Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/600

554 NORTH duke of Grafton was necessitated by the hatred he inspired and the attacks of Junius, no better successor could be found for the premiership than the chancellor of the exchequer. Lord North succeeded the duke in March 1770, and continued in office for twelve of the most event ful years in English history. George III. had at last overthrown the ascendency of the great Whig families, under which he had so long groaned, and determined to govern as well as rule. He knew that he could only govern by obtaining a majority in parliament to carry out his wishes, and this he had at last obtained by a great expenditure of money in buying seats, and by a careful exercise of his patronage. But in addition to a majority he must have a minister who would consent to act as his lieutenant, and such a minister he found in Lord North. How a man of undoubted ability such as Lord North was could allow himself to be thus used as a mere instrument cannot be explained ; but the confidential tone of the king s letters seems to show that there was an unusual intimacy between them, which may account for North s compliance. The path of the minister in parliament was a hard one ; he had to defend measures which he had not designed, and of which he had not approved, and this too in a House of Commons in which all the oratorical ability of Burke and Fox was against him, and when he had only the purchased help of Thurlow and Wedderburne to aid him. The most important events of his ministry were those of the American War of Independence. He cannot be accused of causing it, but one of his first acts was the retention of the tea-duty, and he it was also who intro duced the Boston Port Bill in 1774. When the war had broken out he earnestly counselled peace, and it was only the earnest solicitations of the king not to leave his sove reign again at the mercy of the Whigs that induced him to defend a war which from 1779 he knew to be both hope less and impolitic. At last, in March 1782, he insisted on resigning after the news of Cornwallis s surrender at York- town, and no man left office more blithely. He had been well rewarded for his assistance to the king : his children had good sinecures; his half-brother, Brownlow North, was bishop of Winchester ; he himself was chancellor of the university of Oxford, lord -lieutenant of the county of Somerset, and had finally been made a knight of the Garter, an honour which has only been conferred on three other members of the House of Commons, Sir R. Walpole, Lord Castlereagh, and Lord Palmerston. Lord North did not remain long out of office, but in April 1783 formed his famous coalition with his old subordinate, Fox, and became secretary of state with him under the nominal premiership of the duke of Portland. He Avas probably urged to this coalition with his old opponent by a desire to show that he could act independently of the king, and was not a mere royal mouthpiece. The coalition minis try went out of office on Fox s India Bill in December 1 783, and Lord North, who was losing his sight, then finally gave up political ambition. He played, when quite blind, a somewhat important part in the debates on the Regency Bill in 1789, and in the next year succeeded his father as earl of Guilford. He did not long survive his elevation, and died peacefully on 5th August 1792. It is impossible to consider Lord North a great statesman, but lie was a most good-tempered and humorous member of the House of Commons. In a time of unexampled party feeling he won the esteem and almost the love of his most bitter opponents. Burke finely sums up his character in his Letter to a Noble Lord: " He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding, fitted for every sort of business ; of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a delightful temper, and with a mind most dis interested. But it would be only to degrade myelf, " he continues, by a weak adulation, and not to honour the me:nory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command which the times required." For Lord North s administration, by far the best authority is The Correspond ence of George 111. with Lord North, edited by W. Rodham Downe, 2 vols., 1867. The histories of the period may also be consulted, particularly Lord Mahon s History of England from 1713 to 1783, Sir T. E. May s Constitutional History of England from the reign of George III., and Lord Brougham s admirable sketch in his Statesmen of the Rf.ign oj George III. NORTH, SIR DUDLEY (1641-1691), political economist, was third son of Dudley, fourth Lord North, who pub lished, besides other things, Passages relating to the Long Parliament, of which he had himself been a member. He was born 16th May 1641. In his early years he was carried off by Gipsies and recovered Avith some difficulty by his family, an incident curiously similar to that which befell Adam Smith in his infancy. He entered the mer cantile profession, engaged in foreign trade, especially with Turkey, and spent a number of years at Constan tinople and Smyrna. Some notices of the manners and customs of the East were printed from his papers by his brother. Having returned to London with a consider able fortune, he continued to prosecute trade with the Levant. His ability and knowledge of commerce attracted the attention of the Government, and he was further recommended by the influence of his brother Lord Guil ford. During the Tory reaction under Charles II. he was a pliant instrument in the hands of the court, and was one of the sheriffs forced on the city of London with an express view to securing verdicts for the crown in the state trials of the period. He obtained the honour of knighthood, and was appointed a commissioner of customs, afterwards of the treasury, and again of the customs. Having been elected a member of parliament under James II., "he took," says Roger North, "the place of manager for the crown in all matters of revenue." After the Re volution he was called to account for his alleged uncon stitutional proceedings in his office of sheriff, and did not show much highmindedness in his defence. He died 31st December 1691. The work by which he has obtained an honourable place in the history of political economy is his Discourses upon Trade, principally directed to the cases of the interest, coin age, clipping and increase of money. This tract was pub lished anonymously in 1691. It is supposed that for some unknown reason it was suppressed soon after its appearance ; however this may be, it became very scarce, so that, in his brother s words, " it hath been ever since utterly sunk, and a copy not to be had for money." It does not seem to have been much noticed on its publication, or used by subse quent writers. A copy was purchased at the sale of the Rev. Rogers Ruding, author of a work on the coinage, and from this a gentleman of Edinburgh printed some copies for distribution. Other copies of the original impression were afterwards discovered, and from them J. R. M Culloch edited the tract in the Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce printed by the Political Economy Club of London in 1856. North is named by Roscher as one of that "great triumvirate" which in the 17th century raised the English school of economists to the foremost place in Europe, the other members of the group being Locke and Petty. His tract, Roscher further remarks, reads like a chapter of the Wealth of Nations. It does, indeed, in a very remarkable manner anticipate the doc trines of Adam Smith and the later free- trade school. Its author was quite free from the errors and prejudices of the mercantilism which was dominant in his day, and which had misled on some subjects even so able a writer as Child, against whom, though without naming him, North s arguments on the legal limitation of the rate of interest appear to be in part directed. At the end of the preface to the Discourses are brought together a number of propo sitions, embodying the author s views, which he announces as " paradoxes, no less strange to most men than true in themselves." They are so remarkable for the time at