58 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
measure to ‘the barbarous ignorance observable 
among the common people, especially those of the 
poorer sort.” 1 
In 1695 the largest minded and at once the most 
upright and the most merciful of the statesmen of the 
Restoration era died, Halifax, the Trimmer, as he was 
proud to be known. His guiding hand had been 
strongly felt in the terms under which William and 
Mary were brought to the throne of England. © Our 
Revolution,” wrote Lord Macaulay in his History, ‘as 
far as it can be said to bear the character of any single 
mind, assuredly beats the character of the large yet 
cautious mind of Halifax’; 2 and his verdict upon the 
Trimmer’s political life as a whole was that he © almost 
invariably took that view of the great questions of his 
time which history has finally adopted.” ® Always an 
unswerving friend of freedom, he urged with refer- 
ence to the New England colonies that the same laws 
which were in force in England should be applied in 
countries overseas inhabited by Englishmen, but 
otherwise there is no evidence that he took such 
interest in colonies and colonising as was taken by 
his great adversary Shaftesbury. Like most of his 
contemporaries, he contemplated the Empire in terms 
of trade and sea power. In his famous ‘Rough 
Draught of a New Model at Sea,” published in 1694, 
he wrote, ‘It is no paradox to say that England hath 
its root in the sea, and a deep one too, from whence it 
sendeth its branches into both the Indies. . . . We 
! History of the Society, 1698-1898, uf sup., p. 43. 
? Macaulay, History of England (1855 edition), vol. iii, chap. xi, p. 17. 
8 Ibid., vol. iv, chap. xxi, p. 544.