Walpole's policy endured for a quarter of a century. He abandoned
it only after a bitter struggle in which he was attacked as
sacrificing the national honor for the sake of peace. Spain was
an easy mark for those who wished to arouse the warlike spirit.
She still persecuted and burned heretics, a great cause of
offense. in Protestant Britain, and she was rigorous in excluding
foreigners from trading with her colonies. To be the one
exception in this policy of exclusion was the privilege enjoyed
by Britain. When the fortunes of Spain were low in 1713, she had
been forced not merely to cede Gibraltar but also to give to the
British the monopoly of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro
slaves and the right to send one ship a year to trade at Porto
Bello in South America. It seems a sufficiently ignoble bargain
for a great nation to exact: the monopoly of carrying and selling
cargoes of black men and the right to send a single ship yearly
to a Spanish colony. We can hardly imagine grave diplomats of our
day haggling over such terms. But the eighteenth century was not
the twentieth.
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