The growth of our commerce during these seventy-two years is shown by the amount of our exports. In 1697that is, nine years after the Revolutionthe amount of exports was only 3,525,907; but in the three next years of peace they rose to 6,709,881. War reduced these again to little more than 5,000,000, and at the end of the reign of Anne, during peace, they rose to 8,000,000. At the end of the reign of George I. the war had so much checked our commerce, that the exports scarcely amounted to that sum, the average of the three years1726, 1727, and 1728being only 7,891,739. By the end of the reign of George II., however (1760), they had risen to 14,693,270. Having by this period driven the fleets of France and Spain from the ocean, we rather extended our commerce than injured it. Thus, during these seventy-two years, our exports had increased from about three millions and a half annually to more than fourteen millions and a half annually, or a yearly difference of upwards of eleven millionsa most substantial growth.
Chapter 11Of a truth she understood only too well, that death with a bullet through the brain could be a tender mercy.This succession of adverse circumstances induced Bolingbroke to dispatch a messenger to London to inform the Earl of Mar of them, and to state that, as the English Jacobites would not stir without assistance from abroad, and as no such help could be had, he would see that nothing as yet could be attempted. But when the messenger arrived in London, he learnt from Erasmus Lewis, Oxford's late secretary, and a very active partisan of the Jacobites, that Mar was already gone to raise the Highlands, if we are to believe the Duke of Berwick, at the especial suggestion of the Pretender himself, though he had, on the 23rd of September, in writing to Bolingbroke, expressed the necessity of the Scots waiting till they heard further from him. If that was so, it was at once traitorous towards his supporters and very ill-advised, and was another proof to Bolingbroke of the unsafe parties with whom he was embarked in this hopeless enterprise.
