Amongst the many persons ruined by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble were certain Masters of Chancery, who had thrown away on that wild speculation large sums of which they were the official guardians. Lord Macclesfield was one of the victims on whom the nation wreaked its wrath at a crisis when universal folly had produced universal disaster. To punish the masters for their delinquencies was not enough; greater sacrifices than a few comparatively obscure placemen were demanded by the suitors and wards whose money had been squandered by the fraudulent trustees. The Lord Chancellor should be made responsible for the Chancery defalcations. That was the will of the country. No one pretended that Lord Macclesfield had originated the practice which permitted Masters in Chancery to speculate with funds placed under their care; attorneys and merchants were well aware that in the days of Harcourt, Cowper, Wright, and Somers, it had been usual for masters to pocket interest accruing from suitors' money; notorious also was it that, though the Chancellor was theoretically the trustee of the money confided to his court, the masters were its actual custodians. Had the Chancellor known that the masters were trafficking in dangerous investments to the probable loss of the public, duty would have required him to examine their accounts and place all trust-moneys beyond their reach; but until the crash came, Lord Macclesfield knew neither the actual worthlessness of the South Sea Stock, nor the embarrassed circumstances of the defaulting masters, nor the peril of the persons committed to his care. The system which permitted the masters to speculate with money not their own was execrable, but the Lord Chancellor was not the parent of that system. Infuriated by the national calamity, in which they were themselves great sufferers, the Commons impeached the Chancellor, charging him with high crimes and misdemeanors, of which the peers unanimously declared him guilty. In this famous trial the great fact established against his lordship was that he had sold masterships to the defaulters. It appeared that he had not only sold the places, but had stood out for very high prices; the inference being, that in consideration of these large sums he had left the purchasers without the supervision usually exercised by Chancellors over such officers, and had connived at the practices which had been followed by ruinous results. To this it was replied, that if the Chancellor had sold the places at higher prices than his predecessors, he had done so because the places had become much more valuable; that at the worst he had but sold them to the highest bidder, after the example of his precursors; that the inference was not supported by any direct testimony.