But it was no mere chance or good luck which maintained Walpole at the head of affairs for more than twenty years. If no Minister has fared worse at the hand of poets or historians, there are few whose greatness has been more impartially recognized by practical statesmen. His qualities indeed were such as a practical statesman can alone do full justice to. There is nothing to charm in the outer aspect of the man; nor is there anything picturesque in the work which he set himself to do, or in the means by which he succeeded in doing it. But picturesque or no, the work of keeping England quiet, and of giving quiet to Europe, was in itself a noble one; and it is the temper with which he carried on this work, the sagacity with which he discerned the means by which alone it could be done, and the stubborn, indomitable will with which he faced every difficulty in the doing it, which gives Walpole his place among English statesmen. He was the first and he was the most successful of our Peace Ministers. "The most pernicious circumstances," he said, "in which this country can be are those of war; as we must be losers while it lasts, and cannot be great gainers when it ends." It was not that the honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's hands, for he won victories by the firmness of his policy and the skill of his negotiations as effectual as any that are won by arms. But up to the very end of his Ministry, when the frenzy of the nation at last forced his hand, in spite of every varying complication of foreign affairs, and a never-ceasing pressure alike from the Opposition and the Court, it is the glory of Walpole that he resolutely kept England at peace. And as he was the first of our Peace Ministers, so he was the first of our Financiers. He was far indeed from discerning the powers which later statesmen have shown to exist in a sound finance, powers of producing both national developement and international amity; but he had the sense to see, what no minister till then had seen, that the only help a statesman can give to industry or commerce is to remove all obstacles in the way of their natural growth, and that beyond this the best course he can take in presence of a great increase in national energy and national wealth is to look quietly on and to let it alone. At the outset of his rule he declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more conduce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation of our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities used in the manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may be." [Sidenote: Walpole's finance.]