Though Locke was a commissioner of appeals during at least eleven or twelve years, there is not much to be said about his occupations in that capacity. There must have been a good deal of work to be done in the office, in adjustment of claims and quarrels growing out of the disorganised state of public affairs under Charles the Second and James the Second and the turmoil of the Revolution; but most of this was probably disposed of by a secretary and his clerks, under the supervision of the other commissioners who resided in London. Locke's appointment to the post appears to have been made on the understanding that it should not take up much of his time, and, after his settlement at Oates, at any rate, it cannot possibly have done so. That it was not quite a sinecure, however, is evident from the very slight information that we have respecting his connection with it.

His friend, Edward Clarke, held a somewhat similar, though less dignified and more onerous position, as commissioner of excise, and he seems, in April, 1696, to have complained to Locke about the delay in dealing with some claim in which he was especially interested. "As to the commission of appeals," Locke replied from Oates, "I could do no more than I did, unless I could have heard and judged by myself. I took three journeys to London on purpose, but neither found any more than Mr. Dodington "one of his colleagues "in town, nor could, with my utmost endeavours, get three together. The last time my health forced me out of town in haste, and, there being four then present, I could not think my absence could hinder their proceeding to judgment, and yet I should have come up had not my illness at that time kept me in bed and not permitted me that attendance without danger of my life. But pray tell me, have

. 63

not my brethren determined that cause, and at what sticks it? Mr. Tilson, a clerk in the treasury, our secretary, knows how much I laboured to get a quorum and to bring the appeals to a hearing, and you are not wholly stranger to it." i

Two months later, on the 18th of June, Locke was in London and helped to make a quorum at the consideration of an appeal from a distiller, named Woodcock, against a decision of the commissioners of excise, and on that day he, along with two other commissioners, signed a letter to the excise commissioners on the subject. A couple of days afterwards he learnt that the letter had been tampered with. "I return you my thanks," he then wrote, "for the favour you have done me in letting me have a sight of that letter. I was startled when I at first was told that there was the mention of witnesses in it, being very sure that I had not so far mistaken the common rules of all judicial proceedings as to set my hand to a summons of witnesses in a cause that I was to judge, when it was not demanded of me by either of the parties concerned. All the rest of the letter I own to have set my hand to; but these words, and the witnesses,' which are interlined in that letter, I know nothing of; nor were they there when I signed the letter, and therefore I must desire you to look on them as not coming from me."3

It is not necessary to endeavour to clear up the points involved either in Locke's private letter to Clarke from Oates, or in his letter to the commissioners of excise, of whom Clarke was one. The only value of these letters to

1 Additional MSS., no. 4290; Locke to Clarke, 16 April, 1696. 2 Treasury Papers (in the Public Record Office), vol. xxxviii., no. 63; Commissioners of Appeal to Commissioners of Excise, 18 June, 1696. 3 Ibid.; Locke to Commissioners of Excise, 20 June, 1696.

us is in the slender help they give us towards understanding the nature of his occasional duties as a commissioner of appeals. At the time of writing them he was preparing to enter upon work of far greater importance concerning which we are much more fully informed.

The reformation of the currency was only one of the great services that Somers and Montagu, as the ablest and most active members of the government that was re-shaped in the spring of 1695, rendered to their country; and in at least one other of extreme value they were aided by the wisdom and experience of Locke. In the currency reform Locke took the initiative, and, having insisted not only on a change, but also on the main conditions on which that change was to be effected, he left the working out of its details to associates better qualified for the task. In projecting the commission of trade and plantations, out of which our present board of trade and colonial office have grown, he does not seem to have had much or anything to do; but the business of laying the foundations of all the administrative duties for which these and other departments of the public service are now responsible chiefly devolved upon him.

William the Third had inherited the administrative machinery of the later Stuarts, and only slowly proceeded to reconstruct it. His first cabinets, or cabals, or juntos, were made up indiscriminately of whigs and tories, men of different parties and men of no party, selected primarily in hope of thereby strengthening the loyalty of the various cliques and factions that they represented, and secondarily because they were thought suitable men to execute the

. 62

work assigned to them. But the work was for the most part ill-defined, and for some time there was very little effort to parcel out the public business into separate departments and still less to bring all public business under departmental supervision. This was especially the case as regarded such important concerns as the protection or custody of the poor throughout the country, or the direction of the relations in which English traders and manufacturers should stand to one another, to foreign traders and manufacturers, or to foreign governments, or the guidance and control of the numerous colonies that were established during the seventeenth century. The first Lord Shaftesbury had induced Charles the Second to appoint a council of trade and plantations, and during most of its short life Locke had been its secretary. But that council, never supported by either king or parliament, was speedily abandoned under the pressure of the political and religious struggles that absorbed all men's thoughts at that time, and no attempt seems to have been made to revive it until more than six years after William's accession.

No sooner, however, had the tolerably compact government which followed Carmarthen's disgrace taken shape under the guidance, though not the nominal leadership, of Sir John Somers, than the old council was thought of. It was felt by many outsiders as well as by the more active members of the government that trade, in the widest application and ramifications of the term, could no longer be neglected. Currency reform was more urgently needed than anything else, and that was first undertaken; but currency reform was only one out of many items in the work to be done if England in its domestic and commercial concerns was to obtain substantial benefit from

the Revolution, and, while that was in progress, the entire question was not ignored.

It is not recorded that Locke had any part in the discussion and management of it; but as he was now in close communication with the government respecting the coinage, as he had nearly a quarter of a century before had thorough experience of the difficulties and requirements to be met in the handling of this matter, and as his recent work on 'The Lowering of Interest' had given fresh proof of his intimate acquaintance with trade in its theoretical and practical conditions, there can hardly be any doubt that he was freely consulted by Somers and some of his associates. As he paid only a few short visits to London during 1695, however, and as his time was then very fully occupied with other matters, it is not likely that he had much if any part in the arrangement of the details or in elaborating the plan of action, and it is probable that the constitution of the proposed commission of trade and plantations which was ready for the king's signature early in December was arranged, and that even his name was inserted in it as one of the commissioners, without his knowledge.1

"I was some days ago extremely pleased," the Earl of Monmouth wrote to him on the 12th of December, "when the king was brought to so reasonable a resolution as to determine upon a council of trade, where some great men were to assist, but where others, with salaries of 1000l. a year, were to be fixed as the constant labourers. Mr. Locke being to be of the number made me have the better opinion of the thing. But, according to our accustomed wisdom and prudence, when all things had

1 Docquet Book (in the Public Record Office), vol. xx.