§ 4. THE WARS OF WILLIAM III. AND OF ANNE—The continental wars in which England was engaged after the deposition of James II. were rendered necessary to some extent by the tremendous power of France under Louis XIV. William III. saw it was inevitable for the interest of England that Louis XIV. should be checked, and the war of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) was carried on with the object of preventing that king from joining the resources of Spain to those of his own kingdom. For had he done so two disastrous results would have happened. The Stuarts would by his help have been restored to the English throne, and the struggle against absolute monarchy and religious tyranny would unfortunately have been fought over again. Secondly, the growth of English commerce would have been checked if not utterly annihilated. As it was we were preserved from the {125} Stuarts; and when the war was finally over in 1713, found ourselves in possession of Gibraltar, now one of the keys of our Indian Empire, and of the Hudson’s Bay Territory, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia (then called Acadia)—the foundations of our present Canadian dominion. England was also allowed by Spain to trade—in negroes—with Spanish colonies, and to send one ship a year to the South Seas. The war, as far as we were concerned, was a commercial success, though we had to pay rather heavily for it, and were involved in further difficulties in America thereby. § 5. EXPANSION OF ENGLISH TRADE AFTER THESE WARS[38]—Even during the above wars English trade had been spreading. English merchants now did business in the Mediterranean with Turkey and Italy, in the North with Holland, Germany, Russia and Norway, in the East with India, Arabia and Africa, in the West with America and the Spanish colonies. Many companies were started, too numerous to mention here, for those who had hoarded their money during the war were now anxious to make profitable use of it. Of these new companies the most famous was the South Sea Company, formed in 1711 to trade with South America. The directors anticipated enormous profits, and offered to advance the Government £7,500,000 to pay off part of the National Debt. Everyone knows the story of their collapse (1721), and the ruin it brought upon thousands of worthy but credulous shareholders. It was a time when all the accumulated capital of the country seemed to run riot in hopes of gaining profits. Hundreds of smaller companies were started every day, and an unhealthy excitement prevailed. One company, with a capital of £3,000,000, was {126} started “for insuring to all masters and mistresses the losses they may sustain by servants”; another “for making salt-water fresh”; a third for “planting mulberry trees and breeding silk-worms in Chelsea Park.” One in particular was designed for importing “a number of large jackasses from Spain in order to propagate a larger kind of mule in England,” as if, remarks a later