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 lasting injury than to the mercantile marine. This branch of industry, indeed, suffered not merely by the war itself, but by the hordes of privateers, buccaneers, and pirates which, up to the close of the last century, infested the seas whenever war was declared, thus interrupting legitimate commerce, and plundering wherever they had an opportunity, either by land or sea, too often with little regard whether the property they plundered was that of a friend or a foe. In the early part of the reign of George I. these marauders were almost as daring and as lawless as the pirates had been during the reign of Elizabeth and of the Henrys, and none more so than an Englishman named Roberts, who, in three vessels armed as frigates, the largest mounting forty guns, and commanded by himself, desolated the coasts of Africa and the West India Islands, plundering the ships of his own country with as little remorse as he did those of any other nation.

But while the buccaneers at this period scoured the seas, there were knavish speculators on land who, under the pretence of fostering and developing the commercial and maritime resources of England, were really its greatest enemies. Among the numerous concerns then floated as joint stock companies, no one was more conspicuous or more disastrous than the "South Sea Bubble." Having for its professed object the trade of the South Seas, yet with no basis for its operations beyond the dishonourable privilege of supplying Spanish America for thirty years with slaves torn from Africa, a very questionable favour granted to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, this company, in competition with the Bank