At last, and towards the end of June, they reached the great, important business of the session--the ways and means of supporting the army. The Catholic gentry had maintained the war up to the present time, and their means were totally exhausted. The Protestant gentry seemed unwilling to risk fortune or credit on the issue as between the king and the Prince of Orange. The king's condition was desperate, and called for extraordinary remedies; there was no alternative between exaction and abdication, and he overstepped the limitations of trade for the higher law of preservation. He doubled his subsidy by proclamation; established a bank restriction act by the same authority; issued a million and a half of copper coin, and gave it a nominal value. These measures were declared arbitrary, but they were also measures of the direst necessity; he pledged himself to revoke them when the necessity had passed, and also to redeem the coin issued in sterling money. The traders demurred, raised the price of provisions, and rendered the coin almost worthless; the king established a scale of prices, and threatened penalties on those who exacted more. Such was the offence, and such the demand for this "arbitrary assumption." The king in his extremity, the country in the throes of a revolution, the brave men pouring out their life-blood on the battle-field, were as nothing in comparison to the claims of a self-constituted monopoly. In criticising those "arbitrary assumptions" of the king, we should bear in mind that free trade was then no established principle of either English or Irish legislation; that the corn laws of England, which are somewhat of a kindred character, have been repealed after years of angry agitation, and within a very recent period; that the people, whose rights were of paramount consideration, gave their unqualified approval to those measures; and, even allowing them to have been arbitrary, he could be no patriot who would put the claims of trade in opposition to the liberty of the nation. In one measure alone--his interference with the Dublin University--does the king seem to have acted both unwisely and arbitrarily; and of this, the following extract from Taylor's history will afford a sufficient exposition:--"The first step taken by King James in his war on the Dublin University, proved that he gave that body more credit for common sense than it merited. He nominated a Roman Catholic to be professor of the Irish language, and was afterwards astounded to hear that no such professorship existed in that venerable institution. Doctor Leland rates James very severely for having committed such a blunder, but, truly, the blunder belongs not to him alone. He could scarcely have credited the existence of such a practical jest as an institution whose professed design was to instruct the Irish in the doctrines of the reformed religion, which yet left the teachers wholly ignorant of the language of those whom they had to instruct.