Walpole was now Prime-minister. The King wished to reward him for his services by conferring a peerage on him, but this honor Walpole steadily declined. One of his biographers says that his refusal "at first appears extraordinary." It ought not to appear extraordinary at first or at last. Walpole knew that the sceptre of government in England had passed to the House of Commons. He would have been unwise and inconsistent indeed if at his time of life he had consented to renounce the influence and the power which a seat in that House gave him for the comparative insignificance and obscurity of a seat in the House of Lords. He accepted a title for his eldest son, who was made Baron Walpole, but for himself he preferred to keep to the field in which he had won his name, and where he could make his influence and power felt all over the land. We may anticipate the course of events, and say at once that hardly ever before in the history of English political life, and hardly ever since Walpole's time, has a minister had so long a run of power. His long administration, as Mr. Green well says, is almost without a history. It is almost without a history, that is to say, in the ordinary sense of the word. For the most part, the steady movement of England's progress remains, during long years and years, undisturbed by any event of great dramatic interest at home or abroad. But the period of Walpole's long and successful administration was none the less a period of the highest importance in English {225} history. It was a time of almost uninterrupted national development in the right direction, and almost unbroken national prosperity. The foreign policy of Walpole was, on the whole, no less sound and just than his policy at home. His first ambition was to keep England out of wars with foreign Powers. Yet his was not the ambition which some later statesmen, especially, for example, Mr. Bright, have owned--the ambition to keep England free of any foreign policy whatever. Such an ambition was not Walpole's, and such an ambition at Walpole's time it would have been all but impossible to realize. Walpole knew well that there was no way of keeping England out of foreign wars at that season of political growth but by securing for her a commanding influence in Continental affairs. Such influence he set himself to establish, and he succeeded in establishing it by friendly and satisfactory alliances with France and other Powers. Turning back for a moment into the political affairs of a year or two previous, we may remark that one of the consequences of the Mississippi scheme, and the reign of Mr. Law in France, had been the recall of Lord Stair from the French Court, to which he was accredited as English ambassador. Lord Stair quarrelled with Law when Law was all-powerful; and in order to propitiate the financial dictator, it was found convenient to recall Stair from Paris. England