1688-1783 
passed away and until Wesley had first converted 
England. Nor was there any more fruitful result 
from the visit, two or three years earlier, of Bishop 
(then Dean) Berkeley to Rhode Island, and his scheme 
for a college in Bermuda, where men should be trained 
‘ for the better supplying of churches in our foreign 
plantations, and for converting the savage Americans 
to Christianity.” He went out in 1728, commended 
by the S.P.C.K., having been granted a Royal Charter 
for his college, and having secured private subscrip- 
tions and the promise of a Parliamentary grant. But 
the grant was never forthcoming, and after three years 
spent in Rhode Island, he came back to England in 
1731, without having even landed in Bermuda. 
The middle forty years of the eighteenth century, 
the years which followed the age of Walpole, included 
both the Seven Years War and the War of American 
Independence—Britain’s greatest success and her most 
signal failure. They were emphatically years of trade 
domination, but still there were minds’ at work, ill 
content with the conditions and the outlook. Adam 
Smith had been for years engaged in writing the 
* Wealth of Nations >—the Bible of free trade, before 
it was eventually published in 1776. In it he quoted 
Sir Matthew Decker, author of ‘ An Essay on the 
causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, conse- 
quently of the value of the lands of Britain and of the 
means to restore both,” which was begun in 1739, and 
of which a second edition was published in 17409. 
71 
boasted the conversion of two Indians,” etc. (p. 59). He reprobates 
English treatment of the natives except in Pennsylvania, the people of 
which province, he says ‘are the only people who have treated the 
savages with justice and humanity > (p. 84).