It is only by courtesy that these measures for confining the trade of the empire may be called a colonial system; and it would have been well if England, profiting by the experience of the French wars, had set seriously about the task of fashioning a method of government adapted to the political as well as the commercial needs of her New World possessions. But it was not to be. With the accession of George I, enthusiasm for plantation ventures declined; interest in the colonies, undiminished, indeed, was more than ever concentrated upon their commercial possibilities; and the constructive policy of the Stuarts gave way, in the phrase of Burke, to one of "salutary neglect." The neglect was, indeed, by no means complete. Information was assiduously gathered; many new laws were passed; the number of officials greatly increased, and governors more carefully instructed; colonial statutes, more consistently inspected, were more often annulled. Yet it is true that for three decades after the Peace of Utrecht no attempt was made to transform the commercial code into a colonial system. And even the commercial code was administered in "a gentlemanlike and easy-going fashion: little was embitered and nothing solved." Of many circumstances which contributed to this result, the effect of the Revolution on English politics was fundamental. Kings who ruled by grace of a statute, instead of by divine right, inevitably lost administrative as well as legislative authority. Colonial policy was therefore no longer determined, as in Stuart times, by the king in council, but by the ministers; by ministers who might listen to the Board of Trade, but could not take advice unless it squared with the wishes of the Parliament that made them. When, in 1715, Secretary Stanhope appointed George Vaughan, an owner of sawmills in New Hampshire, to be lieutenant-governor of that province, the Board of Trade protested; and quoted, in support of its protest, the remarks of Bellomont about Mr. Partridge. "To set a carpenter to preserve woods," said Bellomont, "is like setting a wolf to guard sheep; I say, to preserve woods, for I take it to be the chiefest part of the business of a Lt. Governor of that province to preserve the woods for the king's use." The protest was ignored; and for thirty years, while the Board of Trade fell almost to the level of a joke, the colonies were managed by a Secretary of State who was likely to be less interested in preserving the woods for the king's use than in advancing the interests of the Whig oligarchy which governed England.