These pages will show that not only import, but also export smuggling was long continued in England, and not only so, but that the export smuggling, notably that of wool, was for centuries the most important, if not the only, kind. The prohibition of sending wool out of the kingdom was, of course, introduced with the object of fostering the cloth manufacture; but there are always two sides to any question, and in this case the embargo upon wool soon taught the cloth-workers that, in the matter of prices, they had the wool-growers at their mercy. By law they could not sell to foreign customers, or (later) only upon paying heavy dues; and the cloth-workers could therefore practically dictate their own terms. In this pitiful resort—an example of the disastrous effect of government interference with trade—there was nothing left but to set the law at defiance, which the wool-growers and their allies, the “owlers,” accordingly did, risking life and limb in the wholesale exportation of wool. It is the duty of every citizen to oppose bad laws, but this opposition to ill-conceived enactments creates a furtive class of men, very Ishmaelites, who, with their liberty, and even their lives, forfeit, are rendered capable, in extremity, of any and every enormity. Hence arose those reckless bands of smugglers who in the middle of the eighteenth century became highly organised and all-powerful in Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, and, realising their power, developed into criminals of the most ferocious type. They were, properly regarded, the products of bad government, the creatures brought into existence by a vicious system that took its origin in the coming of William the Third, the “Deliverer,” as history, tongue in cheek, styles him. The growth of customs dues in the last years of the seventeenth century, and so onward, in a vicious progression until the opening years of the nineteenth, was not in any way owing to consideration for home traders, or to a desire for the protection of British industries. They grew exactly in proportion as the needs of the Government for revenue increased; and were the direct results of that long-continued policy of foreign alliances and aggressive interference in continental politics—that “spirited foreign policy” advocated even in our own times—which was introduced with the coming of William the Third. We did well to depose James the Second, but we might have done better than bring over his son-in-law and make him king; and we might, still more, have done better than raise the Elector of Hanover to the status of British sovereign, as George the First. Then we should probably have avoided foreign entanglements, at any rate, until that later era when increased intercourse between the nations rendered international politics inevitable.