like a skeleton than a man.” Still weak and helpless, and yet protesting to the last against the abandonment of Darien, he was carried on board ship, and, after a stormy and terrible voyage, he and the remnant of the ill-fated band reached home in December 1699.
In his native air Paterson soon recovered his strength, and immediately his fertile and eager mind was at work on new schemes. He prepared an elaborate plan for developing Scottish resources by means of a council of trade, and then tried to induce King William, with whom he had frequent interviews, to enter on a new Darien expedition. In 1701 he removed to London, and here by conferences with statesmen, by writing, and by personal persuasion helped on the union. He was much employed in settling the financial relations of the two countries. One of the last acts of the Scots parliament was to recommend him to the consideration of Queen Anne for all he had done and suffered. The United Parliament, to which he was returned as a member for the Dumfries burghs, though he never took his seat, decided that his claim should be settled, but it was not till 1715 that an indemnity of £18,241 was ordered to be paid him. Even then he found considerable difficulty in obtaining his due. His last years were spent in Queen Square, Westminster, but he removed from there shortly before his death on the 22nd of January 1719.
As many as twenty-two works, all of them anonymous, are attributed to Paterson. These are classified by Bannister under six heads, as dealing with (1) finance, (2) legislative union, (3) colonial enterprise, (4) trade, (5) administration, (6) various social and political questions. Of these the following deserve special notice: (1) Proposals and Reasons for constituting a Council of Trade (Edinburgh, 1701).[1] This was a plan to develop the resources of his country. A council, consisting of a president and twelve members, was to be appointed. It was to have a revenue collected from a duty on sales, lawsuits, successions, &c. With these funds the council was to revive the Darien scheme, to build workhouses, to employ, relieve and maintain the poor, and to encourage manufactures and fisheries. It was to give loans without interest to companies and shippers, to remove monopolies, to construct all sorts of vast public works. Encouragement was to be given to foreign Protestants and Jews to settle in the kingdom, gold and silver were to be coined free of charge, and money kept up to its nominal standard. All export duties were to be abolished and import regulated on a new plan. Paterson believed that thus the late disasters would be more than retrieved. (2) A Proposal to plant a Colony in Darien to protect the Indians against Spain, and to open the Trade of South America to all Nations (1701). This was the Darien scheme on a new and broader basis. It points out in detail the advantages to be gained: free trade would be advanced over all the world, and Great Britain would largely profit. (3) Wednesday Club Dialogues upon the Union (London, 1706). These were imaginary conversations in a club in the city of London about the union with Scotland. Paterson's real opinions were put into the mouth of a speaker called May. Till the Darien business all Scots were for the union, and they were so still if reasonable terms were offered. Such terms ought to include an incorporating union with equal taxes, freedom of trade, and a proportionate representation in parliament. A union with Ireland, “as likewise with other dominions the queen either hath or shall have,” is proposed. (4) Along with this another discussion of the same imaginary body, An Inquiry into the State of the Union of Great Britain and the Trade thereof (1717), may be taken. This was a consideration of the union, which, now “that its honeymoon was past,” was not giving satisfaction in some quarters, and also a discussion as to the best means of paying off the national debt—a subject which occupied a great deal of Paterson's attention during the later years of his life.
Paterson's plans were vast and magnificent, but he was no mere dreamer. Each design was worked out in minute detail,[2] each was possible and practical. The Bank of England was a stupendous success. The Darien expedition failed from hostile attacks and bad arrangements. But the original design was that the English and Dutch should be partakers in it, and, if this had occurred, and the arrangements, against many of which Paterson in letter after letter in vain protested, had been different, Darien might have been to Britain another India. Paterson was a zealous almost a fanatic free-trader long before Adam Smith, and his remarks on finance and his argument against an in convertible paper-currency, though then novel, now hold a place of economic orthodoxy. Paterson's works are excellent in form and matter; they are quite impersonal, for few men who have written so much have said so little about themselves. There is no reference to the scurrilous attacks made on him. They are the true products of a noble and disinterested as well as vigorous mind. There is singular fitness in the motto “Sic vos non vobis” inscribed under the only portrait of him we possess.
See Life of W. Paterson, by S. Bannister (Edinburgh, 1858); Paterson's Works, by S. Bannister (3 vols., London, 1859); The Birthplace and Parentage of W. Paterson, by W. Pagan (Edinburgh, 1865); Eng. Hist. Review, xi. 260. The brilliant account of the Darien scheme in the fifth volume of Macaulay's History is incorrect and misleading; that in Burton's Hist. of Scotland (vol. viii. ch. 84) is much truer. Consult also the memoir in Paul Coq, La Monnaie de batigue (Paris, 1863), and J. S. Barbour, A History of William Paterson and the Darien Company (1907). For a list of fugitive writings on Paterson see Poole's Index of Periodicals.
PATERSON, a city and the county-seat of Passaic county, New Jersey, U.S.A., in the north-eastern part of the state, on the west bank of the Passaic river, and 16 m. N.W. of New York city. Pop. (1880), 51,031; (1890), 78,347; (1900), 105,171; (1906, estimate), 112,801; (1910), 125,600. Of the total in 1900, 38,791 were foreign-born. Paterson is served by the main lines of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the Erie, and the New York, Susquehanna & Western railways, and by a number of interurban electric lines. The Morris Canal was formerly important for shipping freight between Paterson and Jersey City, but has fallen into disuse. The city lies along a bend of the Passaic river, the southern portion being in a plain and the extreme northern part lying among the hills that rise from the stream near the Great Falls. The river has a descent here of about 70 ft. (of which 50 ft. are in a perpendicular fall), and furnishes water-power for manufactories. The principal public buildings are the city-hall, the post office, the county court-house and the Danforth Memorial (public library) building. Paterson is preëminently a manufacturing centre. There were, in 1905, 513 factories employing a capital of $53,595,585, and furnishing work for 28,509 employés; and the total factory product was valued at $54,673,083. The city is the centre of silk manufacturing in the United States. In 1905 it contained 190 silk-mills, and the products were valued at $25,433,245. There were also, in 1905, 27 dyeing and finishing establishments, with products valued at $5,699,295; 39 foundries and machine shops, with products valued at $2,317,185; 3 wholesale slaughtering and packing houses, with products valued at $2,206,698; and 3 jute and jute-goods factories, with an output valued at $929,319. Among the machine works are two locomotive shops, with an average capacity of three locomotives per day, and a large steel mill.
Paterson had its origin in an act of the legislature of New Jersey on the 22nd of November 1791, incorporating the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, the plan for this society being drawn up by Alexander Hamilton. As the most suitable location for its enterprise the society in the following year selected the Great Falls of the Passaic river, and named the place Paterson, in honour of William Paterson (1745-1806), a member of the state Constitutional Convention in 1776, attorney-general of New Jersey in 1776-1783, a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1780-1781, and to the Constitutional Convention of
- ↑ This work was attributed to John Law, who borrowed some of his ideas from it. To Law's, “system” Paterson was strongly opposed, and it was chiefly due to his influence that it made no way in Scotland.
- ↑ The books of the Darien Company were kept after a new and very much improved plan, believed to be an invention of Paterson's (Burton's Hist. Scot. viii. 36, note).
