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38 Stephen's. There was no reference to legislation in the King's Speech. The Acts of the session were forty-eight, and of these twenty were local and four fiscal. There was an Act, which gave rise to some debate, for placing restrictions on loans by British subjects to foreign states, a measure which, as Sir Robert Walpole explained, arose out of a projected loan for the assistance of the Emperor Charles VI, whose diplomatic relations with George the Second were strained. The care of Parliament for trade and industry was minutely paternal. There was an Act for regulating the methods of burning bricks, and another for better regulating the coal trade. There was an Act for granting liberty to carry rice from His Majesty's Province of Carolina in America directly to any part of Europe southward of Cape Finisterre in ships built in and belonging to Great Britain and navigated according to law, and another Act for the importing of salt from Europe into the colony of New York with the view to the better curing of fish, 'whereby the trade of Great Britain and the inhabitants of the said colony would reap considerable benefit which would enable the said inhabitants to purchase more of the British manufacturers for their use than at present they are able.' And there was one of the numerous 'omnibus' Acts then allowed by Parliamentary procedure, dealing, within its four corners, with the price of bread, the relief of bankrupts, deeds and wills executed by Papists, and the settlement of paupers. And this is nearly all. The eighteenth-century statutes, except so far as they are purely local, consist chiefly of detailed regulations made by landowners sitting at Westminster for their own guidance as justices of the peace in the country. And the