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.