic, and sublime mission than that of wasting her energies in fighting the battles of the continent; that providence has placed her on the seas to be the friend and succour of the civilised world, not by fighting, but by trading, and being ready at all times to offer her services, not to promote contentions, but to restore peace, and when she cannot do that, to alleviate by her wealth their distresses. From age to age the grand truth has become ever more conspicuous—that nations, if they are to be free, must wrestle out their own freedom. The nations of the continent are numerous enough and powerful enough to combine against any one ambitious aggressor, and till they are prepared to do that, no external aid can do it for them. Let us now for a moment contemplate the awful result of our endeavours, for one hundred and fifty years, to do that for the continental nations which they alone could and yet can do for themselves. Let us survey, with an instructible spirit, the results to ourselves of William's system of continental interference.
One of the very first consequences of William's war for the balance of power on the continent was to destroy the balance of our accounts at home. In the eighth year of his
