CHAPTER VIII.
Survey of the Reign of George III .-- The Cato Street Conspiracy .-- The Queen's Return to England, and the Proceedings against her .-- The King Visits Ireland and Scotland .-- Reform of the Criminal Code .-- Freedom of Trade .-- Death of Lord Liverpool .-- The Duke of Wellington becomes Prime-minister .-- Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act .-- O'Connell is Elected for Clare .-- Peel Resigns his Seat for Oxford .-- Catholic Emancipation .-- Question of the Endowment of the Roman Catholic Clergy .-- Constitutional Character of the Emancipation .-- The Propriety of Mr.Peel's Resignation of his Seat for Oxford Questioned.
In the first month of 1820 George III.died.His had been an eventful reign, strangely checkered with disaster and glory; but, if we compare its close with its commencement, it was still more remarkably distinguished by a development of the resources and an increase in the wealth and power of the nation, to which the history of no other country in the same space of time affords any parallel.
Regarded from the first point of view, our successes greatly outweighed our disasters.

The loss of our North American Colonies, the only event which can be so described, was far more than counterbalanced by our vast acquisitions in India, at the Cape of Good Hope, and Malta; while to our maritime supremacy, in the complete establishment of which Rodney and Nelson had crowned the work of Anson and Hawke, was now added a splendor of military renown far surpassing that achieved by any other of the nations which had borne their share in the overthrow of Napoleon.
The increase of our resources is sufficiently shown by a single fact.

At his accession George III.

found the kingdom engaged in the great seven years' war; one British army employed beyond the Rhine, another in India; fleets traversing the seas in every direction, capturing the Havana, in the West Indies; Manilla, in the East; and routing French squadrons in sight of their own harbors.

While, to maintain these varied armaments, supplies were voted by Parliament in 1761 to what Lord Stanhope calls "the unprecedented amount of almost twenty millions." In 1813 the supplies reached nearly six times that amount,[182] and that prodigious sum was raised with greater ease than the revenue of 1761, the interest on the necessary loans being also lower than it had been on the former occasion.
The philosophical man of science will point with at least equal exultation to the great discoveries in art and science; to the achievements of the mechanic, the engineer, and the chemist; to the labors of Brindley and Arkwright and Watts, to which, indeed, this great expansion of the resources and growth of the wealth of the country is principally owing.
While, as the preceding chapters of this work have been designed to show, our political progress and advancement had been no less steady or valuable; yet, important from a constitutional point of view as were many of the labors of our legislators in these sixty years, they are surpassed in their influence on the future history of the nation, as well as in the reality and greatness of the changes which were produced by them in the constitution, by the transactions of the reigns of the next two sovereigns, though the two united scarcely equalled in their duration a quarter of that of their venerable father.
It has been seen how Pitt was baffled in his efforts to remodel the House of Commons, and to remove the disabilities under which the Roman Catholics labored, the reasons for which, even granting that they had been sufficient to justify their original imposition, had, in his judgment, long passed away.