Beneath the calm of general society mutterings of discontent from powerful interests could be heard,--occasional outbursts of jealousy, revivals of old and virulent passions, inveterate prejudices, which made as yet but little noise in the Press or in Parliament, but which rankled in the breasts of individuals. One of the earlier symptoms of trouble came in a familiar shape. For twenty years, whenever a question had arisen of hostility to American trade or of prejudice against American character, the first of Englishmen to stimulate it, and the loudest to proclaim the dangers of Great Britain, had been John Baker Holroyd, Earl of Sheffield, whose memory might have been lost under the weight of his pamphlets had it not been embalmed in the autobiography of Gibbon. Lord Sheffield felt such devotion to the British navigation laws as could be likened only to the idolatry which a savage felt toward his fetich; one might almost have supposed that to him the State, the Church, and the liberties of England, the privileges of her nobility, and even the person of her sovereign, were sacred chiefly because they guaranteed the safety of her maritime system. This fanaticism of an honest mind led to results so extravagant as to become at times ridiculous. The existence of the United States was a protest against Lord Sheffield’s political religion; and therefore in his eyes the United States were no better than a nation of criminals, capable of betraying their God for pieces of silver. The independence of America had shattered the navigation system of England into fragments; but Lord Sheffield clung the more desperately to his broken idol. Among the portions which had been saved were the West Indian colonies. If at that day the navigation laws had one object more important than another, it was to foster the prosperity of these islands, in order that their sugar and molasses, coffee and rum, might give freight to British shippers and employment to British seamen; but to Lord Sheffield the islands were only a degree less obnoxious than the revolted United States, for they were American at heart, complaining because they were forbidden to trade freely with New York and Boston, and even asserting that when the navigation laws were strictly enforced their slaves died of starvation and disease. Lord Sheffield seriously thought them ungrateful to murmur, and held it their duty to perish in silence rather than ask a relaxation of the law.