Cabinet councillor coming up to us just now; if you ask the same question of him he will perhaps hold his peace, and then you will think he is in the secret; but if he opens once his mouth about it you will find he knows as little of it as I do.' No, my Lords," exclaimed the Duke of Argyle, "it is not being in Privy Council or in Cabinet Council; one must be in the Minister's counsel to know the true motives of our late proceedings." The duke concluded his oration, characteristically, with a glorification of his own honest and impartial heart. The address was sure to be carried; Walpole's influence was still strong enough to accomplish that much. But everybody must already have seen that the convention was not an instrument capable of satisfying, or, indeed, framed with any notion of satisfying, the popular demands of England. It was an odd sort of arrangement, partly international and partly personal; an adjustment, or attempted adjustment here of a dispute between States, and there of a dispute between rival trading companies. The reconstituted South Sea Company--which had now become one of the three great trading companies of England, the East India Company and the Bank being the {168} other two--had all manner of negotiations, arrangements, and transactions with the King of Spain. All these affairs now became mixed up with the national claims, and were dealt with alike in the convention. The British plenipotentiary at the Spanish Court was--still further to complicate matters--the agent for the South Sea Company. The convention provided that certain set-off claims of Spain should be taken into consideration as well as the claims of England. Spain had some demands against England for the value of certain vessels of the Spanish navy attacked and captured during the reign of George the First without a declaration of war. The claim had been admitted in principle by England, and it became what would be called in the law courts only a question of damages. Then the convention contained some stipulations concerning certain claims of Spain upon the South Sea Company; that is, on what was, after all, only a private trading company. When the anomaly was pointed out by Lord Carteret and others in the House of Lords, and it was asked how came it that the English plenipotentiary at the Court of Spain was also the agent of the South Sea Company, it was ingeniously answered on the part of the Government that nothing could be more fitting and proper, seeing that, as English plenipotentiary, he had to act for England with the King of Spain, and as agent for the South Sea Company to deal with the same sovereign in that sovereign's capacity as a great private merchant. Therefore the national claims were made, to a certain extent, subservient to, or dependent on, the claims of the South Sea Company. Whether we may think the claims of the English merchants and seamen were exaggerated or not, one thing is obvious: they could not